In this day and age you need to be very careful abandoning anything in the cloud. My employer regularly contracts with HackerOne to test the security of our websites. On at least one occasion they demonstrated an exploit by creating an AWS S3 bucket with the same name as a bucket we stopped using years ago. We still had an old DNS record pointing to that old bucket if I recall correctly…

Well not immediately… Years from now when the military develops something even better then this will all become surplus and sold off to SWAT teams etc. for next to nothing.

At least it’s not 100 trillion James Bonds.

Only some VOIP calls are routed over the internet. Most calls, while digital, are still routed over the proprietary networks owned & operated by the major telcos.

The internet is a packet switched network, which means data is sent in packets, and it’s possible for packets to end up at their destination out of order. Two packets sent from the same starting point to the destination could theoretically go over completely different routes due to congestion, etc. The destination is responsible for putting the packets back together properly. Packets can also get delayed if other higher priority packets come along. It’s for reasons like these that both voice & video on the internet can occasionally freeze, stutter, etc. Granted the capacity & reliability of the internet has improved greatly over time so these things happen less and less often. But the fact still remains that a packet switched network isn’t optimal for real time communication.

Telephone networks on the other hand are circuit switched networks. When you are talking to somebody on a telephone then there is a dedicated circuit path between you and the other person. Each piece of the path between the two of you has a hard limit of the number of simultaneous calls it can handle, which ensures it always has the capacity to serve your particular call. If a circuit between two points is maxed out then the telephone exchange may try to route your call via a different path, or you may just end up with a busy signal.

Packet switched networks also don’t have those hard limits that circuit switched networks do. So packet switched networks can get overwhelmed (think DoS attacks) which can also lead to outages.

Fun fact: the US Coast Guard used to have a base in the Oklahoma panhandle. It’s sole purpose was a LORAN transmitter.

So the copyright industry will push again for back doors that they are given the keys to.

Simple. After they gain access to the routers and realize everything is encrypted then they’ll start throwing piles of money at politicians to outlaw encryption.

Exactly. I know folks that live on the 3rd floor of an old walk-up. Stairs are the only way in & out. So if you want to replace delivery people then it would need to be a robot that can navigate narrow & windy stairs.

That applies to public spaces, yes, but not ALL spaces. I’m on the board of directors for a small non-profit organization that expanded their facility a few years ago. We had to prove for ADA compliance that one floor of our facility was restricted in its use and not for public access. If we had been required to make it publicly accessible then it would have required an elevator, which would have been so expensive that it would have put an end to that expansion project before it even started. The public spaces are all fully ADA compliant. Those private spaces are not.

Also, like most building code requirements etc. the ADA only comes into effect with new construction or when the renovations to an existing property exceed a certain threshold (I forget the specifics). There are plenty of older buildings out there that aren’t fully ADA compliant.

I know people who live on 3rd floor walkups that were likely built 100+ years ago with narrow curved stairs as the only way in or out. If you want to replace a delivery person with a robot in places like that then wheels won’t cut it.

But I want my own personal luxury car that I paid $100,000 for to go out on its own in the middle of the night while I’m asleep and have it earn money for me as a self-driving Uber…

Because the entire world is designed around the human body and the way it moves. It’s theoretically much easier to introduce a humanoid robot into an existing workspace than it is to retrofit all the doors, stairs, etc. to allow a wheeled robot to move around.

AKA greed. Why license your content to Netflix when you can have your own streaming service and lock your viewers into your piddly little hoard of content?

Just how many streaming providers are there today? That number likely changes almost daily at this point…

Any army that treats their troops as “cannon fodder” deserves not only all the casualties they rack up, but the long term social, political, and economic hardship that is pretty much a guaranteed result of such a policy.

The constant rounding up & minimal training of “cannon fodder” is expensive both in the short and long term. Better to protect well trained resources and have them continue to gain experience by using more advanced weaponry that minimizes risk to them.

Good to know. Thanks for the insight!

But how does it handle issues like retrying until one and/or the other person is alerted, without erroneously alerting the other at a later time when they get home? And pausing until the next morning and picking up where it left off?

I’m sure you know what xkcd has to say about standards…

Back in the 90’s before this whole internet thing started taking off I was heavily involved with Microsoft’s effort to create a telephony API (TAPI) that was meant to standardize all manner of telephone equipment. The problem is that it has to be overly broad in order to support everything from a dial-up modem to fax machines to the telephone systems used in large corporate offices, and everything in between.

I remember testing a TAPI program I wrote on different types of hardware. I wrote and tested it on a handful of smaller systems that handled a dozen or so phone lines. The first time I tested it on a large enterprise phone system it failed miserably. That enterprise system had a feature that I never anticipated so my code didn’t handle it properly. In a nutshell, if you placed a call on hold then that system assumed you were placing a new call and you immediately got a dial tone. My code assumed when a call was placed on hold that that was all that happened.

I can see similar issues with a broad standard like Matter/Thread. There will likely be devices out there that behave in unanticipated ways, and testing them will be difficult unless you have the physical device. But hopefully, given the backing of all those big companies, they’ll have a good handle on this. It should be able to let end users gracefully handle edge cases, etc.

I took a very cursory look at HomeKit a while ago and found its ability to create complex automations rather limited. For example, our washer & dryer are in our basement, and we can easily forget we have loads of laundry being washed/dryed when we get busy with the rest of our days.

We now have an automation that will text me and/or my wife when a laundry cycle finishes. But it only alerts us if we’re home, and only whoever is home so can go take care of it. If nobody is home when the cycle completes then it waits until one or both of us is home, and then it alerts us. It also won’t alert us overnight but will wait until morning. So if we start a load of laundry at 10pm it doesn’t wake us up at midnight but instead waits until 7am to alert us.

I’ve implemented this in both Home Assistant and Indigo without too much difficulty. Not sure how easy it would be to do in HomeKit though…

That’s one of the more complex automations I’ve created, but I have a few others that are up there as well.

Just wait until Elon puts AI in those new robots he invented!!!

/s for those who need it…

How long until some organization forks the project and everybody switches to it?

With all the plugins etc. it might take a while, but once a critical mass is reached it would put an end to this idiocy.

I think Netflix could probably start selling their tool and make more money from that then streaming if they can get it to work, because I’m guessing AWS makes it hard on purpose.

The company Cloudhealth Technologies has already been doing this for years, and not just with AWS but other cloud providers as well. Unfortunately they’ve been acquired by VMware so no idea if they’re still as good as they used to be…