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by wisty 3936 days ago
I suppose a camera in a fridge would be handy, so you could have a peek at whether you were out of milk.

I believe there was a similar product, but you had to swipe product barcodes, to maintain a database. But I'm not the kind of person who keeps a database of the contents of my fridge, which might be why I'm the kind of person who forgets to buy milk.

My heuristic for coming up with that idea - when's the last time I called home, and ask someone to perform a simple task. Pet food dispensers might be another one. I guess a remote kill switch for irons, ovens, etc could be useful.

1 comments

And then someone prevents you from running said oven until you pay them a ransom.

(Or just starts turning on peoples irons at random, if it can turn them on as well)

I personally think the security implications outweigh the potential benefits for most IoT devices. It's too bad, because the potential benefits are generally nice.

(And the other side is: I have no desire to "buy" a device that can have features remotely removed. It's why I ditched Windows, it's why I won't ever buy a Tesla or an iPhone, it's why I don't have any recent game consoles. And most IoT devices fall into this category. Among other reasons, it creates a perverse incentive for a company to break (intentionally or unintentionally) older models (or allow them to fall into disrepair) so that people will upgrade to this year's model.)