Smart Beds Malfunctioned During AWS Outage (msn.com) 105
Early Monday, an Amazon Web Services outage disrupted banks, games, and Peloton classes. Eight Sleep customers faced a different problem. Their internet-enabled mattresses malfunctioned. People woke to beds locked in upright positions, excessive heat, flashing lights, and unexpected alarms. Matteo Franceschetti, the company's chief executive, apologized and said engineers were building an outage-proof mode. By Monday evening, all devices functioned again, though some experienced data processing delays. The mattresses adjust temperature between 55 and 110 degrees and elevate bodies into different positions. They activate soundscapes and vibrational alarms. The advanced models cost over $5,000. A yearly subscription of $199 to $399 is required for temperature controls.
What am I getting for $5K? (Score:4, Informative)
For $5,000, I'd expect to have working temp controls. Otherwise, I may as well get some cheaper mattress.
I'm not one of you "fuck subscriptions" people, but in this case, honestly, what is the $5K buying? A subscription for temp controls might be reasonable if you're not already paying a ridiculous price for the product. If you're paying $5K for a mattress, it better be feature complete.
Re:What am I getting for $5K? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had to double check to make sure it wasn't April 1st.
Seriously, WTF would anyone need a bed hooked to the fucking internet?!?!?
Re:What am I getting for $5K? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: What am I getting for $5K? (Score:3)
What I would like to know what those biometrics are and how the company monetises them.
Remember the guy who hooked up his friend's honeymoon bed to Twitter as a joke?
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Well as for what they are - sleep habits, heart rates, breathing.
How they monetize them? Most likely they just sell subscriptions to users to show reports on their data
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They could, but I'm not sure how much profit there is to make out of that
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Looking for health patterns that drug makers could use to target you for a sales pitch.
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For free? You're paying a yearly subscription for the privilege to send your data. The servers you didn't ask for won't pay for themselves you know! (the money from them selling the data to 3rd parties is already earmarked to pay for Ferraris and yachts)
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Yep. Imagine signing up to pay someone a subscription fee that you can get a night's sleep.
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Re:What am I getting for $5K? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What am I getting for $5K? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, WTF would anyone need a bed hooked to the fucking internet?!?!?
See also refrigerators and Eskimos. Refrigerators and Eskimos, my friend.
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Who's hooking Eskimos up to the internet? And does it require a subscription, too?
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A reference to selling useless products to people.
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Refrigerators and Eskimos, my friend.
How else are Eskimos supposed to keep their food warm?
Re: What am I getting for $5K? (Score:3)
How about a temp regulating bed so in the winter it is a nice warm and on those extra hot summer nights it is nice and cool.
They need multiple sensors and such to regulate the beds temp vs your bed heat at the time.
What they donâ(TM)t need is an internet connection?
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Hell my first thought was "SMART BED....is this really a thing?"
I had to double check to make sure it wasn't April 1st.
Seriously, WTF would anyone need a bed hooked to the fucking internet?!?!?
The same people who use smart watches to keep track of steps, sleep, and other fitness indicators. Beds that adjust temperature and other factors, and analyze sleep patterns and quality, can be very useful and valuable.
The problem / silliness isn't that the bed is "smart". The bullshit factor in this proposition is that those useful features and functions aren't local to the bed - they're in the hands of the gatekeepers at the other end of an internet connection. Rule Number One: if a feature or function do
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That's a good point - thanks. Both my wife and her mother have such watches, and it's good to know that they can get help in situations when they're unable to call for it.
I just wish there were smart watches whose price was whatever you paid for it, not that plus 24/7 privacy invasion. Having a watch that calls for assistance when you need it is great. Having one that's reporting on your movements all the time, whether you need help or not, isn't so great.
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Same reason why someone would need a toothbrush with Bluetooth connection :-)
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If I'm paying $5000 for a mattress, it had better do a lot more than that.
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Re:What am I getting for $5K? (Score:4, Funny)
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Fur $5k I expect a robot for sex.
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I guess you are not stupid enough to fall for this scam. Makes you part of a minority, apparently. Will have been noted in some database somewhere now and you know what happens to minorities in fascism... (Yes, I am in there as well. I know.)
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I agree. The functions provided by this bed do not require internet connectivity AT ALL, let alone some ridiculous cloud based architecture. $5000 is enough to include a $200 miniPC to monitor temp and positional sensors.
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A subscription enables the company to collect data on you and enshitify your life.
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A subscription for temp controls might be reasonable if you're not already paying a ridiculous price for the product. If you're paying $5K for a mattress, it better be feature complete.
I'm pretty sure that it IS feature complete. It seems unlikely that the Web-based controls and capabilities are NOT among the advertised features. Too bad for people who didn't grasp the implications of "Web-based". Perhaps now they finally have a fucking clue.
I think even the folks who signed on for Alexa understand that problems with Web infrastructure will cause the nosy bitch to malfunction or behave strangely. Why in hell would anyone imagine that their Amazon-controlled bed wouldn't be subject to the
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Scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scam (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm no control-systems engineer, but I provide support to those who are in that I work with device access rules and have had to account for BACnet traffic. I won't say that it's always fun doing things locally, but when the HVAC technicians have to go visit sites to try to fix Trane Ensemble controllers it's nice when they don't have to call Trane's support hotline for every stinkin' little thing.
I just wish that they'd call my team when they're swapping them out, when they put the new one up without telli
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I'm sure it was built exactly to spec by the offshore development team.
Re: Scam (Score:4, Interesting)
How is this dumb engineering if the product made the company a lot of money?
Re:Scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Even worse, they have a local control loop, but they deliberately cripple it.
If the bed is 'on' (which is only allowed through their cloud connection), then you can locally adjust things fine. However it will refuse to do this if the internet hasn't approved the device to operate locally.
This 'enhancement' was added after people demanded local remote or buttons or *anything*. They implemented an earbud-style tap side of bed N number of times for adjusting temp or dismissing alarm.
So they know precisely what they are doing, it's not dumb engineering, it's malicious engineering.
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Dumb requirements, really, because an app on your phone and local networks are fine. But likely some sales droid or marketing droid required the ability to control your bed anywhere in the world - like you can be at work and the
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Not dumb - deliberate (Score:4)
Its been engineered deliberately so it won't work without a net connection so they can charge a subscription model and possibly get user sleep data too.
The only dumb bit is on the part of the morons who parted with 4 figure sums to buy this thing from these grifters in the first place.
Re: Not dumb - deliberate (Score:2)
Re:Scam (Score:5, Funny)
Also, the failure mode should probably be "bed" and not 110 degrees and upright.
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That's why they put MBA's in charge of these things. For them "reliability" means that the revenue keeps rolling in. A minor blip like this costs them a mere press release, and is unlikely to dissuade anyone from buying one or renewing their subscription.
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Re: Scam (Score:2)
However.. If you want to get as much biometric data as possible from your victims eeh labrats eeh customers, then this is a fantastic system design!
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but the control loop needs to be local. This is just dumb engineering.
That entirely depends on the goals of management. If management wanted their beds completely useless without a subscription, then they were engineered perfectly from the point of view of management.
Software Engineering? (Score:4)
So the code was written by people who aren't familiar with the idea of "fail-safe"?
I might have gone to school for software engineering but I never equated it with building a bridge at 4000' over a canyon. Those are different things.
But none of my classmates would have thought about building a stack that fails into random or dangerous conditions. We always built from the ground up and verified states as new functionality was added with test evaluation of the possible error states.
And those classes were in C++89 without the advantages of proper exception handling like Java or Python provide.
I think if I were in the market for a $5000 IoT mattress I'd want to see something like a UL label on it. I guess the hardware guys put in a thermal switch so the heating elements shut off at 110*F? Thank goodness a runaway fire wasn't a failure mode.
I wouldn't personally ever spend that kind of money on something like that but if I were rich and disabled maybe there would be use cases.
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People actually forgot what failsafe means. It's not just contingencies within your code. It's expecting failure, and making sure that any possible failure has a safe result.
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I did software QA testing around 25 years ago. There were around eight developers per one QA tester at this particular small company.
For whatever reason they decided to not take the BSD-licensed POP3 and SMTP implementations and instead rolled their own. I was able to break the POP3 daemon by sending legitimate commands from stale RFCs to it because the implementer wrote to exact current RFC only. He got mad when I demonstrated this because "it isn't part of RFC!" I retorted, "I don't care if it's part
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The problem is that this attitude has infected mainstream engineering too.
Re: Software Engineering? (Score:2)
Sounds like the matress was made by software guys. They used a raspberry pi for the mattress, didn't they?
Re:Software Engineering? (Score:5, Informative)
The code was written toward the purpose of forcing the users into a monthly subscription.
The goal was not to deliver the best user experience. To the extent they have tried to accommodate demands for local control, they have predicated it on having relatively recently been 'blessed' to let the user do that within the last few hours. That takes explicit effort to implement a local control loop and make sure it gets approval.
My wife insisted on it and we bought one when they were getting started and relatively cheap and the subscription was not yet required. We've been grandfathered in so we don't pay the subscription, and thanks to the leaks we have been upgraded to the latest model, so I have familiarity.
They are a shit company with a decent hardware design (now) that stops short of being good all around precisely to gouge users.
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Are you sure the license agreement doesn't give them the "right" to un-grandfather your device at any time? Promises and agreements mean nothing these days.
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Oh, I'm fully aware that it might cut it off, and then I'll use the FreeSleep project or, failing that, the mod where someone replaced the base with another temperature controller.
You deserve it (Score:3)
If you're stupid enough to buy a bed that goes berserk when the Net goes down then you deserve to wake up vertical and sweating!
Why on earth would such a contraption require cloud-based support for its core functionality?
This subscription-based model has gone way too far when, if the internet goes down or you don't pay your subscription, you can't even get a good night's sleep.
Smart beds? (Score:2)
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IIRC, yesterday there was an internet connected toilet that took pix.
Someone else's computer (Score:5, Insightful)
If "the cloud" is readily substituted as "someone else's computer", then it's no surprise that when your in-home consumer appliance malfunctions when the cloud someone else's computer that 'your' appliance relies upon crashes, is hacked, or becomes unreachable.
I'm tired of things being 'cloud' that don't need to be cloud. To be honest I wasn't even particularly happy with local devices using smartphones instead of their own controls, but I was sort of willing to tolerate it if the connectivity between said thing and the phone was via bluetooth pairing and the essential functions of the device (on, off, power levels, timers) could still be controlled with whatever meager interface was on the panel of the thing. As an example we have a humidifier that can be controlled by smartphone, but really the only additional feature gained from doing this is delayed-activation to start it operating, and the module is optional and is inserted by the owner into an SD-slot.
We don't need beds, refrigerators, microwaves, ranges, or even things like TVs, doorbell cameras, HVAC controls, and a whole slew of other devices to be 'cloud' for their basic functions. Those should always be local, they should always be controllable directly through the systems themselves without a phone, without a 3rd-party tablet. Sure, perhaps they have to connect to services on the Internet for things like content retrieval, the ability to do remote administration, the ability to use extended features like remote access to camera feeds or bidirectional audio, but that local control should always be present. A bed does not need to go to 'the cloud' just to be a bed, and if it's a fancy bed with a bunch of features there still should be some basic controls on the thing.
I would encourage everyone to stop buying this crap if they don't REALLY need it, and if they need some kind of enhanced capability like for a damn camera-doorbell, pick the one that has the least dependence on someone else's computer.
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I like this one best: "A distributed system is a system where I cannot get work done because a machine I have never heard of is down." Apparently said by Leslie Lamport ca. 1990. Current s fuck. And people remain stupid.
Seems obvious. (Score:2)
Your smart bed knows when you're fucking.
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Your smart bed knows when you're fucking.
You do realize that you've opened yourself up to a response along the lines of, "then your smart bed has never caught you in the act."
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Wow... This thing seems almost as obtrusive as that new smart toilet with a camera under the lid that analyzes your poo for health monitoring. Almost.
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So do my neighbors.
Everything old is new again (Score:5, Informative)
Much like tech companies constantly re-invent things like "a bus" here they decided to re-invent The Craftmatic adjustable bed [youtube.com] a staple of TV commercials growing up.
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Don't get me wrong, that bed looks comfy, I'd sleep in it but for $5k I could just as easily get a Heavenly Bed [marriott.com]
Why does bed controls have to leave the LAN? (Score:3)
I mean, is there a reason for you to adjust your bed when you're away from home?
Something like Bluetooth comms with the bed to allow smartphone apps to control the bed sound better suited. Plus there should always be local controls, so on comm failure, you can still have some control of the bed.
But then I read this part:
So you pay $5000 for a bed and you still don't own it.
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My guess is that this started when they sat down in-committee (not a technical committee, mind you) and thought of ways to control their bed without having to spend the money on a full-featured control panel as part of the bed itself. They settled on the smartphone and decided that it thus had to have cloud connectivity, particularly when it was pointed out that if it uses the cloud, then they can charge for the features as a service instead.
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They have local controls on most recent models, *however* the controls will deactivate unless the cloud control has blessed the user in the last 24 hours. Before getting going, they'll talk to local phones without internet, but *only* for the end of getting the WIFI set up. They know exactly how to make local phone control work.
It was never about cost savings, it was always about a path to forced recurring revenue. They opened with early adopters not having to pay subscription fee, but still forcing them
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Something like Bluetooth comms with the bed to allow smartphone apps to control the bed sound better suited.
I'd rather just have buttons.
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I saw this wondering why bed controls leave the LAN?
What is a LAN? You know of course, but the average joe doesn't. They aren't interested in hearing why your shit product seemingly works sometimes and doesn't work other times or that it's related to your phone wifi being on or off at any given time.
The reason we leave the LAN is because of US. You and me. The technical morons who said we don't need IPv6, we can just NAT the NAT NAT and NAT our way through breaking end-to-end connectivity in the world and thus forcing some intermediary to assist us in making
Irrelevant (Score:5, Funny)
No problem (Score:2)
"A yearly subscription of $199 to $399 is required for temperature controls."
It's one day, so they'll get a 1-1.5$ refund.
Smart Bed? (Score:2)
A bed needs to do very few things, even in the exceptional cases of folks who can't sleep in a fully horizontal position.
1. Provide support for the body while laying down.
2. Perhaps adjust to various upright, legs up, head up, or other odd positions for certain individuals.
3. Provide heat or cooling for those who need specific temperatures to support their best sleep.
Anybody that feel for the scam of needing a "smart" bed to accomplish any of this shit is frankly getting what they deserve when the bed fre
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Biggest problem is a company like eight sleep has the marketing. So if someone really wants a temperature controlled bed, it's hard to know what a credibly good one is. I *think* Chilipad is a good one, but it's a pretty pricey thing to evaluate and thanks to internet-everything, it's not like you can see for yourself.
But yeah, Eight sleep deserves every amount of bad press they can get for being such a douche company.
Just when you think... (Score:2)
Just when you think you have seen the ultimate depths of human stupidity... something comes along proving you wrong.
Gee, pay $199 to $399/year for the privilege of accessing temperature controls. Or buy a $79 non-Internet-connected electric blanket. Hmm... tough choice...
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It is really fascinating. I am coming around to the insight that the average person literally (!) understands nothing.
Cost Doesn't Matter (Score:2)
Hmm... tough choice...
Depends on whether money matters. I think people ignore the reality that the market for stuff like this is largely driven by people who are not in the least price conscious. The rich are a lucrative market for obvious reasons. But you need to give them a reason, no matter how insignificant, to spend their money.
Geez (Score:3)
What happens when they reboot their home router or turn off the wifi at night?
Seems like there is something more to this story.
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Seems like there is something more to this story.
A story about one very specific product doesn't seem like there's much more to this. It just sounds like a company has some really frigging incompetent engineers. Especially given they flat out said they'll fix it - basically admitting guilt for a shit design.
Ooops, consumers dumb. News at 11. (Score:2)
I guess some people never have understood what the cloud is.
Pay to opt-out coming (Score:2)
So far this is only affecting fools who pay up for such ridiculous features. The real problem comes when you have to pay to not have the thing you purchased controlled from afar.
Soundscapes? (Score:3)
So at no point in the future will your internet-connected bed with built-in speakers start playing subliminal advertising messages when it detects you're most susceptible?
No, I'm sure that's never going to happen, and never, ever crossed the minds of the maker.
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comfy (Score:2)
Eight Sleep is a truly horrible product (Score:2)
I bought one of their mattress toppers for Burning Man figuring that it's much more efficient to chill a bed than chill a space. However, setting the thing up required an internet connection. By using my phone as a hotspot, I was just barely able to bridge the gap so the mattress would connect to the internet. But then it also required a Bluetooth connection from the same phone to the bed, to actually turn it on, and the bridging-the-gap location was just outside Bluetooth range. What a completely frustrati
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Another reason not to buy IoT crap... (Score:2)
Nothing I own requires any kind of server to actually function and the only things I own that even have a network connection are a low-end Android phone, a Windows PC and my router and FTTC modem.
I don't need fancy crap like an internet connected fridge or mattress or TV set (my TV is a 32" Samsung dumb TV that I only use for watching OTA TV)
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Same, except Linux laptop and media center PC.
Actually, the best fridges are the "white boxes" designed for scumlords who replace their tenants' appliances every 25 years. I'm not joking in any way, either.
This is why we need... (Score:2)
"People woke to beds locked in upright positions, excessive heat, flashing lights, and unexpected alarms."
This shit is gonna kill someone if companies are allowed to build software products any fucking way they want.
We have building codes, fire codes, electrical codes, to protect people from faulty products. We need a software building code to protect people from software.
Cloud or PC (Score:2)
Y2K all over again (Score:2)
Remember how hospital beds were going to fold up with patients inside when the Y2K apocalypse hit?
Maybe the doomsayers were just a few years too early.
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Y2K came 25 years too early.
IoT == Internet of Trash (Score:2)
EOM