Technology

I remember about news of some Israeli intelligence operatives who jogged around their HQ only to be outed by their tracks on Strava.

I mean, UCSC researchers used WiFi to detect a human heartbeat.

Such a boring dystopia :/

In case anyone's interested, there's actually open-source self-hosted robot vacuum firmware for select models

I don't understand why these devices need an internet connection?

If you have a robot vacuum, and the robot vacuum makes a persistent map (as opposed to the older "dumber" models that just bounce around randomly), they all send that map back to some remote server. In fact, most of those robots won't even enable the mapping feature unless they're connected to the Internet (which is absolute bullshit considering most of those robots generate, process, and store that map locally, so there's literally no reason to send it off somewhere).

So your options are to just use the robot without ever connecting it to the Internet and be happy with the reduced featureset, root the robot and install Valetudo on it, or just vacuum manually. But until manufacturers are forced to let us actually own the smart devices they sell is, under no circumstances should you ever let one touch the Internet.

I mean, this has been known about for pretty much all smart vacuums.

But who the fuck is going to use the layout of your house for anything?

"secret". Sweet summer child, you've been mapped down to your quarks for decades, and building plans have been at Town Hall since... Louis XIV?

I've been looking into robotic lawnmowers, and they're basically the same. The more primitive ones have a hall effect sensor under their snout feeling for a wire you bury around the edge of your yard, and do the "go until you hit something, turn a random amount, repeat until low battery, follow perimeter to dock" or they require phoning home in some way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, some guy's got an open source system that runs on a Raspberry Pi on the mower itself.

I guess I'm willing to believe that some of the LIDAR or camera-only guided mowers need some serious processing power to create the maps they use for guidance around the yard, and that's more practical to do on the company's servers than on the device itself...except not really; we've got decently powerful ARM SoCs that don't cost much, don't take a lot of power to run, and can do that job. The reality is, you can't get a pedometer app for a smart phone that doesn't broadcast sensor telemetry to two continents these days.