this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Owning that space in peoples homes is the point, I bought them just for controlling my lights via voice, but the screen started as a clock and weather report and now shows adverts almost constantly.
I’m looking at HomeAssistant as a replacement but you have to realise that unless you are tech savvy, you probably don’t even know HomeAssistant exists let alone know how to set it up for your requirements.
Not only that but it requires constant maintenance.
No, it just requires people to run normal fucking updates like literally EVERY piece of software does, even the canned bullshit from corpos.
Having to do any manual step is beyond what the Echo devices require, they just reboot themselves randomly one day and boom, a whole new new set of features for advertisers.
Ohh, fully auto updates turned on by default on a shitty IoT device? A hacker's wet dream.
Not sure who you think you are advising here, but I suspect Amazon is making sure their echo devices are on the high end of security, any vulnerability will get a lot of press attention.
For Home Assistant and other more open devices this is the problem, you either accept a lot of tinkering ensuring it’s updated, working and secure, or it fails the wife/parent test.
Apple, Google or Amazon devices are just too easy in comparison, but you have to put up with the intrusion and ads.
A lot more people are willing to sacrifice data and adverts for convenience.
Everyone is finding out the hard way that it is a lot worse than some ads.
What has happened?
Even with home assistant set up, I still have Google assistant handling the voice control aspect. I might be wrong but I don't think home assistant comes with any voice controls. You still need something else if you want to control it with voice.
Edit: it looks like there is something built into HA called Assist. I tried it a bit and while the basics work, I find it harder to use than google assistant.
Getting Home Assistant to play nicely with Google without using their Nabu Casa service definitely is a hurdle, but once you get over it, it's super nice. I ended up just blocking Google DNS inside my network to force all the Google home devices to use my internal DNS to fix the https/hairpin NAT issue. It wasn't a big deal since my kids are getting older and I needed to block outbound DNS in general since they're getting savvy enough to get around my content filtering.
Oh I just paid for Nabu Casa. It's only $65 USD / yr and it supports the dev of HA. I'm happy to pay for it for how much I get out of HA.
you might want to read that book "the circle". so scandalous it got banned somehweherehre. (actually it's very tame)