If you drive the road every day, you probably do. If you can see someone drive through it (perhaps someone who knows the area well and knows how deep it is based on puddle width), you definitely do.
The number of people who 1) really want local-only control and 2) can deal with Home Assistant and Tailscale but 3) don't actually have the skill set to put together a Raspberry Pi or other small Linux box and set up HA and TS themselves is tiny.
The cloud systems are insecure and invasive, but it's really hard to get Normal People to understand why it's a problem. "So someone can tell if I'm not home; so what? I live in a gated community, they can't just drive in at night and burgle the house." They're not entirely wrong about that; it is unlikely. The hard push for subscription services by these companies has turned out to be the best way to push people into locally hosted alternatives, because they don't want to pay for another service, but the usual approach is just to do without the service when they realize that the "smart" functions are not that useful. Most people don't have the free time, knowledge, or inclination to set up and maintain Home Assistant. They can appreciate it when they see it done well, but they aren't going to pay for a professional installation and maintenance and they aren't able to do it themselves.
> The cloud systems are insecure and invasive, but it's really hard to get Normal People to understand why it's a problem.
In the case of HVAC systems the danger is a collective one not individual. Sure if someone really wanted to they could watch you and wait until you're not home then turn your heat off and freeze your pipes. But they're not gonna do that, probably. Instead the kind of havoc they'll wreak with this access is to wait until some off-peak time and instantaneously fire up all the AC units and shut them down simultaneously, repeatedly, causing a huge demand spike. If supply doesn't ramp up fast enough then frequency will drop and then the grid will start trimming off branches to self-correct (or something like that? I'm not a power grid expert someone correct me) and you basically have chaos.
So you don't need to get individuals to care about it, and there's some argument to be made that they shouldn't, or at least shouldn't have to. But the power company damn well should, and governments damn well should.
EDIT: the major issue here is the people who are affected by a vulnerability like that aren't the people who purchased and installed the attack vector. They're everyone on the same power distribution network. So it's not like "oh well, they did a dumb thing and trusted a tech company" it's far bigger than that.
Agreed, and with open, auditable design it's far more trustworthy. So you can satisfy both the paranoid tech nerds (guilty as charged) and the folks who just want to get it running with the least amount of effort are safer--whether they know it or not--because it's audited.
Generally additive, not multiplicative, and we are used to it. “Titrate to effect” is pretty standard in anesthesia, and we are watching you far more closely than average. Continuous monitoring of oxygenation, breathing, and cardiac rhythm, with no more than 5 minutes between blood pressure readings.
In 1997-8 I met the first person I knew to have a CD-R burner.
He dual-booted 98 and NT 4. He joked that NT was his 100+ MB CD burning software. He used 98 for almost everything else, but it couldn't keep that steady stream of data going.
Fun fact for the young: Sprint (long before being bought by T-Mobile) was primarily a long-distance company, and they advertised that the sound quality was "so good you could hear a pin drop". Many ads featured this bouncing pin (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-cbzf9amfo from 1986).
The logo they used until just before the buyout was a stylized image of a pin falling down.
There already was one. For all its faults, Swype for Android ~12 years ago was better than any swiping keyboard available now - both in its interpretation of swipes, and in its other features like "squiggle over one letter to indicate a double letter", "run your swipe above the keyboard to indicate a capitalized word", and the incredible editing features (it had an editing keyboard!). The Swype key, located in the bottom left? You could Swype-A to select all, Swype-X to cut, Swype-C to copy, Swype-V to paste. Swype-space brought up the editing keyboard.
Sounds great. When you say 12 years ago do you mean newer versions weren’t as good? Or was it discontinued or something?
I think the really puzzling thing about these keyboards is we all seem to remember typing being easier - even though phones back then were so much smaller. It makes no sense!
I still use it on iOS, and I've tried to remove all other keyboards, but Apple still just seems to "make up" keyboards I don't know are installed. Or switch keyboards on me mid-typing a word to a weird native one I also don't show as installed. It used to be very occasionally this would happen but now it's so repeatable since 26 I can almost not use my keyboard.
One caveat, I have an Icelandic keyboard installed on there. Sometimes web controls will force an input box to a US english keyboard (or numpad), which is annoying but at least that's sort of covered by a spec. What really drives me nuts is when I'm mid typing on the swype keyboard and suddely it switches to a completely square grid keyboard with up and down quotes in the autocomplete (which is not actually autocompleting or correcting(which while technically correct has almost completely fallen out of popularity since the dawn of the internet)
I quit using Android ca. 2016 (not because I hated it, had other work-related reasons why) and Swype for iOS was only around for a brief period before Microsoft killed it (and most of the things that made it great).
I never used the much-vaunted tap-only iOS keyboards of the earlier iPhones. I have large hands (the OG Xbox Duke controller was very comfortable) and typing on those small screens always felt painful even though I was so often told it was great.
I'm perfectly willing to grant that this is the usual case, but since I'm not interested enough in being able to sing well to dedicate a lot of effort to it, it doesn't matter. I probably wouldn't sing if I had the voice of an angel.
If you want to have a philosophical discussion about whether that is really the "sole purpose of government", then I suppose we could have one, though frankly my interest in that isn't all that high.
That's a long way from asserting that it is, in fact, the sole purpose of government, which was what I objected to.
Also a major plot point in Peng Shepherd's novel The Cartographers. Not a marvelous novel (though it's far better than anything I could write), but entertaining enough and an easy read.
That said, this is in no way my area of expertise.
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