Brits don't want their homes to be 'tech-tastic'

Re: Skewed results

>the person that couldn't turn their lights on and another that was locked out of his house due to his router being down.

Exactly. If you ask people if they want 'technology', they will be dubious because 'technology' never seems to just work as it should. A bog standard IR controller isn't 'technology' because it will go at least a year without needing a battery change*. When something just works as it should, it is no longer 'technology' because it is now just 'stuff'.

If the survey was re-written without using the words 'smart', 'connected' or 'technology', and instead asked questions such as "Would you like to have a magic floor that never needs cleaning?" I daresay people would say "Yes!" (or "Yes, but what's the catch?" because we all remember the Sorcerer's Apprentice).

*People see a IR-controlled ceiling light as being pretty easy to understand - their long experience of using televisions has trained them. However, my brother-in-law bought an expensive example, and it is unusable because it erroneously responds to signals from a Samsung television controller. WTF? I've seen all manner of heterogeneous home entertainment set-ups, and I've never seen a Sony VCR upset a Panasonic television, or an LG DVD player annoy a Yamaha amplifier. Yet this young IR-controlled lighting company make that product that doesn't play nice with a very common brand of TV. Idiots.

Right o', I'm off to to construct a system of strings and pulleys to control my light switches, window blinds and thermostat from my sofa. I got the idea from some nice chap called Professor Branestawm. I'll try my best to not garrote the cat.

Re: internetofshit

Favourite one so far:

"lol my bank just called me

because you can give your accounts nicknames to remember which savings acct is which

and I put an emoji in one of them

and apparently somehow broke their entire banking system

so I guess... don't do that"

Re: Show me the money

If those robot mowers weren't a grand, I'd buy one. I can't believe they're so expensive.

Re: Show me the money

Thermostats to turn on/off your heating have been around for decades, probably centuries if you include non-electrical ones such as Watt's flying balls.

Re: LIfecycles of tech

Can you rely on manufacturers to continue updating their software to allow uninterrupted control of all of your Things?

Whose uninterrupted control of all your Things?

Re: The usual arrogance of tech companies

People will be converted eventually, but through seeing, not listening. Most people don't read tech blogs, or become first-adopters of new technology. Instead, they see something at a friend's huse and, if it works as it should, consider getting one if they can see the point of it.

Case in point: Even my dad now has a connected music system of sorts. (Spotify on his phone and laptop, a Chromecast Audio dongle on his amplifier. He'd seen his son-in-law's iPad/Sonos set-up and thought it useful).

Of course the 'analogue' way of doing multi-room audio is just to have one amp, two speakers, and the volume turned up to 11 - you can now hear the music in every room! :)

Re: IoT

"developers are being asked to rush things out there and security doesn't even get invited in for the ride, never mind take a back seat."

If I can access something from the internet, then potentially so can billions of other people. Nothing can ever be completely secured from a determined hacker. This is the reason why I will never have a connected home or a connected car.

Re: IoT

Nest bought Revolv and bricked their existing customer base and sod the lifetime guarantee. No way am I going to depend on external software to run my home.

Re: IoT

"Hive looks promising but needs its own router and their privacy policy states:"

That's horrendous.

Do they also say anything about the horizontal and the vertical?

Re: If a multi-billion company can't produce safe mainstream code

Your making sense, we'll have none of that interfering with our good work as marketers of dreams.

Re: If a multi-billion company can't produce safe mainstream code

As for my heating...jeez. Wouldn't a basic education about frugality taught in school make more sense, than having to rely on an app?

Part of the problem of heating is systems is that the (hardware) interfaces are appalling. Really appalling. I know it's a balance of cost vs usability but ramming an entire two-part (heating vs water) scheduling function into as few physical buttons as possible never works.

The next part of the problem is almost certainly compounded by the appalling interface, but a huge number of (supposedly bright) people just don't understand and seemingly don't want to even try to understand how a heating timer and a thermostat work. These people tend to turn the heating OFF in summer or when they're warm, or turn the thermostat to maximum when they're cold. In general, no amount of patient explaining gets through to these people and they will continue merrily being stupid because that's how they've always ran their heating and it "works" for them. Just accepting that the "on" periods only dictate when the heating could come on but this will depend on the thermostat setting and the temperature is beyond them.

In this instance, a sensible way to schedule a heating system along with being able to control temperature freely rather than a fixed target (minimum) temperature is a good thing.

It is NOT paranoia if they really are tracking you and listening to your conversations...

"And if informed of the disadvantages - lack of security, dependence on vendor maintaining servers, etc - they'd probably be convinced otherwise."

No, they'd probably turn around and tell you to stop being paranoid or a luddite. The problem is not just that these issues exist, but that so few people realise they are serious issues rather than just something that someone (ie you, me, and most people who still care) moans about.

I have no problem with new tech that helps me but when it is - intentionally or unintentionally - designed and built in such a way that it needs to be replaced, reloaded, updated or whatever more frequently than an "inferior" low-tech equivalent whilst not giving me additional USEFUL functionality then I have to question why "they" think I need to replace something that is doing what *I* need it to do...