Re: smart plugs???

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

I hate Alexa. We had an Echo in the house for a bit, and it was forever
listining in on our conversations and breaking in on them. That got her
banished.

What!? As in "I cannot do that Dave"-stuff? Scary! I would never dream of having
a device that constantly sends audio to google & co in my house. On the other
hand, I live in an apartment, so automating light switches and other stuff is
not meaningful, since it quicker and easier to just use the light switch. Also
there's no heating, blinds or other stuff really to control.
I do see the value if you have a big house. I can then see where it might make
sense to optimize some parameters of the house.
But I'd ideally like something self-hosted for that.

It may change as more companies realize the cloud is costing them a lot of
money particularly for AWS or other commercial providers. Some have went
back to running their own servers.

>
I never understood how any business - large or small - could be
comfortable having their financial information or their proprietary
technical data on a cloud server. Quickbooks online would seem to be a

You are a wise man Lars! My companies finances are on my laptop, on my backup
server, and at my accountant. They have sworn on the bible, that it is not in
google or in a cloud service, but I don't trust them. On the other hand, the
selection of accountants was very bad, so I no choice but to trust them at the
moment. The positive thing is that sometimes when they share information with
me, they share a Nextcloud link, so that's at least something! =D

tempting target for Intuit data mining. For that matter, I worry about
having my personal tax return submitted to IRS through Intuit's servers
(TurboTax) - or for that matter HR Block's. But I pray that there are
data protection laws surrounding this that they can't bypass with a
click-wrap user agreement. Imagine how lucrative it would be to sell
mortgages, life insurances or investment packages to people based on
reading their annual Form 1040.

Yes! I read an article about modern scammer practices. Apparently they are
modern people and you can buy data, data cleaning, voice operators, money
launderes, etc. "as a service". Either pay by the hour or with % of the money
you manage to steal. Fascinating!

Meanwhile it is annoying. My Fitbit device won't synch with the
application on the phone without an internet connection. Leaving aside I
don't enjoy being radio-collared by Google I sometimes have to jockey the
phone around to get a connection.

>
I just discovered that in the last two weeks, as I replaced by Fitbit
Charge 5 with a new Charge 6. It somehow would not show me the time
when I had left my phone in the office while going out to get the mail
from the mailbox at the driveway. Recovered once I was in Blluetooth
range. Some datapoints can sync between the watch and the phone over
BlueTooth, but "deeper stuff" like sleep analysis does indeed require
connection to the Google servers.

I say... drop the fitbit and take a walk and do some pushups. Then you'll be
find, and you will have one less device to worry about! =)