Securing the Internet of Things - or how light bulbs can spy on you

Re: Who let the data out?

We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.

Re: Who let the data out about Hot AIgents?

Let Internet Brains take the Strain, Pete 2. IT can Handle IT with Virtual Machine Activation Codes to Bots in LOVE's Live Operational Virtual Environments for Greater Games Plays with Pandora's Toys for Surrender to Temptation and a Resultant Alternative Perspective ...... More Comely Insatiably Satisfying View.

Crikey, I hope El Regers are thinking that it's gone all 50 Shades of Black for the Brilliance of Light Edutainment Being.

The Dark Side too has ITs Master Brilliants. Don't Forget to Remember Current Presents for Future Past Reconstruction and Destruction in History WiFied Clean and Refreshed with New Archives with Sublime Instruction Sets for Virtual Tablets of Stone from Global Operating Device Stores with Superb Diagnostic LogIC Returning Output to Feedback for Input to Output as Novel Source of CodeX-XSSXXXX Standard.

And their shenanigans are great fun ... and most reassuringly disorderly:-) .... courtesy of vine, grain and hop invariably? :-)

Re: Who let the data out?

A connected fridge, microwave or light bulb?

Gimmicks that suck fools in..

Re: No

So you can pay premium rate for your electrciity rather than economy7 or economy-super where you let the power company turn down your AC at certain times in return for a 50% discount

Re: Internet of Fail?

I like the idea of everything connected

Why? That's a sincere question - like many of the other commentators, I can't imagine having any use for most of what's being touted here.

I don't want it to become a problem because the logic circuit in my dryer failed or a previously unknown programming error 'bricks' my dryer

Already an issue with many appliances, even without Internet connection. I've replaced logic boards in my washer three times (all under warrantee, so the vendor's more than lost their profit on the unit). It's a lousy design[1], but it's also a common one - the manufacturer of this washer OEMs to several of the major US brands, and apparently to several European ones as well.

(If I lived alone I'd have bought a cheap washer, but I'm not the one who does the laundry around here.)

[1] The washer has three logic boards with custom ASICs. The boards cost around $200-$300 each if you buy them through the appliance vendor's parts division; you can get them directly from the manufacturer for about half that. Dispensing with the unnecessary electronic controls would get rid of one board. Alternatively, they could use an off-the-shelf fanless Linux box connected to a single board with a USB adapter, some A/D logic, and a handful of relays to control everything.

No, but it does raise my adrenaline levels to the point I want to puke.

Unless that's what you mean?

Re: existential fear?

No, but then I'm one of those bat-sh*t crazy 'Merkins you lot are always complaining about. I find myself repressing my natural instinct to use a high speed lead injection to remove the demon from the gene pool.

Didn't you know? It's actually Swiss farmers who are driving all this stuff. IPv6 wouldn't have happened without their reps on the IETF...

@Skelband

"It needs more cowbell!"*-Christopher Walkin

Everything is improved with more cowbell!

*google youtube, it's an hilarious SNL skit!

Re: Hacking the internet of things

Yet the meter, with a tamper seal, that can be inspected by the electricity company, still reads >9000. So, where's all that weed you're growing?

but but ...

How hard is it to change suppliers anyway? Read meter. Phone new company. Say "I want to switch". Most will sort out the rest for you.

It takes all of about 5 minutes. The main issue is that they are all a bunch of profiteering bastards and awfully close to cartel pricing (i.e. once one jumps they all put up their prices within a week).

But still not of that justifies a many 100 £££ smart meter which will probably need replacing every 3 years once the security bugs start rolling in.

@Dodgy Geezer

Not entirely true. Electric companies had differential rates for power way at least as far back as the 1970s. My dad was no tree hugger, but we switched to it because it saved money. Off peak costs were about 1/3 of on peak, and we could do things like laundry in the off hours. He even put the electric water heater on a timer and insulated it, then timed it so it would be on during the off peak time and it would hold long enough to get us to the next off peak. On the rate occasion we needed to, we just went in the basement and flipped the heater back on.

These days, yes, it is mostly tree-huggers shaking down people.

Re: ahem

Sorry ? Are you suggesting that the next washing machine I buy I have to pay for a 3/4G phone line as well ?

That's going to float as well as a brick in the current market for sure.

Re: Perhaps nothing

Nah. I worked for an outfit that was trying to hawk something like this only under the home-owner's control instead of industry. Some of it was kind of cool, but none of it was the killer-app/I-gotta-have-this-for functionality thing that actually moves techies. Especially after you saw the price tag our company would have put on it. They are of course long bankrupt.

Re: Where did we lose it?

Deregulation. There was a point - my guess would be some point in the mid to late 90s - where most of the genuinely 'no brainer' obstructive red tape had been cut and governments started to eat slowly but surely into the 'here be unintended consequences' stuff. Not one thing, but lots of little bits here and there that became a mindset more than anything else, and left us in the uk with a procession of regulators who are big on PR (witness Jon Snow's standup interview with an 'on message' bloodless corpse at the start of the horsemeat scandal), but very small on resources, legal firepower, and perhaps most importantly, the willpower or interest to use what they have - at best they can be described as showing a smug, resolute disinterest in anything beyond the pay packet, and an unfounded and unnatural belief in markets.

The rest of us have collectively sat around imagining (hoping) that somewhere under the hood our official bodies still have something of the clout they had twenty years earlier, and not quite realising the extent to which the entire thing has been privatised and outsourced to our brilliant thinkers in business, so exalted they now manage social change as well as their now untouchable enterprises. Anyone gritty enough to stand up and say something has been either ridiculed, marginalised, ignored or worn down by self serving and apparently incontrovertible arguments by capitalism's government apologists till they see the sheer fruitlessness of wasting breath. Even Denis Skinner seems to have run out of steam.

I reckon we can look forward to a century at least as murderous, repressive and lacking in progress or democracy as the hot/cold war dominated twentieth was, only better decorated.