Toilet’s chipset is only good for network connection and video recording. Business logic is on servers. As I said, users want to know if their shit is good before they flush so they dont lose a sample in case it is bad.

You may have stumbled on multiplayer shitting though. Conference call with random strangers on the internet, biggest splashback, fastest bowel movement… endless possibilities. Yeah I think always online is the best course of action here.

Sorry, Euro defaultism… my healthcare is affordable. You can always run Tolet Assistant on a raspberry pi at home and let your shit never leave the network.

Kwikset keypad works great for me. There’s a keyhole, a real button keypad, and the batteries last a while with quite a bit of warning before they’re actually dead.

I have a Nuki this one still works with a normal key, since you install it on top of your existing double cylinder with an emergency function. The Nuki just turns the key or thumb turn of the cylinder. Also means you can’t see from the outside that a smart lock is installed. Battery is not a problem since they last for about 5 months. And you get a warning when it reaches 20%.

LOL relevant meme attached:

Arlen TX

Weird coincidence seeing this right after finishing an episode of King of the Hill. LOL

“Yo man dang’ol smartlock open up man left my daggum phone in there tell ya what.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Can you repeat that?”

I’ve seen landlords put these things on doors, too, and use them to allow entrance to anyone they think has a reason to be inside, whether the resident knows and consents or not.

Honestly I’m not sure, I only got a look at it when I was helping her move.

It’s tied to a wall panel on the other side that controls the whole unit’s lighting and thermostat and such though, and shows a doorbell cam.

Educated guess that it’s all tied to Amazon. Blegh.

Allegedly they’re just supposed to rely on maintenance to change the batteries so they’re not locked out of their home. Crazy.

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

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.

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.

Is that the new ifixit one?

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

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.

Nah you’d have a chimney. The main reason I want a “separating drying toilet” is that it would have a fan and wouldn’t smell at all in your bathroom. And you’d probably also have a separating toilet as first step, then dehydration which can be closed cycle, and then either burning or compositing. And with that and biodegradable soap and detergents, sanitation becomes much less infrastructure intensive.

Imagine cleaning the splatter after all the corn boils and pops in there

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 ?

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.

Laughs nervously in self-hosted

“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.

Flag Admiral Stabby earned that knife.

Or the Pope?

There is no functional reason to have a toilet connect to an outside server

So that all the toilets you poop in can share data on your poops and get a complete picture of your bowel health.