Tag Archives: Smart Appliances

Feb 13 2016

TV Companies Invite Police Investigators Into Living Rooms

Back in 2016, no one realized the implications of Smart TV’s using voice control for people who didn’t want to bother with a remote control or mobile to manage their TV’s.

cloudThere was some small print in the announcement of the new technology from Samsung, that the microphones would be recording and sending everything they heard the cloud for interpretation, in order to be able to change channels, increase volume or look for programming on the Internet.

In order to use it, you accept the terms and conditions (as we blindly do with any new software or technology), which include that in some countries, for security reasons, like an Internet Service Provider, Police and security services have the right under various terrorism and serious crimes Acts to commandeer these recordings, from the manufacturers’ servers.

This has resulted in thousands of arrests for crimes ranging from drug and gang related offenses through to roundups of suspected terrorists.

Graver concerns have been expressed in some countries where freedom of speech and political or religious beliefs are ‘discouraged’. In countries in the Middle East and parts of Asia, many people known to espouse strong opinions have ‘disappeared’ and according to reports from the website http://www.JournalismTruth.com (which was recently removed from the Internet) large numbers of these people were known to have recent models of smart TV’s featuring voice control.

Advertisement
Aug 21 2012

My Toilet Says I Don’t Drink Enough Water

I remember back in the days when I used to visit Tokyo regularly and the ToTo toilets at the Tokyo Hilton in Shinjuku had seat warmers and ‘showers’. It was cool novelty value although I never thought I’d have anything like that myself.

Today many of us live in Smart Homes where M2M communication between appliances is pretty normal. Hard to think back to the day when I thought I was really cool having Cat 1 cable with double jack points throughout my house.

Now we have the smart fridge sending a grocery list to our mobiles, the heat pump notifies us that the temperature in the lounge is only 13 and given that my car GPS telematics system has told the that I am heading in the direction of home, it prompts me to turn the home climate control on to a comfortable 21 degrees.

As to the new toilet, I have a wife who can tell me that I don’t drink enough water and I’m not sure I need the toilet analyzing my urine every time I take a pee. Of course if I had Crohn’s Disease, Diabetes or some other ailment, it might be handy, but otherwise a toilet that does poo analysis is really a bit of a stretch in the motion sensor department.

It started with the smart scales which monitored our weight as we were dieting and gave each of us a weekly graph of our weight and BMI on the iPad diet app, but I thought it was a bit OTT when the toilet started notifying us of our weight as well. Of course it did validate my theory that I weighed more prior to my morning constitutional than after.

I’m just not sure that I really need to be sitting in a business meeting, checking a notification coming through on my iPad telling me that my pregnancy test was negative. I don’t know where my daughters get their sense of humor from, but it seems they have hacked my toilet password.