I had this exact same reaction last week when I bought a new toothbrush.
You had to use your mail for a toothbrush?
Please tell me that you’re joking…
Some electric toothbrushes have these gimmicky features where they can map your mouth while you brush and report on your hygiene habits to tell you how effectively you’re brushing, or even nag you if you don’t brush enough. Guessing that’s the kind they have.
So for the manufacturer, why allow the device to simply use a local account to track that information, when instead they can force you to register an account online and associate your brushing habits with all of the other shadowy telemetry data being collected about us online?
But also, these aren’t hidden features. That info should be on the box. I’m not trying to defend companies demanding your email and an account to use an electric toothbrush, but also at a certain point you gotta look at the consumer and say, you bought that. Electric toothbrushes aren’t exactly a monopoly out there; you can buy one that doesn’t require an email.
It’s pretty easy to put something on the box like this can make your phone buzz if you forget to brush your teeth, and people who worry they’re sometimes forgetting to brush your teeth will see that as an advantage without necessarily realising that they need to give the manufacturer their email and the right to associate it with their brushing telemetry.
If it’s not prominently displayed on the box, then it’s not the consumer’s fault.
I agree, but I suspect that info was on the box.
I doubt that the packaging could help you find a “smart” toothbrush that doesn’t ask for your email
Don’t spent money on that, it’s complete bunk and just a very expensive gimmick.
If you’re going with an electric toothbrush, avoid the absolutely cheapest ones because the parts tend to be rubbish. Get the first tier up that has a pressure sensor. That’s all you need. They don’t need different brushing modes, they don’t need a masturbation setting, they don’t need bluetooth connectivity, or 3D scanning or whatever.
You want a pressure sensor, and a motor that lasts more than a couple of months. When I bought my toothbrush some four years back you got two for ~$80.
LMAOOOOOO
Friendly reminder that mechanical toothbrushes still cost a buck and require no account signups. This should really be a non-issue lol. Are people really this lazy about just brushing their teeth?
The “internet of things” sucks.
Smart local devices rock though. Its not the technology but the implementation for many IoT devices that sucks 🙂
I have this pipe dream of a noob friendly router/hypervisor/NAS combo that would trivialize the installation and running of server-side apps like nextcloud or home assistant. The reason it’s also a router is to automagically forward ports so you could have remote access without
someone else’s computerthe cloud.Zigbee has been great, as I know it’s a local device. Finding WiFi devices that don’t phone home is impossible.
Not if you flash them with Tasmota or ESPHome
Flying cars was a scifi delusion that didn’t consider all the problems that come with it. What would be a more rational “this was predicted and never came about” would be social constructs like safety nets and betterment of society for all, as well as improving our management and use of the Earth. That should make us mad, not that we don’t have flying cars buzzing (and falling) in the sky.
It just hit me that we did for flying what we should have done for ground. Make it almost all mass transit.
Yeah, screw flying cars and parts falling off them due to disrepair.
The real sci-fi future is trains. Numerous and fast.
That verifying email for everything shit is something else all together. And yes it is true. Like what the fuck man? I am glad my fridge and stove and microwaves are all low-end crap that do the one basic job they are required to do (and they do it very well mind you).
It’s a scientific fact that dads become 69% hotter when they wear a dadbod T-shirt.
Source: my crotch
You sure you’re not just a furry?
Absolutely fucking not. LOL. I appreciate and respect the furry community, but I want human dads with human moobs.
We really need to make people more aware of how their data gets from A to B. I think most people think you need internet access for anything connected to a network to communicate. If more people realized that if device A is on your LAN and device B is on your LAN, there’s no reason traffic from A to B has to traverse the internet, they wouldn’t fall for stuff like this.
And people think that your need a phone service to use GPS.
Indeed, a lot of people think it’s an active satellite connection when all it is is a receiver picking up a really accurate time signal.
What’s more, if the device in question is some simple thing like a thermometer, then there’s no reason for it to be networked at all. Just take the temperature and get on with your life!
Bah, there’s a LOT of devices that could talk to my father’s phone over the LAN if they were programmed that way. But, they aren’t. They report to a wall-known “cloud” server, and the app on his phone checks that same server for the latest status or to relay command/control.
Nice advantage: can get status / send commands even when he is not on the LAN. Bad disadvantage: when the rural Internet blinks out (like every time it rains) he can’t tell the robo-vac which rooms to start cleaning.
There is a reason military computers are often air-gapped. That is to say they have no connectivity whatsoever and need information brought to them, and they used floppy disks until recently. Not because people refused to give up the 90s but because floppy disks are very difficult to hack, unlike USB keys which are much easier to do.
I hate that anything smart needs my location to be enabled before it will work even if it’s use is unrelated to location. Like my smart light bulbs. Why do they need to know a location ever
They really don’t. Look into home assistant, there’s no reason the network packet controlling your light bulb needs to go across the internet at all!
And stop buying from vendors that don’t allow full free local control (Google, etc.)
As a rule of thumb those device go straight back for a refund.
I always download the app first before buying. If it requires an account (and they usually do) I don’t buy.
Take it a step further and don’t use anything that requires a proprietary app. Even if they don’t require sign-in they’re still hoarding an egregious amount of data on you. I’ve been free of those shackles for years now.
If your bulbs use Bluetooth and your phone is an android, that’s because on Android you need location permission to scan for Bluetooth devices (as known Bluetooth beacons in range could give away your location). It’s still bad, because you can’t know if the app uses that permission for anything else.
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We do have various flying vehicles that have been described as flying cars. But it’s fair to say that the Back to the Future II-style mass adoption hasn’t happened.
I’m happy with those broadly staying science fiction. People already can’t drive in two dimensions. It’s worrying to think how awful it’ll be if they’re ever given a third.
There are a far fewer pedestrians and walls and lamp posts and motorcycles in the air than on the ground, though, so there’s a lot more margin to be awful without endangering anyone other than your own family.
At present it takes considerable effort or lack of skill for someone to crash their car through the roof of your house. Once morons can fly, all bets are off.
Yes, but there are still pedestrians and walls and lampposts and motorcycles on the ground. I would imagine accidents would be far more disastrous and dangerous than in 2D.
~Add in people in convertibles who aren’t wearing safety restraints (or a failure of said restraints) if/when the vehicle does a 180° flip (for any reason).~
Add in people in convertibles who aren’t wearing safety restraints (or a failure of said restraints) if/when the vehicle does a 180° flip (for any reason).
Well, a car falling from the sky (car crash or ran out of gas) probably wouldn’t be very safe either. I’m absolutely not trusting the average nitwit who pays more attention to Instagram than to the road to operate something akin to a mini-plane.
There’s a reason passenger planes’ safety engineering is so much better than passenger cars’: if your car just goes completely dead, you can probably still steer it somewhere safe and get out. If something goes wrong with a plane and there’s no backup system, it’s just become a glider with one chance at landing wherever happens to be available. If your flying car is in the city (and most cars are in urban areas, because most people are) there won’t be anywhere available to land, and it’s going to hit a building. If the pilot fucks up then it might be worse than a glider and just drop out of the air like a stone.
Helicopters are basically flying cars.
Based. This is what I post every time.
TBF, flying cars in most sci-fi rely on some kind of crazy convenient anti-gravity tech that allows vehicles to hover while still somehow retaining lateral friction so they don’t drift sideways when turning.
A lot of space sci-fi spaceships have basically flown as if they are in an atmosphere, with a more-or-less aerodynamic shape and turning as if there are control surfaces in an atmosphere making them move more-or-less in the direction that the spacecraft is heading.
Flying cars costs 10 times as much as a regular car, and are not that great at flying or driving. You need driving and pilot license. Needs to take off from an airport or request special permission. It’s just not as practical and cheap as portrayed.
WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS
and the best is when the servers the use to send verification emails are crazy slow so you make a throwaway email (because fuck giving them your email, also handy to track who sells it and who they sell it to), go through their bullshit registration, then nothing. You checked spam even. You think you fucked up, and click resend email, still nothing. You give up and you can’t really use your new thing. Maybe you return it, if you’re smart. Then the next day you finally get the email, which indicates they clearly care about the user experience since they put so many resources into onboarding
if if
Was actually looking at these probe thermometers to give as Christmas presents this year… some brands actually advertise that they connect to nothing and need no phone or account to operate.
Those are strong selling points that we’re all going to be looking out for constantly now.
“smart”
But we do have flying cars. They’re called planes. You can get a license to fly them and everything.
Planes are not flying cars. They’re flying buses.
You can get tiny planes that seat 1-5, like a car.
Sure. But you need to think lived experience, less technical specifications. Think of how these machines actually interact with everyday life. Car and bus are socially defined categories. We could just classify them all as automobiles, but we have separate classifications for cars and buses because people interact with them in fundamentally different ways.
Right and I’m saying that there is a class of small plane that people, particularly in remote areas, use as personal transportation. Commercial jets are flying buses, the Cessna 172 is not. Your “um actually” is a false generalization.
And some people use full sized buses as their personal vehicles. Weird edge cases aren’t how we define words. Your exception proves the rule. This isn’t “umm actually,” this is you being deliberately obtuse.
We’re talking about how 99% of people actually interact with these machines, not a handful of oddballs living in rural Alaskan homesteads. Those few rare edge cases are not how words are defined.
Planes, for 99% of the population, are more like buses than cars. When people say, “flying car,” they specifically mean a flying vehicle that:
- Can provide point-to-point transport.
- Can be operated on your schedule.
- Doesn’t require expensive licensing and training (at least no more than a regular drivers license.)
- Can be owned or operated by the typical American family living in a typical American neighborhood.
This is what a flying car is, and it’s why planes are not flying cars.
Have you literally never seen any media depicting flying cars? Are you really that incapable of seeming the difference between this:
And this?:
For 99% of the population, the idea of using the latter for a personal vehicle is comical. You need to have a pilot’s license, and you need to own a god-damn runway in order to use it as a personal vehicle! The vision of a flying car has always been something that you could park in an ordinary suburban garage, pull it out into the driveway, and vertically takeoff without requiring you to own a giant piece of land. This is why you only see two types of people use planes for personal transport - the incredibly wealthy, or folks who live in extremely rural areas where large amounts of land are comically cheap. And it has to be something you can keep on your own land. If you have to drive to an airport to use it, you’re no longer fulfilling the point-to-point on-demand dream that the vision of flying cars represents.
Again, you need to focus on the social definition, not the technical one.
Fucking FR
