The headline editor is absolute gold! More candy for him!
Hells door-bells! Ring pieces paralyzed in horror during Halloween trick-or-treat rush
The so-called smart doorbell maker Ring has just suffered an outage on the one day of the year that its internet-reliant products get the heaviest treatment. Reg reader Aidan Padden alerted us to Tuesday night's downtime in the UK – which came at the height of Halloween door-knocking by trick-or-treaters – although it appears …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 02:13 GMT David 132
Well done, IoT wanksters...
...you've managed to take one of the simplest devices in human history (whether it be a bell on a spring, a buzzer on a simple electrical circuit, or even just a rope tied round a goat's 'nads) and give it a central point of failure. Bravo.
What next? The "iWheel" which gives you up to the second reports on how many times it's rotated, but turns square and refuses to roll if it can't connect to Azure?
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 02:40 GMT Blofeld's Cat
Hmm ...
I too have a somebody-is-at-the-door-demanding-money-with-menaces notification device.
It consists of a piece of specially cast, high mass alloy pivoted about a horizontal axis located at the top edge of the unit, which also attaches it to a mounting plate of the same alloy.
It is operated by manually adding potential energy to the system for a short period of time, and then using gravity to reset it to a state of equilibrium by converting the potential energy firstly to kinetic energy and then pressure waves in the surrounding air.
These pressure waves are perceived by myself as sound, alerting me to the potential visitor, assuming I am sufficiently close to the device.
It's a brass door knocker depicting the head of a lion that is, for some unexplained reason, chewing a teething ring. I like to believe the designer was nominated for a No-bell prize...
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 04:04 GMT the Jim bloke
So
World Wide extends all the way from the American west coast to Europe. Presumably in an easterly direction, otherwise it wont include actual inland USA.
I guess that will be a shock to all those USA-ian "World Champions", but unlikely to ruffle their equanimity for long as they have border protection agencies to keep out the rabble.
For those of us apparently living outside the world, if only we really were outside the reach of culturally inappropriate blatant mass marketing exercises pretending to be seasonal festivals...
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 09:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: So
"if only we really were outside the reach of culturally inappropriate blatant mass marketing exercises pretending to be seasonal festivals..."
Humans are social animals. It seems part of our nature to have festivals where communities dress in a special way, share special food, and have ritual behaviours. The dates are specific -and often linked to particular seasonal changes. At least one of these events seems to specifically be to enjoy a sense of fun and fear.
While the props may be consumer items - the way they are presented by the individual encourages degrees of creativity.
In my experience it is also interesting that it is rare for a child of any age to take more than one chocolate bar from the offered cornucopia.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 10:52 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Re: So
At least one of these events seems to specifically be to enjoy a sense of fun and fear.
Is that the one where we nail a bloke to a tree while eating chocolate eggs?
Halloween and Black Friday Sales are American cultural phenomena I can do with out. At least the latter doesn't come knocking on my door trying to force me to be part of the unwanted experience.
I encourage everyone to remind parents there may be paedos and worse behind every door. That way, when those parents accompany their children on the Night of Extortion, telling Timmy and Tabitha they are victims of commercial exploitation gets to where it needs to go.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 12:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: So
"Halloween and Black Friday Sales are American cultural phenomena I can do with out. At least the latter doesn't come knocking on my door trying to force me to be part of the unwanted experience."
Well they have to make up stuff to cover for no past to look to.
When you only have 250 years of history (after killing the incumbent tribes) and the most exiting bit is a war with your founders country or thanking some of that country's Puritans for getting on board a boat from Plymouth (UK), any chance to seize a day and name it becomes an event
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 13:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: So
" At least the latter doesn't come knocking on my door trying to force me to be part of the unwanted experience."
It is my understanding that in the UK there is a generally accepted rule that houses are marked as "eligible" by exhibiting some external Halloween decoration. It would be unproductive for the kids to try every house in the hope of a response. Out of the forty or so houses in my street only two of us announced we were "eligible". Apart from the various neighbours' children my visitors were all well behaved strangers.
Unusually there were two groups of 13-15 year olds as well as the pre-teen groups with adults. There is no discernible risk for the children that I can see - beyond the rare extremes that can happen anywhere at any time.
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Thursday 2nd November 2017 09:38 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: So
Halloween and Black Friday Sales are American cultural phenomena
Well - strictly speaking, halloween is a Catholic religious festival that has it's origins in the Celtic Samhain (also see the various other end-of-autumn festivals in the Germanic and Latin worldview) celebrating the end of harvest (and the time when surplus livestock would be slaughtered and preserved for winter eating..
But yes, the obnoxious "trick or treat" stuff is strictly American. Who else would glorify extortion and demanding with menaces?
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 07:24 GMT wallaby
Advertise you are out
I fail to see how a device that is advertised on the TV to all and sundry as a tool to answer your doorbell when you are out makes you safer, when the person answering is heard with a number 19 bus thundering past or "all cashiers to the checkouts" booming from an overhead speaker its a dead giveaway you are far from being on the premises.
As an option for lazy arses who cba to get up and answer the door - yes, but trying to tout this as a security feature.
The outage is the biggest fail since that crap actor pretending to be a parcel delivery drone on the ads.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 13:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Advertise you are out
"What made it crap? Did he actually deliver parcels?"
The actor knocked on the door and waited while carefully handling the parcel. No attempt was made to throw it over a fence, onto a roof, squeeze it through the letterbox or pass it to a random stranger when the door was not instantly answered.
Definitely needs to brush up on his method acting.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 07:40 GMT macjules
How to handle terrorists ..
I had several dozen confectionary insurgents attack my residence last night, one of them quite well dressed up as Donald Trump, plus a number of 'Haribo Horrors'. This year we got away with minor financial damage, considering the number of extortion threats.
I was intending at some point to install a door/alarm system, but my guess is that by next year enough 7 year olds will know "Alexa, open the front door' off by heart, or the equivalent for Apple or Google.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 11:10 GMT Muscleguy
Re: I know it's apocryphal ...
Though we should note that it was a pair of Russians who discovered graphene. Using sticky tape.
BTW it would be very hard to do some things in biology such as making transgenic or knockout mice without blutak. Experiments in my PhD which involved a de Fonbrune microforge also included some plasticine rolled into a thin pancake in a Petri dish. No means to plug the filling end of my slow release glass capsules of tetrodotoxin and no live embryo (and probably no live mother either).
My PhD also used heroic quantities of sellotape backed up with masking tape. The mundane can be vital.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 19:35 GMT Cynic_999
Re: I know it's apocryphal ...
"
Pretty much the last thing you want floating around a space station would be a fleck of conductive graphite from a pencil.
"
If any systems on the space station could be adversely affected by conductive dust or flecks floating around in the habitable section, then they are extremely badly designed.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 08:31 GMT Blacklight
Le sigh...
"Let's all think of the clever, and not think of the function...."
Yes, it might put up a bit of cost, but how hard is it to also incorporate a remote sounder, like most wireless doorbells? Or even some local (encrypted) storage, so it can take/store pics of people who did come to the door?
If your internet backhaul is down, isn't the result going to be the same? At least Hue & Lightwave etc continue working with whatever settings they have been given, if the cloud goes down. My home automation system uses a cloud UI to configure, but once it's got it's config. it doesn't need the internet.
Failover modes people, failover modes....
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 09:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Le sigh...
"Failover modes people, failover modes...."
My home system has an infrared beam to detect anyone approaching the door. The wired doorbell is also repeated several times by a 433MHz link throughout the house and garden.
For Halloween these act as separate triggers to start the computer controlled displays with all the classic tropes: thunder and lightning; organ chord; striking clock; heartbeats, chainsaw.
Last night a small child managed to pass through the beam in a way that was dismissed by its algorithm as "noise". They couldn't reach the doorbell push - so they tapped on the door. Luckily there was a manual override button which was used in testing.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 08:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Are all those IoT thermostats knocking about going to go down this winter or is it about to get hot?"
I know someone who has those individual radiator thermostats fitted. They work on batteries. The first one has just failed owing to frequent cycling causing the batteries to last only a couple of weeks. We're heading for a situation in which your central heating can go down due to a server on the other side of the world or a shortage of batteries locally.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 10:02 GMT I ain't Spartacus
tiggity,
Gas central heating of most types requires electricity. The controls are electric, and more importantly, so are the circulating pumps.
Now your stored hot water will work without (until it runs out), so long as there's electricity for the water company to keep pumping mains water at you. There, you do have an advantage over a combi-boiler, which heats the water as you use it.
Although thinking about it, the UK doesn't force combi-boilers on anyone - do you actually mean condensing boilers?
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 10:12 GMT GruntyMcPugh
"but if electricity fails then the gas heating system will not work"
Indeed, so being the kind of self reliant type I am, I have a couple of log burners, one in the front room, and one in the lounge, and they keep those rooms toasty, and the rest of the house bearable. I've only had to rely on them solely once, when the old boiler blew a control board.
I'm so not on board with the IoT for providing basic needs, such as warmth. Worst case scenario, and there's a power cut, and I have no coal, or logs (doubtful, as I have two large bins for coal that usually last me through winter, and several log stores) I have a large axe, and a local park where there are trees (and usually enough fallen wood to collect, before I'd have to start felling anything)
Hell, I went to see Ray Mears last night, he was demonstrating fire lighting techniques adventurers have used for centuries, but we've abandoned the 'KISS' principle and now have made some simple things excessively complicated.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 13:03 GMT Martin 66
The real thing to worry about is not electricity not being available, its gas. We still have many gas fired power stations, as well as all most of our central heating being based on gas. And the single pipeline to Europe, is in Ukraine and at Russia's mercy......
We also only have about a week's supply stored, so any gas outage during winter means we wouldn't last very long indeed, esp if people started trying to use electric heaters instead.
Better chop some wood, for the burner.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 14:09 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Martin 66,
Your info on UK gas supplies is completely wrong. I did a quick bit of googling to get some figures, and this looks like a decent link.
So firstly we have over 3 months of stored gas at the beginning of the winter drawdown period, but that storage can only be withdrawn at a certain rate - as it's a long term store. So I don't know what they've got in the way of emergency storage - but the on demand short term storage seems to have about 10% of the capacity of that one, so I'd imagine that's where your week's capacity figure comes from.
However, we draw 40% of our gas supply from the UK bit of the North Sea. And that's from multiple platforms and pipelines, which makes it pretty robust.
The linked page doesn't show it, but iirc our next biggest source of supply is Norway's bit of the North Sea.
We then have several LNG terminals in the UK and so are able to buy liquefied gas from the US and Qatar, amongst other places. This can obviously be bought at short notice should we suffer a supply interruption.
As I remember Russian gas via Europe is probably the smallest component of our supply mix. You are correct that most of this comes from Russia, although there are supplies coming in from Libya as well I think. Also there are 2 main Russian pipelines - as there's Nordstream through the Baltic which the Germans and Russians built in order to be able to bypass Ukrainian supplies in case of disputes.
It also bypassed our allies in Eastern Europe, but belatedly the Germans showed concern about this, and the EU's common energy policy means it's now connected up in a grid so that supply can be shuffled around to help those countries closest to Russian gas - who naturally are most reliant on it.
Because of Russia's unreliability Europe is also investing in more LNG capacity, so that gas can be bought into this network, if required. Many other countries have higher stocks than us, partly because it makes more sense to have smaller capacity pipelines and store locally, but also because they don't produce 40% of their demand from domestic sources.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 13:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
"My back up is a gas powered heater in the garage. I also have a plethora of torches and lanterns.
Always be prepared I say."
Clearly from the UK
Otherwise the list would also include
10 assault rifles,
10 handguns,
10,000 rounds of ammunition
10 crossbows
5 years worth of tinned food.
Water recycling units
A fully equipped bunker.......
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 14:18 GMT GruntyMcPugh
Re: torches and lanterns.
.. I've been looking at old fashioned storm lanterns, which are a snip at about four quid each on Ebay. Just need a decent bulk source of non-smelly lamp oil. Or is paraffin OK to use indoors nowadays? I remember my granddad had a paraffin heater to stop his greenhouse getting frost, and it was a bit smelly.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 13:06 GMT sabba
Getting a metal box to travel from A to B makes sense since it (a) enables you to travel faster/farther, and (b) allows you to carry a greater payload. Using a device to enable you to answer the door when you are not there seems a little like a solution looking for a problem. Assuming it's a miscreant. What next? Ok, it can take a photo but that's the domain of a security system (I have no problem with that) but why link it to your doorbell? KISS
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 09:44 GMT 0laf
Really it's just not a good idea to put the internet on everything.
I love bacon but it doesn't go with absolutely everything, a fruit trifle is nice as it is it is not improved with bacon.
Many things are not improved with the internet. Especially if they can be bricked like this.
A big brass/iron door knocker works very well without the internet. If you want an IP camera with that fair enough. If the camera goes down the big hunk of metal will continue to function.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 10:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
"a fruit trifle is nice as it is it is not improved with bacon."
A sprinkling of crunchy smoked bacon "crumbs" on top would not be an unreasonable combination of textures and flavours.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 16:26 GMT Mark 85
Why does a doorbell have to be internet enabled. What kind of tomfuckery is that.
It serves two purposes as near as I can figure out. 1) The owner of one feel "cool" and "high tech"... probably wears a man bun. 2) Profit for the manufacturer and stockholders. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which is the more important purpose.
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 10:18 GMT John Smith 19
Read the story and thought...
Hahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
But what does this teach us.
People use the the internet like a utility with 99.999% availability. It's not.
Server based systems are complex and need lots of capacity testing for edge events (But in principal high doorbell use during all public holidays celebrated in many countries at once is predictable).
Failover modes. Internet dies. Internet or servers die system runs straight and level (probably going to be needed as more companies go belly up and the hardware is bricked).
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 10:40 GMT AustinTX
Internet Of Spying Devices
See, I understand the part where Ring and other IoT device hawkers spy on their customers to produce statistics to sell to other, more shadowy players.
What I don't abide in is how they lobotomized their devices so thoroughly that they don't merely send stats from the devices - the devices have to send out a signal and receive instructions from the server on how to ring the bell. That's pathetic!
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 13:56 GMT Chris King
I can't believe we've got this many comments on this...
...without someone making the obvious "unintentional DDoS [1]* attack" comment.
[1] In this case DDoS = Distributed Denial of Sweeties
Mine's the one with the big bag of Haribo Sugar-free Gummy Bears, for the teenagers demanding confectionery with menaces. The ones forged in the fires of Hell, which will turn your digestive system into a sulphurous pit with random lava-hot eruptions...
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 16:22 GMT Mark 85
Halloween and door bells...
So the door bell died. Meh...no loss on Halloween. Around here, the little beggers pound on the door and scream "trick or treak" at the top of their lungs and ignore the door bell.
Then again, I have a mouthy, barky, critter who takes great pride in letting us know if any even approaches the front door. Now that I think about... why do I even have a door bell?
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 20:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Halloween and door bells...
Around here we got a succession of nice, polite little children in groups with mummies watching from a safe distance.
In other news, house prices here went up over 14% last year.
Burglar alarms? We watch out for our neighbours.
I'm not boasting, just very aware that we are rapidly becoming two interleaved countries. And it's going to get worse.
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Thursday 2nd November 2017 10:10 GMT DropBear
Re: Halloween and door bells...
"Around here we got a succession of nice, polite little children in groups with mummies watching from a safe distance."
Why should zombies and vampires get all the candy?!? I find this completely arbitrary discrimination against mummy costumes thoroughly disturbing!
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Wednesday 1st November 2017 19:52 GMT Cynic_999
Technology is de-improving
Well over a decade ago I bought a webcam. It streamed directly to the remote viewer without passing through any intermediate server. Which seems to me to be the most sensible way of achieving the objective in any application where you are not expecting more than 1 or 2 people to need to view the output at the same time.