The more we electrify our cars, the less feasible this is.
Decoding and sending messages to mechanical systems over the CANBUS is one thing (still difficult, but possible), but taking control over system software is another. In the us, consumers are supposed to have the right to repair their personal vehicles, but a lot of that law was established back when you could do work on a vehicle without having access to digitally protected copyright. We might have a right to repair, but that’s starting to clash against their copyrights over their IP and software controls.
And that’s not even getting into their eagerness to utilize subscription models - would a court side with a consumer if they decided they wanted to circumvent DRM controls over subscription-controlled car features (a car that they own outright)? It’s unclear to me that right to repair or consumer protections have been written in a way to accommodate those conflicts… Especially when cars are subject to far higher safety regulations than computers - a manufacturer could argue that they need to prevent consumers from tampering with their software systems for their own safety.
If you still own a ‘dumb’ car without one of these systems, it’s really not a bad idea to hold onto them for as long as possible. You can always upgrade them if you want to - some people have even replaced ICE transmissions with electric ones. But once you own one of these cars with software-controlled systems, it’s far harder to strip them out. Especially once they start requiring cellular connection to operate or function (or require connections to privately-owned satellite constellations…)
The only real concern I could see with these is a nefarious actor having access to your real-time usage to determine your habits. I guess the argument can be made that the POCO is spying on you, but I really don’t see a benefit to them knowing your usage aside from network/grid management. Perhaps a locality can use this data to determine if you’re growing weed, but other than that, in a world where all of our information is harvested anyway, it seems pretty inconsequential to me. if you’re that concerned, get a solar/battery system and turn off your main breaker.
That, and be able to adjust billing to surges.
The secondary concern is reading the real-time usage by a nefarious actor, which has proven to be useful to ML applications for intuiting what types of activities are happening on the circuit. Obviously this pales in comparison to the potential abuse allowed by smart NICs and modems, but as a secondary measure or where a user is obscuring their network activity with encryption or similar, a real-time power reading would be helpful too.
It’s just another vector that enables possible abuse, and one that you don’t have any choice over. My utility installed one of these on my house this year and we were not given any choice.
If I could trust an authority to create effective regulation, and trust the company to follow it, then I wouldn’t mind the technology itself.
I personally don’t buy that personal meters provide much more useful data about grid performance than if the continuous meter was placed further up the line (maybe at junctions and transformers?). To me, the risks far outweigh the benefits. The push for these individualized meters is really unsurprising though, since it provides far more financial benefit to them if they can measure each user’s energy use and tailor pricing to that individual. Even if they could guarantee that data never left the utility, its existence is still problematic just by the nature of the oppositional relationship between utility and the user.
I don’t know anything about that site, only that there is a real threat to privacy enabled by continuous power monitoring.
I can’t speculate on radiation (i’m doubtful), but smart meters are absolutely a threat to personal privacy. Not to mention predatory, since continuous monitoring could be used for surge pricing.
Notify you when a cycle is done, but you could do that with a vibration sensor over zigbee and home assistant, or an outlet power monitor.
People simply don’t understand there are other low-band wireless local communication protocols other than wifi and maybe IR, and that is completely taken advantage of by companies who deal in user data.
I’m not as worried about the routing, I was planning on using my own anyway. I’m more worried about all it’s other connectivity features (built-in-wifi and a bluetooth antenna(?)). It makes me nervous that they call it “smart” and require it be permanently installed inside my house, not to be removed even if the service is terminated. I’m struggling to understand why that’d be the case, and maybe it’s because i’ve been watching too much Mr Robot but I can think of at least a few ways it could be used maliciously.
Yea, definitely too much Mr Robot.
Thanks.
It also apparently has a BLE antenna in it for some reason, i’m a little worried about what that’s doing there. But the alternative is Xfinity so i’m still considering it…
Not that I need it but according to the sales guy they just installed 8Gbit service in my neighborhood, and I hadn’t even heard of anything that fast for residential service. It’s like $165 a month though
Considering Quantum Fiber as an ISP, but they require the installation of a (permanent) C5500XK smar
Way late to this, but:
First: it doesn’t say “illegal”, it says “prohibited”. Could be (and probably is) talking about apps prohibited either by the device manufacturer or apps that are otherwise legal but copied from another device (i.e. loaded through a 3rd party app store)
Second: the use of the “illegal” app should be the illegal thing, not the side-loading of it on your device. In your analogy, growing any plants in your house at all would be the new restriction, on top of weed being illegal (for now)
yup. I haven’t done it yet, but apparently ceiling fan controllers are a pretty standard thing, so usually all you really have to do is replace the whole controller box (they’re like $30 apiece from what I remember), or replace the controller board itself like you mentioned.
I’ve stopped buying appliances from places like Home Depot for this reason, seems like they simply do not stock items that aren’t their brand-name cloud-hosted services, or larger brands like hue.