This is a gen x complaint. Boomers would just ask their kids to set it up because they can’t get it to work. Gen x realizes what is going on and that it is bullshit to need an account for a fucking lightbulb.
I think it’s a complaint from everyone but Gen z, who are just used to it.
Somewhere between milennial and gen-z here. I can’t fucking stand making more accounts just because companies want to collect data. And neither can my gen-z younger siblings.
Ah. Resignation is NOT acceptance.
Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.
As genz, can confirm
I think this is a common-sense complaint, mostly unrelated to generation.
I mean yeah we are used to it but it’s still shitty. Are you not used to it?
I’m too poor to have this complaint, I guess. I have to do everything manually still
Gen z to me is just the boomers mark II.
For what reason? That doesn’t make any sense.
I meet a lot of overentitled Gen z. They remind me of the boomers that I also meet a lot of. Of course neither group can see it.
This might surprise you, but people are people no matter what generation they were born in.
Boomers is a name for a specific reason.
So you agree.
Millennial here. We are in agreement.
Gen X here and can confirm.
what kind of lightbulbs are you guys buying? I’ve never had to set up an account for this kind of stuff
My late 50s mum happily signs up with her Facebook to everything. Meanwhile it’s often the people in their late 20s to 30s who were introduced to computers during their youth before everything had super streamlined GUIs who know enough about software that they realize this is a privacy concern, what internet privacy means, and why it’s important. People who are older or younger than that have to go out of their way to learn how and why to look behind the easy interfaces. That’s my experience and explanation at least.
Remember when our parents were super nuts about keeping your info private online, not revealing too much info to strangers, and not signing up for stupid shit? My my, how the turntables.
My 70yo mom thinks I’m crazy paranoid because of my data privacy stances, while she’s dealing with constant spam and account hacks. Guess who hasn’t had damn near any info issues? :D
I was never allowed to be on Club penguin or the like. I also wasn’t allowed to be on Facebook when it became popular around me, until I was 14. Mum, what happened?
Tbf you weren’t missing much with Facebook. It was kinda cool in the early days when it replaced MySpace (like Reddit to Digg), but that went out the window pretty quick when all your extended family are calling your parents wondering why there are tagged pictures of you dancing around a fire half naked with a liquor bottle in your hand at 3am.
Then: Don’t trust everything you read on the internet, and Wikipedia isn’t legitimate because anyone can edit it
Now: Some loud moron on Youtube told me a thing and I believe it 100%.
Then: people on the internet were mostly technically adept and creating webpages because they enjoyed them.
Now: people on the internet are mostly ad tech attention economy scams and creating LLM spam blogs for PPC revenue.
It’s just easier now for a conspiracy loon to find something that matches their preconceived biases.
It really sucks now for product comparisons. It used to be the you could look up productA vs productB and get an enthusiast going on about them, now it’s purely AI generated crap.
Not personally, but I remember the feeling
My mom never actually had any idea what the internet was. My dad bought the PC for me, so he probably would’ve doubled down if he knew what I was seeing and maybe would’ve even said it was good for me or not a big deal or something
It’s weird to see my 11yr old brother now with the exact same access to YouTube which I’d ironically argue is a lot worse than old rotten.com. No idea if that’s true but an argument could be made, for sure
Eh the internet was a lot simpler back then. Yeah there was fucked up shit around like there is today, but social networking imo is what really screwed the pooch. Back then, people just posted screwy shit for the sake of it and had varying degrees of influence, but now almost everything out there is intended to manipulate your behavior and worldview on a mainstream level. It’s a shitton more dangerous than the weirdos in chatrooms asking a/s/l.
My young family members are the worst, they just click “yes” to everything, regardless of any effort I’ve made to explain how things work.
Any barrier to convenience is too frustrating to them. They don’t like even using full applications in their laptops, always say “wheres the app, this is too complex”. 🤦🏼♂️
that’s not just young people that’s 80~90% of users
You’re not wrong. Ffs.
I’d say you made the point better than any of us.
I know some network security folks, in their 40’s, who’ve literally said “I don’t want to be inconvenienced” when discussing why they tolerate this invasive shit.
Motherfucker, your job is securing networks. You know first hand the kind of shit going on out there.
I really wish more things just let me log in with Facebook, I don’t want to fill out and make passwords for every pointless site. At least I can be somewhat confident that Facebook will follow security standards.
Based on their long track record of privacy excellence?
They dont care about your privacy, they do care about their security, which your account being compromised would hurt.
Might I recommend a reasonably secure browser with an in-built password generator and manager? I use Firefox. You make up a username and it generates a safe password and saves it so you don’t have to remember it’d Just use a safe password for the browser itself that you can easily remember. I personally feel that’s a decent compromise between secure and convenient.
I love the basic instructions for someone debating security policy nuance. It’s like you don’t get that he’s way, way, way beyond “pick a password you can easily remember” despite the technical level of the discussion.
The person I’m replying to isn’t the only one reading the comment. Chances are someone who’s on the fence or hasn’t interacted with the issue yet will benefit from it a little. That’s what I like to think at least.
That’s still shifting responsibility to the users, which is great for all these crappy products, but we should be demanding better.
Of course, but meanwhile, we have to take of our own privacy.
Hahahahahaha Facebook follow security standards? Your fucking kidding, right?
Facebook, probably the first greatest scourge of privacy invading companies (worse than Google), follows secjrity standards?
The motherfuckers have a profile on me, and I’ve never once been on any Facebook website or service, let alone logged into any Facebook crap.
You’re probably aware, but welcome to third party tracking. You can’t truly get away from this trash unless you start doing some hardcore blocking at the network level (apps have tracking too).
Boomers would get the bulb set up by their kids, then something will happen, and you come over to find your parents sitting in a rave room because they need the light and can’t fix it.
And haven’t mentioned the issue even though it’s been like that for months.
Nope. Mom’s meross bulb got a little fucked in a power failure. She unscrewed its green self and put in a regular bulb.
Boomers WILL solve this. But they’ll go low-tech even if it means unplugging the cord to turn it off.
Sadly these days, it’s a hold over from boomer managers making the decision that services require logins, which in turn require accounts and emails. So gen-x managers who were taught by boomers do the same thing. It’s systematic really.
I don’t think it’s boomer managers doing that, necessarily; I think it’s an unholy alliance of liassez-faire tech bro entrepreneurs and the
propagandamarketing industry.
It’s also a millennial complaint.
Sincerely, elder millennial who recently had to make an account for a lightbulb and an air cooler and is sick of that bullshit.
Boomer isn’t really used as a generational term nowadays
Gen Z doesn’t know what a “boomer” is…
Not wanting to be exploited by tech coorporations, technological literacy, is not a boomer thing.
I mean, have you met zoomers? Technological literacy as we knew it is dead.
but also have you met boomers? Tech literacy as we knew never existed.
Born too late to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born too early to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born in just the right time to have the cursed knowledge on how all of the cobbled together tech stack out there barely works
Every time I use an ATM I get the mental image of a 70 year old COBOL programmer desperately trying to patch holes in a sinking ship with a roll of duct tape.
Me too, except any time I have to deal with the US banking system. Ever used ACH? What a wreck.
It’s a fucking nightmare, but I have heard rumors that it is in the process of being replaced with a new nightmare.
Boomers were the generation that invented a lot of this tech. Most of them weren’t literate, but I have known quite a few who were. Honestly same with Gen x, we grew up with it but, a lot of the good tech didn’t come until later in our lives. There are tons of illiterate gen xers and millennials and gen y and z. Some people care and some people don’t.
Laugh it up now. When we’re 50, our holoshere is going to require us to submit to genetic modifications to get our next soylent nutrition paste to dispense. God only knows how we connect to a person young enough in 2040 to know if it’s even possible to bypass. That kind of stuff was laughed at the last time we tried.
Gen X and Millennials to the rescue
Quick, invent everything before we get too old!
Gen X would like a word
nobody cares about Gen X
How is this a boomer complaint? Why does everyone need my email and info?
So they can sell it to spam companies obviously.
Er I mean… For better customer exploitation!
Shit, I’m really not good at this but they’re going to send me to the
to exploit you. not being exploited at a molecular level is boomer shit.
now, are you an old, or are you gonna send me a copy of your social security number and complete sequenced genome?
now, are you an old, or are you gonna send me a copy of your social security number and complete sequenced genome?
Does email work or do you have a mailing address? I’ll spit in a cup and send that to you if I need to but I’d rather not have to go to the post office.
do you have like a cloud storage with at least 1TB? if not, we’re gonna have to sneakernet this.
I lack that much cloud storage, I’ll see if I can track down a station wagon I can fill up with tapes.
I very much appreciate this. I mean, you are proving that you’re not an old, but I won’t be sure until you do it.
Ok boomer.
Lol jk
What I love was it is boomers that allows these changes so they gotta live with it. It’s not like we all woke up and decided to start asking for emails for everything. It was sitting back and being cool with letting ads take over everything until they started needing more and more data so they weren’t paying 30 million for beer ads to people who don’t drink
Any beer paying millions in ads isn’t worth drinking.
Anything paying for ads shouldn’t be worth it. We should be hostile to any advertising as stealing from us. They don’t pay us to take our free time yet tell me anytime of your day where you are not experiencing some type of advertising.
I gotta go to work 1/3 my day. 1/3 I’m sleeping. 1/3 I get to meet except that 1/3 for me is taken up by lunches, kids sports, prepping for tomorrow’s 1/3 work day. So of that 1/3 maybe I get a few hours to relax and enjoy something. So I sit down to the streaming service I cut cable for and and still get chunks of that time giving to company’s Hawking me stuff I don’t need wasting my free time. It gets worse when you think how much-needed of our day is being in front of some type of ads. Radio, TV, bus stops, magazines, going to kids hockey games, browsing the internet, watching movies. Even viral videos often are just paid commercials made to circumvent ad regulations and laws and to not pay websites for server time and big fixes.
It is insidious. We have been corralled into something we don’t even know we’re in. Like cows that don’t realize are in a pasture. It all seems innocent like “I’ll just ignore that thing I don’t like” but deep down that thing is affecting every part of the society we are in and it’s a root cause for most of what we complain about today.
@The_Picard_Maneuver I once bought a TV sound bar that wanted me to download an app, make an account and give it detailed location information just to use it as a wired speaker. I returned it.
I wish more people would do this!
If more people acted this way this wouldn’t be the standard
The only radio with Bluetooth that fits my older car requires a fucking Android app to sync Bluetooth… Fuck you pioneer!
Was it a Bose? I once bought Bose headphones and downloaded an app to pair it. When Bose recognized the headphones, it told me that I had used the wrong app to pair to those headphones.
@snow_bunny Nah, it was Sonos. Which, I guess the app ecosystem is their whole thing - but I didn’t know that at the time, and I just wanted a basic sound bar, and the reviews didn’t really mention that all that extra fluff was mandatory.
For me it’s that I don’t want short form video anywhere near my view.
I went to a bar for a drink the other day. They had TVs all over the place which I normally don’t care for but it looked like golf or something I could just ignore. After I ordered my drink I realized how wrong was.
It was actually some weird short form video TV channel. They croped the 16:9 screen into a 1:1 square with moving neon lines in the “empty space” where there was no video. Each video was about 5 seconds long and showed brainless content of people using a Rube Goldburg machine or doing card tricks and other such nonsense.
Once I realized what was happening it was too late as I got my drink and I felt compelled to finish it and pay. I tried to ignore the 5+ screens in my view but they were too big and eye-catching to really ignore. I kept catching myself looking at one of the screens after a minute or so. I felt like I was getting serotonin raped between ads.
Eventually I moved to sit by a window and stare at a tree. I’ll never go back to a bar like that again.
This reads like a cyberpunk vignette; I enjoyed it. Thank you. I’ve started to take note when something decidedly cyberpunk happens in day-to-day life. I make a lot of notes.
I could increase the cyberpunk feeling by turning the TVs off with a flipper zero. I haven’t felt the need to yet but it’s always an option.
Remember when phones had ir transmitters
I was so jealous of my dad’s HTC one, haha.
That’s an idea…
that’s the direction we all need to be moving, if we’re going to survive/avert the water wars.
Extrapolating a bit, here are the next steps
- screens in places where people might look at an ad will all have built in image recognition and eye-tracking.
- an algorithm/model will calculate the number of people within view and an acceptable level of eyes on screen per minute (or some other time increment tbd by an industry leading marketing psychologist) depending on the task they are doing.
- the algorithm/model can also calculate the local demographic
- the short format video content can be easily tweaked to improve engagement. If the racing crash clips aren’t generating enough engagement, then it can try indoor cat clips.
- when the eye to screen levels are at or above minimum advertising levels, display an ad that would best match the target demographic that the advertiser set. The ad contents will also match the actions of the local population.
Certainly. Having worked in advertising for 25 years, that’s probably just phase one. Those short videos will eventually be different for each person seeing the screen… and largely A.I. generated with few humans in the loop. In the flip side, people will probably be able to program their smart glasses to hide all that shit. It’s an arms race over our attention already. See: Trudell’s “mined mind.” Or Bo Burnham, for that matter.
It’s like a race to the bottom.
I’m a grumpy bastard and hate similar things but honestly, this doesn’t sound so bad that I’d be particularly bothered by it or leave if I hadn’t already ordered that beer. It’s just wallpaper. If I was by myself I’d probably appreciate it on some level and if I’m with other people I’d likely stop noticing. Overall I think I’d probably prefer the bar not have them at all but it’s really not that bad.
Loud sports or music that can fuck right off but otherwise, meh.
Normally I would agree with you. But they had these 50" screens in every direction except for down. I was literally staring at the floor in an attempt not to look at them. The swirling colorful “boarders” of the short format square video was eye catching enough. But with the video changing scenes every 5 seconds it was a similar effect to the Eisenstein editing style in Battleship Potemkin. The screens were screaming at you to stare at it.
It was also just total garbage content, the type of stuff I left reddit for. It was just a step above what Americans of the future watched in Idiocracy. It was truly a bizarre experience for me and also one of the most “boomer” moments I’ve had. Although out of everyone else in the bar, only the boomers were happily watching the short format video.
CHILI’S IS ABLEIST AND HAS LITTLE SCREENS KN EVERY DAMN TABLE THAT DISTRACT ME.
I went to a restaurant awhile ago and they told me to order using the little screen on the table. I said “no thanks” and left.
I have this exact same reaction.
Bro we need to track you in every way possible so we can sell you even more shit, what’s the big deal?
Um, how about no Scott, okay? You got my money, if you wanna keep pestering for more money, I’m gonna return this original item and you aren’t getting shit.
Ladies and gentlemen, Scotty don’t.
Scotty n’est pas
That’s my pet hate with everything.
A mouse doesn’t need an account. Just let me install the shit and configure it you fucks.
Linux has built in drivers for most shit with no account necessary. Logitech (for example) has a third party app called Solaar that does everything Logitechs own crappy mouse/keyboard software does.
Getting away from the endless hassle of popups and drivers was my biggest motivation for switching to Linix way back in 2008.
Does it work with the g pro mice? I fucking hate the logi app
I used it with a G503, it should work.
Not only an account. The Razer Naga needs connection to the cloud so the macros work properly
Outrageous. Do the macros get processed in the cloud or what?
They get processed locally. It’s just that some macros are stored in the cloud (except the simple remapping s). So Razer synapse downloads them every time you turn on the computer.
I didn’t make a razer account, therefore I had to remake every macro that wasn’t a remapping.
Well that is honestly so dumb. Why not just store it locally somewhere?
I had the same question.
I tried so hard to ask razer support. But I couldn’t get a reasonable answer out of them.
Cheaper than putting the hardware for it in the mouse.
This shit I don’t get. Your computer can’t handle that? Loading up tons of trash in the cloud is fucking atrocious.
But now they can say “cloud compatible” in the board meeting!
I would have returned that instantly upon discovery. I’ll add Razer to my denylist of brands.
No, lightbulb, I won’t give you my location
(actually happened)
I think it was requested on mine for the sunrise/sunset feature, but let me just put in a zip code after I declined location access
That and they can turn on when you get home after sunset. But they could do that with simple wifi connection or something. Unless your wifi is unstable I suppose.
Or, you know, a photodiode.
Or you use a VPN on your router
Lots of times devices need access to a thing called location just to detect certain kinds of Bluetooth. I don’t know the specifics but it’s a trend I’ve noticed. It might not be the fault of the light.
Für Android, the location permission was(is? not sure right now) basically required for anything that wanted WiFi or Bluetooth. As getting access to that, could in theory be used to locate you
Not that this was necessarily the case here, but an explanation
“required”
Required by Google, yes, but not actually required in any functional sense of the word other than the function of spying on you in another insidious way. It worked without invasive permissions for a long time and you absolutely won’t convince me it wouldn’t now if data collection weren’t a priority.
(This isn’t directed at you personally; apologies if it seems like it is.)
The Olympics required four apps. Five if you count Visa Go, which just outright didn’t work. All of them want you to make accounts and send you shit.
- Itinerary, account optional
- Tickets, account required even though the tickets were on the phone
- Transport, account required even though the tickets were in the
- Metro app, for which it told you to NOT DELETE THE DATA BECAUSE THE TICKETS ARE ONLY ON THE DEVICE
The real solution: Buy your own domain name, and make a catch-all email address. Every account gets a new address with that account’s company in the email. Target is target@[your domain].[tld]… The benefit is that you can see exactly who is selling your info to spammers, and easily burn those accounts. You start getting spam sent to that target address? Congrats, now you know Target has sold your info and you can set a rule to automatically send any target@ emails straight to your trash. Also, get a damned password manager so every account has a unique password.
Create a fake persona. This persona has a fake name, birthday, favorite food, first pet, etc… Memorize everything about this fake person, or even just make a note about them in your phone. And none of it is real. This fake person’s info is used for all of your signup info. So when shitty fucking companies get hacked and lose all of your info, the hackers never actually got any of your info. And if you ever see spam addressed to that fake persona, you know you can immediately discard it.
Between the catch-all email address and the fake persona, you’re basically immune to all of the typical ads, phishing, data breaches, etc…
That’s a massive ballache
Commercial email providers will typically provide some number of aliases aimed at doing this for you.
Proton Mail’s a popular provider in Switzerland, for example:
https://proton.me/mail/pricing
Their $3.99 /month service provides 10 aliases.
Their $9.99 /month service provides unlimited aliases.
And will work with a domain you own, so it’s not like you’re locked to them if you want to move to somewhere else down the line.
Abine (now IronVest) just sells the privacy aspect. They aren’t an email provider – that is, they don’t give you an email box – but provides this “masking” service to forward it to your regular email provider, if you already have email service.
Their $39/year service provides 50 aliases.
Their $99/year provides unlimited aliases.
They also do some other stuff like provide masked phone numbers that forward to your real number. They have provided masked, temporary credit card numbers with charge limits and a bogus name and address, so you don’t even need to give your real name to someone you purchase something from online (though it looks like that’s currently not available, says that they’re bringing it back. I have used a masked credit card number from them in the past, so I know that at least some merchants will accept it, though I’d think that it’d tend to trip anti-fraud stuff at merchants, but…shrugs).
That being said, while I think that this sort of thing is a way to reduce the increasing degree of data harvesting – you can’t always choose whether-or-not to use certain services – I think that if you have the option to choose a product or service that doesn’t harvest data on you in the first place, that’s really a better option.
Bitwarden can do both automatic email creation and also store the identity(s) and fill them in for you.
So it doesn’t need to be a ballache, can be one-click transparent.
Fyi, this can be done with Gmail as well. Just add a plus sign at the end of your email. I.e. your_email+target @ Gmail.com
Except most companies have wised up to this, and automatically scrub anything after the +. Because why wouldn’t they?
You can also do this with dots in various places in your email with gmail. Not as descriptive as the plus sign thing but still can be useful as you can create different filters based on the location of the dots.
That’s a great idea! The fake information won’t work for things that require real information, but it’s otherwise great! Is there any retaliation you can take against companies that sell your information? I guess you could forward all of those emails to their sales address.
How do I make a spam email address using my own domain name?
What service do you use for the catch all emails? I use “simple login” currently with my own domain. But, I’d love to look at other options.
It depends on the mail server/provider. As a datapoint, I use Zoho Mail with 4 of my domains and they all have a catch-all that points to a single inbox.
Using Zoho, too. Unfortunately, the free version does not have IMAP or POP3. (Still does hate SMTP, though, which is fantastic for my self-hosted services)
I have one of the yearly deals on MXRoute. Unlimited domains. Been using them for almost 3 years.
https://www.migadu.com/ is a cheap and reliable one. Used YandexMail for years for free before, but they were shameless about reading the contents of emails and then had the audacity to remove the free tier and demand money for it.
Fighting side by side with a boomer?
What about side by side with a friend?How about side by side with your mother?
It means the fight may continue well over 10 pm. I’m in.
I was going to buy a really sweet drone. Then I watched the Getting Started video and there was an app and an account thing, and I realized the second they shut down the service, that drone would be a paperweight.
I’m back to building my own because I’d like to use it for more than a year or two.
Create an account so you can do anything with your purchased device? That’s just plain abusive. How about: thank you for using your hard-earned, post-tax funds and choosing our product. Let’s get you going as fast and easily as possible, then go as far as we can to make things work before having you stop and create an account?
Only reason to create one is so you can save a persistent context for multiple types of interaction. Support multiple users, or different mobile devices, maybe groups of devices. But for a single device, out of the box, no sign up should EVER be needed.
Unless the company’s priority is to hoover all your usage data, analyze it to death, invade your privacy, and sell it for profit.
And your last point is moot because that is the exact priority. Sell product which in turn makes customer into product.
look into home assistant. you can unlink almost every device from their cloud and run them locally. No internet connection needed.
I use it for WAY more than lights. I can monitor and control my 3D printer and weed grow, remotely. Now I have ONE app for all my IOT devices
I luckily dont really have any IOT devices
I love that my lights turn off 15 minutes after I leave home, and turn on as I enter. I don’t touch light switches ever.
Well I mean you do you. I will not be changing all my lights and such. I have thought of putting home assistant on my little server but I literally have nothing to connect to it except maybe my raspberry pi running octoprint.
I love being connected to my printer’s remotely through home assistant. I can cancel a job if I see it is failing
WHAT DOES GOD NEED WITH A STARSHIP?!?!?
Wasn’t that scene from Star Trek II (specifically, when the Reliant approached them suspiciously), not Star Trek V?
Haha, yes… It’s definitely the wrong movie. Good eye!
“Or sign in with your Facebook account”
No, this isn’t Facebook!
