• yesman@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 day ago

    We have a constellation of satellites constantly broadcasting the most accurate time humans can measure and it’s crazy every device doesn’t have an antenna to pick this up and set the time.

    • teije9@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      1 day ago

      nope, but they do have WiFi to send analytics to the factory (and so that they can get hacked and be used for DDOS attacks)

          • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            23 hours ago

            I tried not to, but it formed a mesh network with the neighbors toaster, and that connected to someone’s dishwasher the next street over, which connected to a washing machine down the block, and so on, until they found a self-aware microwave that just happens to be benevolent but sort of mischievous, and now whenever my toast is done, the Grindr chime sounds off and the toaster asks me to put it back in.

        • teije9@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 day ago

          appliences that connect to your internet are supposed to be secured, but cheap Chinese ones usually arent. this means they can easily get hacked and added to a botnet thats used for DDoS attacks. I once saw a screenshot of someone whose washing machine uploaded ~30GB of data per month.

          the best thing to do against this is to just not connect them to the internet.

    • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago
      1. Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it’s still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.

      2. GPS doesn’t provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you’re in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it.

        You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.

      3. it’s like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can’t make any big data or ad revenue from it.