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posted by martyb on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-an-eye-on-things dept.

Christophe Deschamps was watching a basketball game with his wife and three children when he received an alert on his smartphone.

The home security system told him something was wrong, so he quickly accessed the video feed on his phone.

"I could see smoke," he says. Their home, in the Wallonia region of southern Belgium, was on fire.

The family's thoughts immediately turned to their two Bernese Mountain dogs - Lisbonne and Hawaii - locked in the garage. A terrible family tragedy was threatening to unfold.

The video images now showed the smoke getting thicker and brightness coming from flames off-camera.

The fire alarm had already alerted the firefighters, so the Deschamps family rushed home as quickly as they could.
...
Fortunately, Lisbonne and Hawaii were saved with just 20cm of air left to breathe above the floor of the smoke-filled garage. But the fire damage to the house took six months to repair.

The dogs' lucky escape was due to the indoor security camera Christophe had installed.

So, the Internet of Things (IoT) is really a good thing.


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  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:15PM

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:15PM (#506875)

    Why couldn't he just open the garage door with from his smartphone?

    Because his cloud service subscription did not activate that tier of functionality. And even if it had, he would have spent half an hour digging through the anti-friendly user interface that was designed explicitly to mine usage data from him, and it would have lagged as all of that data got sent back to China/India and new advertising and updates got uploaded, and an AI automatically determines if this is the optimal action. The error message would be along the lines of "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

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