An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
Ugh. Stop shaming people for wanting to automate mundane tasks. No one’s playing a stupid game here, the problem isn’t robot vacuums. The problem is that manufacturers insist on holding features hostage on the basis that you connect said vacuum to the Internet, so they can harvest (and then sell) your data. Be mad at that, not at normal people wanting to make a boring chore less burdensome.
Disagree. My experience is they still don’t get everything, can’t do furniture or corners well or under furniture. They’re stupid. They’re expensive and if you really can’t spend 10 minutes or less to vacuum your house daily or every other day it speaks volumes on the type of person you are.
I stand by what I said. More money than brains.
Disagree, and I think you’re stupid for putting people down for using these. The data harvesting is the big issue, but let’s ignore that for a second.
You’re right that they don’t do a great job at getting everything, but if you use it to maintain a level of cleanliness alongside vacuuming then that shortcoming doesn’t really matter much. Instead of vacuuming 10 minutes every single day, you could do it once a week and have the robot do it between vacuums. If somebody travels for work and is away from home regularly then using these things is actually a good fit.
But go off, friend. Keep flexing that you’re superior for doing a mundane task for 10 minutes every day. Everybody else is stupid except for you.