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The Internet of Broken Things (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: The Internet of Things is all the hype these days. On one side we have companies clamoring to sell you Internet-Connected-everything to replace all of the stuff you already have that is now considered "dumb." On the other side are security researchers screaming that we're installing remote access with little thought about securing it properly. The truth is a little of both is happening, and that this isn't a new thing. It's been around for years in industry, the new part is that it's much wider spread and much closer to your life. Al Williams walks through some real examples of the unintended consequences of IoT, including his experiences building and deploying devices, and some recent IoT gaffs like the NEST firmware upgrade that had some users waking up to an icy-cold home.
Well, that and the weekly stories we see which demonstrates just how terrible the security of this crap really is. It's not like it's a hypothetical case researchers are warning us about.
Those of us who have been around long enough know damned well not to take a day-one update, because companies have become lazy and sloppy and don't find out what they've missed until some poor schmuck has it go wrong.
And now we're supposed to trust a vendor to push out an update to the things which run our homes and have them not screw it up?
You can keep your interweb of crap, and I'll keep assuming the people making it don't give a damn about security or testing their products.
The IoT is a model in which all of the consumers are the beta testers, and which security is a farce, if it exists at all. It's all gimmicks and toys, lacking either substance or quality.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
My mercury switch thermostat has been working reliably for decades. Decades. Never woke up to a cold house when the mercury needed an operating system update either....
I think what will kill iot is that it's just frankly too expensive. A perfect example is the Belkin WeMo line of iot enabled products.
* 150 dollars for a slow cooker
* 150 dollars for a coffee maker
* 200 dollars for a humidifier
* 40 dollars for a plugin relay switch
And the list goes on. The nest costs 5x-10x more than a low end digital thermostat. I have a sneaking suspicion as with almost all other home automation, upper class people will buy it for the novelty but the rest of the world will keep to their "dumb" devices.