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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.
Has the new formatting of HaD had such a bad impact on readership (I no longer go there because of it) that they are now harvesting views via /.?
It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't such an obvious conflict gentlemen..
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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....
...the IoT is a generally stupid idea, for all the hundreds of reasons that have been repeated here ad infinitum: additional points of failure in systems that benefit very little or not at all from the 'features' added by the new connectivity.
-Styopa
...The Internet of Things is creepy to the max and it sounds like it could be very invasive.
You misspelled profitable.
And the scariest part about IoT is not how creepy it is.
It's the fact that not enough humans on this planet give a shit about privacy anymore to stop such an industry.
Even Edward Snowden is sitting around these days asking himself "Why did I even fucking bother"...
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.
...
27) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I listen to the Backstreet Boys.
57) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I listen to the Backstreet Boys.
You've got bigger problems than IoT spying.
You could see what happens on TV sets. Now almost all models are "smart". Finding a "dumb" TV is harder and harder, and normally the firmware and the SoC are using is the same of the smarter models, only the extra features aren't enabled when on the boot the harware is not found. Being normally the "dumb" TV with smaller panel they're considered low end models are priced less. but when the "smart" and "dumb" models with the same screen size are sold, the price difference is small.
You can thank smartphone technology for that - TVs need SoCs too and while they could get by with a low end SoC, a low end SoC doesn't cost all that much less than a higher end multi-core multi-GHz one used in a smartphone. (Even the low end ones are dual core 1GHz units0.
Manufacturers love having the extra power - it makes the UI more "snappy" and it can boot faster, and the video processing can be done on the GPU rather than specialized video processing hardware controlled by the CPU (with very little increase in lag - it's still roughly a frame or two).
And when you're at this point, "smart" features are really just a software thing manufacturers can do to add value to their products for basically free. After all, the processing power is there.
Using a lower end SoC with video processor on the side costs about the same price, and they lose out on the ability to run a standard high level OS like Android on their SoC.
Qualcomm was going to introduce a video chipset at one point with all the TV inputs and a low end processor - perfect for TVs, but abandoned the plans when there was little interest