IoT news of the week for July 1, 2022

Signify exec says Hue bulbs won’t have Thread: This entire article featuring Hue’s George Yianni discussing plans for the upcoming Matter home interoperability standard is worth a read, but the most surprising tidbit was how Hue thinks about Thread. Yianni says that Hue plans to stick to Zigbee for its bulbs because it’s a known technology. This means we shouldn’t expect Thread bulbs from Hue anytime soon if ever. That’s mildly surprising, but I do know there are concerns among manufacturers about Thread at scale. Companies and The Thread Group are still working on Thread, so a lack of faith isn’t crazy surprising. All in, the article paints a clear picture of a Signify’s plans for Hue in a world where connected light bulbs become commoditized. (Matter Smarthome)

Is this an IoT security story? I really struggle with the idea that routers are an IoT device (although I also didn’t think of networked security cameras and printers as IoT devices for a long time, either). But if you do think of them as IoT products, it’s worth noting that a new and sophisticated hack has surfaced that attacks home and SOHO routers. Researchers have found more than 80 affected routers. The attacks are also pretty sophisticated with malware infecting the routers and then additional malware attacking the devices attached to that router using DNS highjacking to download the malware. (Ars Technica)

I am so ready for trash-sorting robots: Your vision of the future may include a personal jet pack, but I’ll recognize that I’m living in Tomorrowland when robots can help me figure out which plastics can go in the recycling bin and which cannot. That’s why I was so excited to read about startups that are close to cracking the code on getting robots smart enough to sort recycling, and hopefully help boost recycling rates. This is a use for AI that I can get behind. (IEEE Spectrum)

Cameras are getting crazy small, and we’re really not ready for it: Pete Warden, a former Google engineer and one of the folks behind the TinyML movement, has written about several examples of very tiny cameras developed by researchers. One fits on the tip of a finger! From an innovation point of view, these are awesome, but from a privacy point of view we should probably talk about rules on disclosing cameras and ways to make them evident to people who are being recorded. (Pete Warden)

We’ll call this the IoT use case of the week: We don’t have a regular feature touting different use cases for IoT, but I had to draw your attention to this one where Vodafone has helped Hugh Lowe Farms to deliver 1.5 million strawberries to the Wimbledon tennis tournament. The use case sells Vodafone’s MYFARMWEB data management platform that includes sensors for measuring soil conditions, weather, and the conditions of the strawberries as they are shipped from the farm to the kitchens serving the tennis tournament. Since I’m currently trying to grow my own strawberries during a very rough season in the Pacific Northwest, I only wish I could have a sophisticated system in place to generate more sunshine and keep the squirrels away. (IoT Enterprise Insights)

Listen to your Alexa? I’ve complained a lot about how annoying I find Alexa’s unprompted suggestions after I ask it to set an alarm or tell me the weather, but I have to admire this writer who tried everything Alexa prompted her to do. During the day she listens to Alexa tell her jokes, suggest recipes for vegan salsa, and play country music. Apparently she’s one of the 40% of people who are unbothered by Alexa’s many suggestions. She also shows that Alexa really doesn’t have much of a clue about what she would like. (Digital Trends)

Open source Alexa and Siri has a new version out: Mycroft AI, a company building a voice recognition engine that is open source and privacy centric because it doesn’t send data to the cloud, has announced a version 3.0 of its software. Mycroft’s Mimic 3 text-to-speech software component adds more languages and completely offline capability. Mimic 3 is part of the company’s vision to deliver privacy-first AI voice assistants. Mycroft AI will not store data on a cloud or sell it to third parties. (Mycroft AI)