Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

I've been thinking about how Amazon develops its ecosystem around its products with a chaotic energy attitude. When Amazon tries to get third parties to use its products, Amazon opens its doors and invites all visitors. When it comes to making new products, Amazon is more likely than anyone else to do what it wants, sometimes even boldly.

Sometimes, this leads to funny Alexa products, such as ringtones that ring at the push of a button, IR blaster and Alexa party games. At other times, it leads to synergies between companies, who are increasingly interested in monitoring.

Before we talk about dark things, let's take a moment to take a look at the latest example of how Amazon will do everything it can to make things work with the ecosystem: create a black box for emitting infrared beams on TV so that you can command them using Alexa. This is the equivalent of the tape adapter we had to use in the past to make the Sony Discmans work in our cars. This is almost the pinnacle of Amazon's chaotic energy.

This IR blaster made my boss Nilay Patel very angry, so I had to give him some space to talk about it in this newsletter. Nelly, take this:

Why can't the TV industry get rid of IR blaster? Infrared controls on televisions, cable boxes, and streaming devices (such as Roku player, Apple TV) are unstable and, worse, unidirectional, so devices like Amazon's new Alexa IR convert Cube have no way of knowing whether the volume up command really works. The best way to solve this problem is the Caavo control center, which uses machine vision to monitor the HDMI output of various devices to check whether the commands are working. This brute force cracking has been going on for a long time!

The infrared is so poor that any product built around the infrared control of the TV system is doomed to failure. The original Google TV failed. The failure of Xbox One TV mode almost caused Xbox One to crash. Logitech Harmony's remote control business is shrinking. Bracken Darrell, Logitech's chief executive, basically told us that he was just waiting for it to disappear. You can't build a product around junk technology like infrared and expect it to succeed.

However, while everyone in the TV and home theater industries knows that infrared is bad, they continue to make infrared products and incorporate them into all products because all potential alternatives are worse. HDMI-CEC is inconsistent or completely inconsistent between devices. It sounds good to control everything through Wi-Fi, but the TV company doesn't. They are good at building web software that is always effective and reliable. Bluetooth: next year will be better.

Unless there is a drastic change, regulators say everything to support CEC, or Apple released a TV that does not provide any IR support, everyone buys one, then the IR will still be the denominator of backup, and the price will be the lowest. How awful.

Amazon is not as troublesome as Nilai. Amazon is focused on a chaotic ecosystem and is willing to release any number of products to fill the gaps that consumers think are needed. Of course, you can buy an integrated Amazon solution if you want. But if you don't, you'll only get a fire-fighting TV stick or fire-fighting TV box, which is both an Alexa speaker and an IR blaster. Or, if you already have an echo speaker, buy an infrared blaster.

Amazon is happy to do all of these things if it means that people will end up using more Alexa.

But I think Amazon's IR Blaster comes from the same place as other problematic projects (such as sidewalks or Ring). Facebook used to have a famous slogan, "act quickly, break the rules". Amazon didn't do it. I think it's more like "doing something to see if someone catches up or doesn't catch up."

This is chaotic energy-or an older meme: this is the attitude of honey badgers.

This attitude has been on my mind since Amazon's hardware event in the fall. It has just announced a new wireless technology called sidewalks. For example, to protect Amazon from public awareness and regulatory attention, let's review it again.

Sidewalks are proposed in the 900MHz band for medium-range (up to half a mile) positioning and communication with Internet of things (or smart home) devices. This will be ultra-low power consumption and cheaper than buying 5G data. Multiple access points will jointly provide data and even locate objects. So far, everything is fine, but in this relatively simple passage, you just read a nightmare about data security and privacy. If Amazon is not careful, it is just waiting for it to happen.

Whether you think Amazon is good, neutral or evil, you can't deny that it is chaotic.

Amazon announced the proposed technology by releasing a dog collar, which will enable you to find high-quality ol'Spot near ring development. What happens half a mile from your home? No problem, as Amazon pointed out in its hardware event "Real time blog" in September:

Just a week ago, for example, Amazon employees took part in a test with friends and family using a 700-ring lighting product that supports 900 MHz connections. Employees can install these devices at home like ordinary customers. In just a few days, these independent outlets can cover most of the Los Angeles basin (one of the largest basins in the Los Angeles basin).

Lighting and other secure low-bandwidth 900 MHz networks support metropolitan areas by land area.

In other words, by installing the cheap and convenient smart home products sold by Amazon, the whole city can unknowingly create a wireless network and find anything in it, such as your good dog or yourself. Liz O'Sullivan (left)

Iz O'Sullivan) alerted this alert and the associated Wi-Fi trace in the Twitter thread at the time, and Charlie Wozer (Charlie Warzel) felt the same concern.

For my part, I asked Amazon to provide as much detail as possible about the specification immediately after the release, with a view to identifying possible privacy and security measures, but there were few. It is (and probably is) a very early specification that is not ready for release at all. Amazon hopes to develop it with partners.

On stage, Amazon hardware chief Dave Limp (Dave Limp) pointed out that the sidewalk would be secure-I was told end-to-end encryption-and that any device on the network could be updated automatically. The last part is critical to the Internet of things, because gadgets at the edge of the network are often the primary target of hackers.

Do something to see if anyone can catch up or catch up.

Imagine that if Apple (or Apple) (or Apple) (born to impersonate), Google just casually came up with a new wireless protocol with the side benefit of providing the company with a map of the location of each connected device. It's going to be a huge story! On the other hand, Amazon's proposal was lost in the confusion of various Alexa gadgets announced that day. (again, Google doesn't need it because it probably already knows where you are.)

Take a step back and think about how cruel the sidewalk is: the network that Amazon owns and operates can eventually cover the city only through customers' natural purchase of its products. Amazon is not worried about recoil at all. (however, this is not to say that Amazon is not worried about privacy or security. Caution and skepticism about Amazon's plan is well-founded, but that doesn't mean we should assume it will do something wrong.)

However, this is part of Amazon's overall attitude towards the ecosystem. It is this attitude that drives it to release dozens of Alexa products every year. Amazon's Works with Alexa plan is still laissez-faire at a time when Google must be cautious about which services can be connected to its smart speakers. It has led to a surge in the number of gadgets used with Echo speakers.

These gadgets are released faster than we adapt to them. Just today, we learned that Amazon is willing to ask for Ring videos for more than a month. If Amazon can use Ring camera data for free, can location data collected from Sidewalk be used for free?

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