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Atari Is Going To Build IoT Devices (pcmag.com)
angry tapir quotes a report from Computerworld: The latest entrant in the Internet of Things is legendary gaming company Atari, which plans to make consumer devices that communicate over the SigFox low-power network. The devices will be for homes, pets, lifestyle, and safety. Atari has signed a deal with the communications service provider, Sigfox. "The initial product line will include categories such as home, pets, lifestyle and safety," the companies said in a statement. "By connecting to SigFox's global network, the products will benefit from its competitive advantages: a very long battery life and a simple solution that does not require local Internet connectivity and pairing. As soon as the battery is inserted in the object, it is immediately connected to the network."
I assosociate Atari with 70s tech and failure. It's over Atari, hang it up.
The Atari of today has little to do with the legendary gaming company of yore. The name has been bought and sold and licensed and is now basically just a marketing shell. There's something called "Atari", yes...
I grew up in the Atari 2600 era. I remember the first Pong machines showing up in restaurants in the early 70's, where two players would sit down at the machine. It was a great company then, and it changed the world. That company has not existed for a long time.
Also:
As soon as the battery is inserted in the object, it is immediately connected to the network.
Not at my house it doesn't.
Wowz.
I don't care who makes them, none will ever be welcome in my home.
FTFS:
The devices will be for homes, pets, lifestyle, and safety.
I asked the dogs, but they don't have any money for this sh*t. It's not part of their lifestyle, and they're dogs - they provide the safety for the home already.
Another IoT (Idiots obtaining Turdware) loser.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Thought that was dead since the 90's.
In 30 years or so, someone can discover the landfill where Atari buried all the failed IOT devices.
Time to break out the port scanner.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Same AC, following up to my own post.
For those not around in the early 70's, just how amazing Pong seemed then is hard to comprehend through today's eyes. We take "interaction with a screen" so much for granted we don't even think about it. At the time, interaction was unknown for most people. You watched TV... but did not interact with it. It was a push only medium. It did not react to you. While not the first video game, Pong was the first one to reach a mass audience - moms and pops all around the country played it at pizza parlors and movie theaters. It was the first time most normal non-techie people had ever experienced a screen that reacted to what they did.
Atari - the real Atari - brought that to the world. Sad to see what their name is now being used for.
Atari ought to be good on customer privacy issues - the last time they brought out a product designed to "phone home", it took the whole company down. Doubt they'll want to go through that again. ;)
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Not at my house it doesn't.
Just to be clear. Yeah, if the battery goes in, then it does.
This is an... interesting... and disturbing trend for the future. Right now the home internet other than a few specific "mobile" devices like smartphones or onstar needs to connect to YOUR network, that YOU control.
This represents a shift where they connect to networks directly that you do not control. They don't run through your router, they aren't subject to your monitoring or blocking.
The future samsung smarttv won't need to connect to your network to get ads... it'll just connect to cellular or something directly and get ads.
The only solution... not even sure what it will be. Not to buy one (even today avoiding a smartTV is a PITA but not connecting it to the net is easy)?? Jammers ? Probalbly not going to be legal or easy to deploy in populated areas -- hardware hacks to render their antenna useless? Maybe? OR maybe their is no escape but to move into a log cabin in the woods...
This business plan makes sure they remain irrelevant.
The company that made Alone in the Dark is switching to IoT? Hmm, I guess they believe they have some relevant patents and a good partner for this venture, but IoT seems like an area filled with pitfalls and liability. Maybe not the best strategy for a company staving off vultures?
Twinstiq, game news
thank you for article! Magento 2 Search
It's just the company that owns the Atari trademark.
Same AC you're replying to here.
Agreed. Eventually the only way to avoid that shit may be to avoid buying... well, almost anything. You can try to cut antennas, but hard to know if something is getting out anyway, and in some devices the antenna may be inaccessible.
I just don't buy devices like that. Hence "not at my house". But I have no illusions. It means eventually being cut off from anything new, outside self-made tech, which only gets you so far.
I think the era of customer-owned computing is drawing to a close. Personal computers came onto the scene in the 70's. Electronics you control might be all but dead by 2025.
I couldn't see anything in either link about what the products are, or will do, for homes, pets, lifestyle, and safety.
Am I missing something or is this just a press release from SigFox saying that Atari wants to use their network?
hardly. the atari some of us knew from our childhood is long since dead. only the brand and trademarks remain. the only "company" from that era with as fucked-up a corporate history as atari is commodore.
captcha: prestige
You can always live inside a system of faraday cages... Then nothing you don't wire in is getting in. Stupid to have to be in a situation where that's even possibly a thing...
"IoT" or "Internet of Things" christ I miss the days that only hardcore nerds gave a shit about IT, Computers, technology, gadgets, etc.
Sorry, I'm super sick of hearing about "IoT" just be fucking descriptive, this shit is as bad as "the cloud" (actually it might even be worse)
SigFox operates its own cellular network (that it calls LPWAN, Low Power Wide Area Network) that, in the US at least, operates on 915MHz.
This is a kind of disturbing development. I don't know what the actual hard costs to a manufacturer to give a device on-demand data access through a cellular type network, but my guess is that it's rapidly declining and that ultimately cellular network operators will be hungry enough for growth and have built out enough network capacity that selling capped data-only plans to IoT type companies will become appealing to them, especially if they can manage to get existing smartphone users to pay for them.
The scary part is that when you bring an IoT device home with magic connectivity, not only do you lose control of its communications but do you know what it might be doing to tap into your existing wireless network or somehow spy on you?
There's also the ability to build in obsolescence or subscription leverage -- when the device's data expires or no longer works, neither will it, regardless if its not worn out or otherwise damaged.
I suppose the good news is that if these devices exist, someone will figure out how to hack them to appropriate their data plans for their own use. This may be their undoing, as the devices may well be sold at a loss with the hope that subscription plans or other payments are designed to fund the connectivity that comes built in. They might try to ship them "deactivated" but there will probably be good reasons to ship them with functional data plans so they work out of the box without too much multi-vendor activation involved.
"As soon as the battery is inserted in the object, it is immediately connected to the network."
The Object?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari ...
On June 22, 2014, Atari announced a new corporate strategy that would include a focus on "new audiences", specifically "LGBT, social casinos,
>OR maybe their is no escape but to move into a log cabin in the woods...
Yeah, like my buddy Ted. His advice: make sure your cabin is somewhere that still has good snailmail service. Can't attach the explosives to e-mail.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
In certain situations where personally sensitive information is handled in bulk it is likely to be complex to certify all components of a system and recertify given any potential updates if devices are able to connect via the cellular network. To target things like healthcare it may be that there will be a demand for devices which can be controlled more completely to minimise attack vectors (cf. How some cars can be fooled into using an attacker controlled cellular signal) but that would likely be at a premium. I can see an increasing need to model systems with regard to security and associated employment. To some extent that assumes that the devices implement the specifications correctly and that is rarely the case due to bugs, or the tendency for minor component changes in ostensibly the same product which slightly undermines JIT delivery as for simplification you may wish to get 2n instances of a batch of items of which, even given capacity planning, you only need n.
From a consumer ease-of-use perspective a cellular connection could be great - no need to configure wifi keys or reconfigure if you modfy your router (change your WiFi password and your shower stops working?) Or no unexpected home network data charges for buying a new and oven.
It might be possible to mitigate some of it with WPS and better router GUI design, and an alarm so your toaster can let you know when it can no longer talk to your washing machine and for you to press its wps button.
Even then, I can see that for a lot of people setting this message up this will be a challenge and by the time I am 80 I will need to find a tame 25 year old to help connect the iron to the interwebs except that'll be the Corby 3000 roboiron by then.
I just want to know if there will be phillips head screws to take it apart so I can re-align the button pads ....
The so called "Internet of Things" is simply not going to happen any time soon. For the simple reason that there seems to be no effort whatsoever to address the crucial issue of security.
Within weeks of the first big batch of commercial IOT products coming out people are going to find their whole home has been pwned by some script kiddies or, even worse, organised crime gangs. This will kill the idea dead with consumers.
Plus with the advent of Windows 10 and the whole corporate culture that now thinks they have a right to invade your privacy and data mine you for every single breath you take who in their right mind would even allow one of these devices into their home ?
Of course idiots and young hipsters will probably fall for the scam. The first group because it will be advertised at them and they'll not want to feel left out and the second because it's "the new shiny" but they'll soon learn.
I am collecting more fitting expansions for the acronym, my current favorites are:
"Internet of Terror"
"Insecure Online Things"
"Insecure Omnipresent Technology"
Sorry, no IoT devices at all are allowed in my house!! NOT EVER! That cabin in the woods is looking better and better all of the time!!!
Which makes the real point. WTF does my shower/toaster/fridge/oven/heating/etc. etc. *NEED* an internet connection ? It doesn't.
The only things in my home that I might want to have accessible from the internet are some security cameras (obviously using as secure a connection as I can create).
Any other appliance in my home etc has buttons, dials, knobs etc. (or other controls) to operate it.
"But, but your fridge can automatically order more milk/bread/eggs etc. ?" They day I can't manage to do this myself you can shoot me.
"But you can control your heating from you phone ?". There's a control panel and a time for that on the boiler. The day I can't walk to that you can shoot me.
"But you might go on holiday and forget ?" Which will teach me a lesson not to be so damned careless. The day I keep doing this you can shoot me.
IOT = solution in search of a problem.
Commodore's IoT offering is bound to be superior.
That costs money. Car manufacturers can easily add a thousand dollars to the price of a car, so it has 5 years of cellular connectivity. Such a price hike would kill the television market.
If they solve that problem, it's time to glue aluminium foil over the microphone, camera and built-in antenna. Also, who pays the refund when I disagree with the firmware EULA?
I enjoyed my circuits class. I did have to work to wrap my head around the idea of a feedback loop where the output of a circuit can be wired back as an input to the circuit changing the output and also the input changing the output changing the input.... ok make it STOP! ;)
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I want a smart snobby toaster than orders its own fresh bread to toast, because it is too good to toast old bread.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
IOT = solution in search of a problem.
As someone who has investigated this stuff a fair bit, I agree that the connected appliances that are currently being pushed are uninteresting and, frequently, pointless. However, an INTRANET of Things is a whole different proposition, with sensors connected to a central processing device/server that uses the data to make complex decisions and then controls various other devices to effect the required changes. That, to me, starts to look really interesting as the security issues are reduced by being a much more contained system, the owner has total control over what events lead to what actions, etc.
My own particular research interest is in how (whether?) the IoT can aid learning and teaching in universities, so fairly niche, but one that certainly looks like it might have some promise.
yea its probally some shithole chineese holding company like almost all american brands these days
Implicity Dumb Internet of Things.
This is basically the sate of IoT due to an almost total lack of security.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
That's all I care about. All the Asteroids emulators were fine and good, but none of them play exactly like the original vectorscan black-and-white game, running on a 6502 processor and a discrete logic state machine/vector generator. Lots of fun to debug failures on the logic board, and you'd always need to keep a supply of 2N3716 and 2N3792 power transistors on hand to repair the monitors. The heck with the Internet of Things, bring back classic Asteroids!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
That costs money.
The relevant hardware is cheap. Like under $10 cheap. And the data... lots of devices can easily run on under 100MB per YEAR. A data plan negotiated directly by the manufacturer with the carrier "for the life of the device" when looking at thousands or millions of devices would be pretty nominal.
And if the purpose of that data plan is partly to drive ads to the device and marketable user tracking info; it will literally pay for itself.
It's coming.
I always fancied a log cabin near a good trout fishing stream. A garden, a few chooks, maybe a cow for milk, and possibly a small solar setup to run a fridge. Sounds like a nice way to live to me.
Nah, I want Tempest. I loved that game!