It seems like you really have no grasp on the concept of the Internet of Things. You're inventing ridiculous strawmen to slaughter to make your point. Nobody but you is talking about adding IP to showerheads.
The IoT is recognizing the idea that there are millions of IP enabled devices out there today, and the number is growing rapidly. The most visible examples include replacements like Nest or Honeywell thermostats, but other devices are entering homes, too, such as garage door openers, smoke alarms, light bulbs, and even washing machines. The most popular devices include entertainment systems that now can connect to Netflix or Hulu. Some of these will be successful, others won't. But the numbers are ever increasing, and people are buying them.
The market for them is also poised to go up rapidly. Today, they're primarily owned by early adopters, who are always willing to pay a premium. But there is something unusual about the IoT in that, by reporting back to a cloud, they provide valuable data to the manufacturers. More data gives them more value, so they have incentive to increase market penetration, and that means aggressive pricing and increased competition. This will result in more rapid adoption.
So with these diverse things entering the home, the demand to integrate them will increase. Microsoft has a large portion of the home PC market, and is perfectly positioned to provide that integration, even if it doesn't happen on Windows Phones. That is, as long as they do it well, and handle all the random error conditions that a diverse set of computers can generate. If it's not seamless and perfect, they'll fail again.
So how many of these people are actually needed in the federal government? It's not like having an extra cyber security guy in the FBI helps make Joe's Dry Cleaning a safer business. Security isn't transitive.
Regarding your iOS v. Android observation, that's possibly related to demographics. On average, university students tend to come from families with better educated parents, and better education correlates with a higher average income. I'm not saying every student on your campus was given an iPhone by a rich mommy and daddy, but I bet the average is higher than in the general population.
I already have a Z-wave hub for interfacing with home control devices, an AssureLink hub to interface with a Craftsman device, and a Harmony hub to blink IR at the entertainment devices. The Z-wave hub sits on my network, and I can access it directly. The AssureLink hub provides an interface only via their cloud, and can be accessed either from a browser or their smartphone app. The Harmony hub supposedly is Z-wave compatible, but in reality has no external connectivity at all, and pairs only with their remote. My Honeywell thermostat talks only to their cloud, and my Samsung appliances will provide a local interface only to their smartphone app. OpenHAB would be like magic if it could pull all these diverse boxes together.
However, the added complexity means troubleshooting will be an even bigger nightmare. Let's say the Z-wave controlled garage light isn't coming on when the garage door opens. Is the problem in the door opening controller, the AssureLink hub, the local network, the internet connection, Craftsman's cloud, the OpenHAB system, the Z-wave hub, the Z-wave's mesh network routing, the Z-wave light controller, or the bulb itself? The complexity is already outlandish, and the reliability of the mesh network is very poor - adding more complexity will not help it get better. At this point it's not worth even trying to integrate these devices, even though I'd like to.
And I understand what's going on - imagine someone who just pays an installer to plop an integrated box in front of them. They're going to get used to lots of disappointment.
Look at it this way: one of those Saturday courses on just about any money-making topic would have cost you over $100.00. So really, you learned the lesson for a pretty reasonable price.
That said, I wish you luck in getting a working product.
From your link: "RFID works by rectifying a strong local signal (not ambient RF)" [emphasis mine.] The scam in TFA is that they're ignoring the same laws of physics you apparently didn't bother to read.
Pro tip: If you're going to cite a source for your argument, you probably want to make sure it's not refuting the argument you're trying to make.
You've packed a lot of wrong into such a short post. If a system is insecure a "good" architecture is irrelevant - you're still screwed. And either way, neither architecture nor cryptocurrencies have anything to do with this problem, which is unpatched OpenSSL.
Some really clever weapons systems, like the Crusader with the Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact (MRSI) system that delivers an array of shells to one area simultaneously, seem to have everything going for them: congressional backing, tech, whatever. Turns out that a weapon designed for WW2 land wars isn't so useful in fighting religious nuts in the deserts. Some simply get canceled because there isn't a need for them any more.
The 'things' you seem to be thinking about are computing devices that are all deliberately meant for data access. The 'Internet-of-things' things are the non-traditional devices, such as washers, dryers, light bulbs, garage doors, thermostats, and other devices with some other primary purpose that is not data access.
The concept is that today, 99% of the things on the Internet are computers first, and most people have only one or two. But when the day comes that everyone puts a hundred appliances on the net, we may need to be looking at the whole network differently. When other 'things' outnumber the people and PCs, then we can truly call it the Internet-of-Things.
But yeah, it's mostly generic marketing-speak, like "the cloud" has become.
I wouldn't want to go through gigabytes of anyone else's old giant email archive, not my dad's, grandpa's, or son's. I barely get through my own daily notes. I keep old emails so I can search them, but I don't think of myself as beig so important someday that anyone else will ever care.
But I do still have a few printouts of emails my wife and I exchanged, back when we were dating in 1980. Again, not that anyone else will care.
It's not that uncommon. We had six computers in our area crash within days of each other. Of course, that was corporate IT idiots pushing out a BIOS patch that destroyed our disk encryption keys, rendering the devices utterly unrecoverable.
And two weeks after the "oops" incident? The bloody idiots re-pushed the patch across the board, because some computers didn't get it; the update software blindly installed it a second time, wiping all the freshly recovered disks a second time.
I simply cannot believe the IRS admins are any more competent than our IT department.
Some companies have taken this in a different direction. They have a "delete all email after 30 days" policy, with no exceptions, except for legal holds required for gathering evidence in specific legal situations.
Having and following a policy are the only requirement. It doesn't have to be a rational policy, it just has to be a policy. A policy of timed destruction, even if it's only a month, fits the requirement, and it helps avoid deep legal fishing.
If you're implying the use of steganography, then you're a moron.
He probably is a tinfoil hat conspiracy loon, however, there is a grain of truth to what he is saying. Digital camera sensors can have a unique fingerprint. Dead pixels, model specific JPG quantization tables, sensor size, all these things can help a digital forensic analyst match a camera to the photos it's taken. The same is harder to prove with an analog camera.
No, the IR sensor can't be used as a camera. However, the unintended uses for the ill-minded are still plentiful. An IR sensor majes a dandy occupancy sensor, and determines when you are home or not. A power meter can reveal energy use rising as the lights come on at 6, peaking when you make the morning's tea or coffee, going down as you shut off a few lights, and then two short spikes when your garage door opens and closes as you leave. A Honeywell thermostat may even have your vacation return date programmed into it. Such patterns and data (while not exactly the same for everyone) can be analyzed to figure out when your house is most likely to be empty. Robmyhouse.com would benefit.
Generally, this tracking is justified as "non-identifying". To be valuable to the mall owners and retailers, they track IDs as they move around, so they can provide insight like "people who shop at the Dizzknee store are more likely to cross the mall for a cookie", and "72% of shoppers walked past location X, place advertising there." And state DOTs are using such systems to track traffic flows and speeds. The data does have legitimate uses.
But what they don't generally advertise is that a single act of correlation to an ID identifies all that person's past behavior. While it may not matter much to my privacy if they send me a coupon for The Cookie Shop, it will matter greatly if that ID is used elsewhere. "Hi, I'm from LIZARD insurance, and we see you drive through tough neighborhoods on the way to work every day. Here's your high-risk rate hike."
Maybe, maybe not. Congress is saying "Since charities like food shelves and food banks take care of feeding people in trouble, we are cutting funding to food assistance programs." Never mind that people need food shelves because their assistance programs were reduced by the very same Congress.
They're outsourcing assistance programs and the only funding comes from donations. If people and corporations don't get tax exemptions for their donations, they won't donate as much. Many of the already stretched thin food banks would close, and the rest would have to cut back on their assistance. The resulting crisis might spark enough outrage to require restoration of the assistance programs.
But yeah, when it comes to religious organizations, they should be taxed exactly like nightclubs. They behave the same: mood lights, candles, music, ritualized dancing, ringing bells, drinking wine, their customers dress up for the occasion, and they're filled with people talking about unbelievable nonsense. The primary difference is that one of them cards you at the door.
I dont see a point in any appliance being computerized. No thanks for the extra complexity.
Extra? Do you know how washing machines were controlled before they were built with computer controls? There was a clock motor and clockwork gears driving a shaft with notched cam disks, and a series of cam following microswitches that opened and closed based on timing. When certain steps in the cycle needed more precise timing, a gear driven mechanism would speed up the camshaft.
Don't get me wrong, these devices were really cool mechanisms. But they had their limits. They could not adjust water levels by sensing the size of the loads, so they wasted water. They could not measure the outflow to know when they no longer needed to spin, so they wasted energy. This complicated mechanism cost a lot to make. And each individual component had a higher failure rate over time than a microcontroller. With an array of sensors and an intelligent controller, they can now be made cheaper, more durable, and more efficient. That's the point.
Millions of customers have already disagreed with you. Their devices are already connected to the internet, and the number is growing rapidly.
This is actually good news for you. That means the chances are very good that sometime in 2024 when your neighbor's house starts playing dub-step at max volume at 3AM, you can wake up, run to Slashdot and post "I told you so."
In the meantime, those millions of other people will have been saving energy, time, and money for a decade with their smart houses. But it will all be worth it, because you got to say "I told you so back in 2014."
I'm glad to know your toaster won't ever post "golden brown" to your Facebook page, but your opinion won't slow down the growth of the interconnected device market.
Now get off my lawn, because I'm watching you remotely with my cameras, and I'm about to turn on the sprinklers with my phone.
wrong, your $5 an hour waiter makes 2nd copy of receipt for his friend to buy them both things, it's just 2nd tip.
Nope. The $5 an hour waiter uses the battery powered skimmer that he has in his pocket, and sells them to Jimmy the Sneak out the back door of the restaurant. Writing the numbers takes too long, and he could get caught.
Physically, you can steal one box at a time, perhaps 1000 receipts. And the thief must be physically present, and risk his ass getting caught doing so.
Electronically, you can sit in Odessa, Ukraine, and steal 44 million accounts from every cash register at a major retailer. And the thief risks absolutely nothing, because his government is too busy fighting the Russian separatists who have taken over City Hall.
But it appears to have all been personal degradation and character assassinations (which may open a civil suit but still would have no net effect on the first amendment claims).
Libel laws have much tighter requirements in the case of a "public figure", where actual financial harm has to be proven. The (real) mayor can't simply claim "his false statements made me embarrassed, so I want $10,000 in pain and suffering", he has to show real losses, as in "when he claimed I smoked crack, my boss filled out an HR form that said they had to fire me because they couldn't have a drug user driving forklifts, so I was fired, and lost $10,000 in wages."
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like you really have no grasp on the concept of the Internet of Things. You're inventing ridiculous strawmen to slaughter to make your point. Nobody but you is talking about adding IP to showerheads.
The IoT is recognizing the idea that there are millions of IP enabled devices out there today, and the number is growing rapidly. The most visible examples include replacements like Nest or Honeywell thermostats, but other devices are entering homes, too, such as garage door openers, smoke alarms, light bulbs, and even washing machines. The most popular devices include entertainment systems that now can connect to Netflix or Hulu. Some of these will be successful, others won't. But the numbers are ever increasing, and people are buying them.
The market for them is also poised to go up rapidly. Today, they're primarily owned by early adopters, who are always willing to pay a premium. But there is something unusual about the IoT in that, by reporting back to a cloud, they provide valuable data to the manufacturers. More data gives them more value, so they have incentive to increase market penetration, and that means aggressive pricing and increased competition. This will result in more rapid adoption.
So with these diverse things entering the home, the demand to integrate them will increase. Microsoft has a large portion of the home PC market, and is perfectly positioned to provide that integration, even if it doesn't happen on Windows Phones. That is, as long as they do it well, and handle all the random error conditions that a diverse set of computers can generate. If it's not seamless and perfect, they'll fail again.
So how many of these people are actually needed in the federal government? It's not like having an extra cyber security guy in the FBI helps make Joe's Dry Cleaning a safer business. Security isn't transitive.
Regarding your iOS v. Android observation, that's possibly related to demographics. On average, university students tend to come from families with better educated parents, and better education correlates with a higher average income. I'm not saying every student on your campus was given an iPhone by a rich mommy and daddy, but I bet the average is higher than in the general population.
I already have a Z-wave hub for interfacing with home control devices, an AssureLink hub to interface with a Craftsman device, and a Harmony hub to blink IR at the entertainment devices. The Z-wave hub sits on my network, and I can access it directly. The AssureLink hub provides an interface only via their cloud, and can be accessed either from a browser or their smartphone app. The Harmony hub supposedly is Z-wave compatible, but in reality has no external connectivity at all, and pairs only with their remote. My Honeywell thermostat talks only to their cloud, and my Samsung appliances will provide a local interface only to their smartphone app. OpenHAB would be like magic if it could pull all these diverse boxes together.
However, the added complexity means troubleshooting will be an even bigger nightmare. Let's say the Z-wave controlled garage light isn't coming on when the garage door opens. Is the problem in the door opening controller, the AssureLink hub, the local network, the internet connection, Craftsman's cloud, the OpenHAB system, the Z-wave hub, the Z-wave's mesh network routing, the Z-wave light controller, or the bulb itself? The complexity is already outlandish, and the reliability of the mesh network is very poor - adding more complexity will not help it get better. At this point it's not worth even trying to integrate these devices, even though I'd like to.
And I understand what's going on - imagine someone who just pays an installer to plop an integrated box in front of them. They're going to get used to lots of disappointment.
Look at it this way: one of those Saturday courses on just about any money-making topic would have cost you over $100.00. So really, you learned the lesson for a pretty reasonable price.
That said, I wish you luck in getting a working product.
From your link: "RFID works by rectifying a strong local signal (not ambient RF) " [emphasis mine.] The scam in TFA is that they're ignoring the same laws of physics you apparently didn't bother to read.
Pro tip: If you're going to cite a source for your argument, you probably want to make sure it's not refuting the argument you're trying to make.
You've packed a lot of wrong into such a short post. If a system is insecure a "good" architecture is irrelevant - you're still screwed. And either way, neither architecture nor cryptocurrencies have anything to do with this problem, which is unpatched OpenSSL.
You bleeding heart liberals never know when to change.
Some really clever weapons systems, like the Crusader with the Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact (MRSI) system that delivers an array of shells to one area simultaneously, seem to have everything going for them: congressional backing, tech, whatever. Turns out that a weapon designed for WW2 land wars isn't so useful in fighting religious nuts in the deserts. Some simply get canceled because there isn't a need for them any more.
The 'things' you seem to be thinking about are computing devices that are all deliberately meant for data access. The 'Internet-of-things' things are the non-traditional devices, such as washers, dryers, light bulbs, garage doors, thermostats, and other devices with some other primary purpose that is not data access.
The concept is that today, 99% of the things on the Internet are computers first, and most people have only one or two. But when the day comes that everyone puts a hundred appliances on the net, we may need to be looking at the whole network differently. When other 'things' outnumber the people and PCs, then we can truly call it the Internet-of-Things.
But yeah, it's mostly generic marketing-speak, like "the cloud" has become.
I wouldn't want to go through gigabytes of anyone else's old giant email archive, not my dad's, grandpa's, or son's. I barely get through my own daily notes. I keep old emails so I can search them, but I don't think of myself as beig so important someday that anyone else will ever care.
But I do still have a few printouts of emails my wife and I exchanged, back when we were dating in 1980. Again, not that anyone else will care.
It's not that uncommon. We had six computers in our area crash within days of each other. Of course, that was corporate IT idiots pushing out a BIOS patch that destroyed our disk encryption keys, rendering the devices utterly unrecoverable.
And two weeks after the "oops" incident? The bloody idiots re-pushed the patch across the board, because some computers didn't get it; the update software blindly installed it a second time, wiping all the freshly recovered disks a second time.
I simply cannot believe the IRS admins are any more competent than our IT department.
Some companies have taken this in a different direction. They have a "delete all email after 30 days" policy, with no exceptions, except for legal holds required for gathering evidence in specific legal situations.
Having and following a policy are the only requirement. It doesn't have to be a rational policy, it just has to be a policy. A policy of timed destruction, even if it's only a month, fits the requirement, and it helps avoid deep legal fishing.
If you're implying the use of steganography, then you're a moron.
He probably is a tinfoil hat conspiracy loon, however, there is a grain of truth to what he is saying. Digital camera sensors can have a unique fingerprint. Dead pixels, model specific JPG quantization tables, sensor size, all these things can help a digital forensic analyst match a camera to the photos it's taken. The same is harder to prove with an analog camera.
No, the IR sensor can't be used as a camera. However, the unintended uses for the ill-minded are still plentiful. An IR sensor majes a dandy occupancy sensor, and determines when you are home or not. A power meter can reveal energy use rising as the lights come on at 6, peaking when you make the morning's tea or coffee, going down as you shut off a few lights, and then two short spikes when your garage door opens and closes as you leave. A Honeywell thermostat may even have your vacation return date programmed into it. Such patterns and data (while not exactly the same for everyone) can be analyzed to figure out when your house is most likely to be empty. Robmyhouse.com would benefit.
That's a common ailment, known around here as 'CRS Syndrome'. As in Can't Remember Shit.
Generally, this tracking is justified as "non-identifying". To be valuable to the mall owners and retailers, they track IDs as they move around, so they can provide insight like "people who shop at the Dizzknee store are more likely to cross the mall for a cookie", and "72% of shoppers walked past location X, place advertising there." And state DOTs are using such systems to track traffic flows and speeds. The data does have legitimate uses.
But what they don't generally advertise is that a single act of correlation to an ID identifies all that person's past behavior. While it may not matter much to my privacy if they send me a coupon for The Cookie Shop, it will matter greatly if that ID is used elsewhere. "Hi, I'm from LIZARD insurance, and we see you drive through tough neighborhoods on the way to work every day. Here's your high-risk rate hike."
Maybe, maybe not. Congress is saying "Since charities like food shelves and food banks take care of feeding people in trouble, we are cutting funding to food assistance programs." Never mind that people need food shelves because their assistance programs were reduced by the very same Congress.
They're outsourcing assistance programs and the only funding comes from donations. If people and corporations don't get tax exemptions for their donations, they won't donate as much. Many of the already stretched thin food banks would close, and the rest would have to cut back on their assistance. The resulting crisis might spark enough outrage to require restoration of the assistance programs.
But yeah, when it comes to religious organizations, they should be taxed exactly like nightclubs. They behave the same: mood lights, candles, music, ritualized dancing, ringing bells, drinking wine, their customers dress up for the occasion, and they're filled with people talking about unbelievable nonsense. The primary difference is that one of them cards you at the door.
All they needed was some marketing. If only they had called themselves SkyDrive, or OneDrive, or iCloud...
I dont see a point in any appliance being computerized. No thanks for the extra complexity.
Extra? Do you know how washing machines were controlled before they were built with computer controls? There was a clock motor and clockwork gears driving a shaft with notched cam disks, and a series of cam following microswitches that opened and closed based on timing. When certain steps in the cycle needed more precise timing, a gear driven mechanism would speed up the camshaft.
Don't get me wrong, these devices were really cool mechanisms. But they had their limits. They could not adjust water levels by sensing the size of the loads, so they wasted water. They could not measure the outflow to know when they no longer needed to spin, so they wasted energy. This complicated mechanism cost a lot to make. And each individual component had a higher failure rate over time than a microcontroller. With an array of sensors and an intelligent controller, they can now be made cheaper, more durable, and more efficient. That's the point.
Millions of customers have already disagreed with you. Their devices are already connected to the internet, and the number is growing rapidly.
This is actually good news for you. That means the chances are very good that sometime in 2024 when your neighbor's house starts playing dub-step at max volume at 3AM, you can wake up, run to Slashdot and post "I told you so."
In the meantime, those millions of other people will have been saving energy, time, and money for a decade with their smart houses. But it will all be worth it, because you got to say "I told you so back in 2014."
I'm glad to know your toaster won't ever post "golden brown" to your Facebook page, but your opinion won't slow down the growth of the interconnected device market.
Now get off my lawn, because I'm watching you remotely with my cameras, and I'm about to turn on the sprinklers with my phone.
wrong, your $5 an hour waiter makes 2nd copy of receipt for his friend to buy them both things, it's just 2nd tip.
Nope. The $5 an hour waiter uses the battery powered skimmer that he has in his pocket, and sells them to Jimmy the Sneak out the back door of the restaurant. Writing the numbers takes too long, and he could get caught.
Physically, you can steal one box at a time, perhaps 1000 receipts. And the thief must be physically present, and risk his ass getting caught doing so.
Electronically, you can sit in Odessa, Ukraine, and steal 44 million accounts from every cash register at a major retailer. And the thief risks absolutely nothing, because his government is too busy fighting the Russian separatists who have taken over City Hall.
See the difference?
But it appears to have all been personal degradation and character assassinations (which may open a civil suit but still would have no net effect on the first amendment claims).
Libel laws have much tighter requirements in the case of a "public figure", where actual financial harm has to be proven. The (real) mayor can't simply claim "his false statements made me embarrassed, so I want $10,000 in pain and suffering", he has to show real losses, as in "when he claimed I smoked crack, my boss filled out an HR form that said they had to fire me because they couldn't have a drug user driving forklifts, so I was fired, and lost $10,000 in wages."
... because prostitution is illegal in a lot of places.
Apparently it's illegal in the same places where carriage returns, line feeds, paragraphs, and coming to a logical conclusion are illegal, too.