Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

I could see having lights on a somewhat sophisticated timer. Like having bedroom lighting that simulates dawn, fades on etc. Maybe making a thermostat a little bit more sophisticated. I’d like to live in a world where I could trust the power company to tell me when electricity is abundant and scarce but we’re gonna have to win Civil War 2 before we get that. My toilet and faucets do not need any digital technology at all.

ZigBee and Z-wave create their own network not connected to the internet, pair that with Home Assistant 🇪🇺 and done, sane smart home implementation.

I worked for Cisco during the time IoT was being pushed into everything. You don’t want to know how bad it is. If I was malicious I could have easily written several backdoors into their products without anyone knowing. I wrote kernel code in their IOS operating system. There are no checks on that shit and the entire switching team does next to zero peer review on kernel security.

Yes, there products that (at the time) touched upwards of 95% of all packets sent over the Internet.

Remember, the “s” in IoT stands for “security”.

The only upside to this state of things is that it keeps alive my fantasies of one day being a Watchdogs-style techno-sorcerer that can wirelessly hack anything that runs on electrons and a WiFi signal.

… Although the nightmare is that people far more evil can probably already do that.

Recipe for disaster

I keep it in a voice activated safe plugged into the 110

Is there a community for those of us with late 90s early 2000 HP laserjets? Somewhere we can discuss maintenance, feeding, and overall care?

FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS

I will bulk purchase grey-market bootleg toner from shady overseas websites before I go back to a inkjet…

Is that the new ifixit one?

No, it’s one of the few use cases of emacs.

Yes, I don’t hate the idea of smart-ish devices, if they’re not cloud-dependent in any way and have some kind of manual override.

It’s kind of painful to have a kitchen full of devices each implementing their own half-assed OSs separately, or even more than once in one device.

Even there though, what is the actual point of a phone app controlled smart toilet, even if you open sourced the whole thing? Unlocking one’s phone and tapping the app icon, and then presumably a button on the app, is going to take more time than one press of a lever that one is right next to anyway, and the latter doesn’t present as many points of failure.

I wish I was this smart. We really want to do a smart light show using Xlights but every time I try to learn it I feel so frankly dumb.

Stuff like openWRT routers get a pass.

If it has a local host API I would use it because it never has to connect to the internet.

They were bonked with a hammer until they were below the proper “smart” threshold.

I can press the entirely local switch and have light.

Are you sure about that? Is it a local connected smart switch (still fancy electronics, just local) or a plain old power switch?

If it’s a power switch, and If you turned your lights off by app over the internet, and then the internet went out, then your lights’ ability to come back on when you flick the physical switch depends on somebody having thought about this need and programmed a “oh, the switch was flicked so I better ignore the internet settings” mode.

And if they did that, it also probably means your lights all turn on after a power outage since the light can’t tell the difference between power outage and light switch flipped off.

There’s nearly as much reason for those to be internet-connected.

Why would a programmer own a printer? I almost never print anything and when I need to I just go to a library.

Im studying the security stuff. The more you think about it, the more paranoid you become until you notice that your level of paranoia is far too high and try to ignore things.

Firmwares everywhere are definitely spying on us. Or at leasty they could, and we wouldn’t really know it.

“Routers using OpenWRT”

Every time I research this, it seems like nothing I can reasonably acquire can run it. Especially any WiFi 6 / AX devices. It’s infuriating.

Laughs nervously in self-hosted

In complete agreement. I hate crossovers so much.

Have you looked at this wagons or Volvo wagons ? Or just a good old tacoma or tundra long box ?

Explain yourself

Khan wrote this

“It’s easy to be a saint in paradise.”

This. SO many devices, especially networking stuff. It seems like they should just do their thing after plugging in and setting a few settings. “It’s so EZ!” says the box.

Nope, “scan this code to get this app, make an account, agree to all the things, register for spam…”

It’s disgusting.

What do house guests do?

“Let me know when you’re done and I can flush the toilet though the app.”

Or

“Download this app to flush the toilet once at my house.”

Flag Admiral Stabby earned that knife.

The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.

Brrt.

Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”

There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.

The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?

Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.

Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.

The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.

The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.

And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.

Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.

She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.

She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.

She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.

The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she………… 😉

Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters

Cory Doctorow’s book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here’s an excerpt.

Ars 2020

Except if the game is designed to be multiplayer-only, but even then we should be able to set up our own servers. If the original Half Life could do it in 1998 then why can’t we do it now?

Recently noticed how many of my “offline single player” games did not actually work offline, after moving and being without internet for a while.

To anyone reading this, try unplugging your PC and check what your options actually are. I was really disappointed about not being “allowed” to play Red Dead.