No, the major issue with IoT is it's pointless marketing hype designed to sell products, and security (if any) is tacked on as an afterthought.
The security of the cloud will continue to be irrelevant if the security of the damned products is non-existent.
And for the next several years (at least) you should assume the security of IoT products was written by incompetent morons under the guidance of indifferent management... because that's pretty much what we have now.
If you can access your home from a cell phone, chances are someone else can too.
Until companies face major fines, or CEOs get thrown in jail, security of internet connected devices will continue to suck.
Me, I'll continue to not buy this crap, and laugh my ass off as people keep learning just how badly done the security is.
Honestly, if they can't tackle the problem of putting someone on the Moon for a week, or a month (or at all)... they have no way in hell of trying to solve some of the problems with going to Mars.
Permanently living on the Moon isn't even a pipe dream, but the only way to start solving some of these problems is to actually try to do it there... put up a structure and go back to it hasn't been achieved, establishing a "permanent" settlement anywhere? They don't have anything remotely resembling that.
Trying to even get people to Mars would be suicide at this point, let alone trying to have them live there. At least not without developing and proving an awful lot of technology under realistic conditions.
It seems like the technical ability to go to the moon has more or less been lost, and then someone wants them to leapfrog to Mars.
NASA spent a bunch of years putting stuff exclusively into low Earth orbit (which was always a criticism of the Shuttle), and then subsequently lost the ability to do that... and to add insult to injury they need to rent lift capacity from Russia, or buy rocket engines from them.
How anybody could expect them to go to Mars when they've not demonstrated the ability to go to the moon in 43 years?
Of course they don't have a plan... they have neither the budget for it, nor the technology at the moment.
This should guarantee the IoT continues to have no security for the foreseeable future... cloud-based IoT management should provide me hours of entertainment to laugh at the idiots buying this shit and getting pwned.
Cisco estimated that the Internet of Everything represents a $19 trillion opportunity over the next decade
All those suckers, waiting to be fleeced. The mind reels.
Wow, you mean a cheap product someone bought off the interwebs doesn't adhere to a spec, or Microsoft has decided not to implement the standard?
I'm shocked, shocked I tell 'ya... nobody ever doesn't adhere to a standard. Because they're magic!!
Sorry, ever since there were "Windows Modems", or any "standard" to ignore, people have been doing this shit. Most especially Microsoft and cheapo devices.
"Supposed to" my ass. Companies have been doing a terrible job of implementing standards since forever. I've long since stopped acting shocked when it happens.
One of two entities got lazy/cheap/sloppy here, and I'll plausibly believe either of them.
You're not supposed to be able to patent an idea, you're only supposed to be able to patent an invention... far too many patents are really little more than the idea of "doing something kinda like this".
So many of them describe a concept already in use, or which is exactly the same in the physical world... but digital.
And then seemingly it becomes a magic device whereby you can claim that "a system and methodology for doing something which is commonplace, but involves a computer and a network" is a unique invention.
In the many years I've been aware of software patents, the ones I've seen more or less boil down to software analogs of things we've already seen, and stuff many of us would have learned in a CS degree (and which was already common practice).
Then you just write it in fancy sounding bullshit, and pass it off as a unique invention -- and the morons at the patent office, whose only real criteria is if the checks clear, will rubber stamp it and suddenly you have a patent.
William Ginter Riva: Mr. Stane. Sir, we've explored what you've asked us and it seems as though there's a little hiccup. Actually, um... Obadiah Stane: A hiccup? William Ginter Riva: Yes, to power the suit... sir, the technology doesn't actually exist. So it... Obadiah Stane: Wait, wait, the technology? [puts an arm around him] Obadiah Stane: William... [points at the giant arc reactor] Obadiah Stane: Here is the technology. I've asked you to simply make it smaller. William Ginter Riva: All right, sir, that's what we're trying to do, but... honestly, it's impossible. Obadiah Stane: [shouting] Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps! William Ginter Riva: Well, I'm sorry. I'm not Tony Stark.
First, they'll need to make a big huge one that actually works.
The making it wee part? Well, deal with that when you've got step one done.
Of course porn, people have been saying since at least the 90s that VR will never exist as a commercially viable thing without porn.
Apparently everything after the wheel and fire wasn't going to succeed without porn.
I'm surprised hybrid cars even managed a foothold without porn.. actually, wait, I'm sure rule #34 will come into effect, never mind.
So, maybe what we need to do is get the porn industry involved in all of those "Solve This Major Problem" things... solve world peace and we'll show you our tits kinda deal. (And, so we don't have it too sexist, for the ladies we'll show you that Channing Tatum guy's backside or something, you can save the world in exchange for tawdry things too, we don't mind.)
This time the contest challenge was to cause a false match in a nuclear inspection scenario, allowing a country to remove fissile material from a warhead without being noticed.
That's a highly specific thing... who funded this again?:-P
Many look at a technology and say "it's good enough, it does 80% of what I need"
Having recently been a consultant at a company doing this... that was their entire new strategy.
They were doing more with less, it was the new way forward, it was going to change the world, 80/20 was the new standard, no more of the white glove service, we'd focus on core functionality only and stop catering to the outliers.
Everyone not in management understood that to mean we're cutting budgets, and we're going to claim service levels won't suffer, while making policy which mandate service levels suffer because both of these can't be true.
What management understood that to mean wasn't clear -- either they believed they could do more with less, or it was doublespeak and they knew they were full of shit.
When average and mediocrity is the policy, WTF do you expect to get?
The people defining IT purchasing and driving strategy? They don't want anything BUT the safe middle of the road which won't get you in trouble... and they want it to be managed in a foreign country as cheaply as possible, no matter how bad the service.
So those remaining must be deleriously happy to be working with such elite peers. their productivity must be skyrocketing now that all the deadwood and even mediocre but dilligent workers are gone.
Yeah, you definitely missed the sarcasm bits.
This is just the modern version of "the beatings will continue until morale improves" thing -- the remaining people are expected to be so scared shitless they'll say yes to anything and magically produce awesoms.
Of course, it never works, but that seems to be the idiotic thinking of management.
As someone who worked in a male dominated job where giving each other shit all day was the way to pass time, to a job with an HR department. I wonder if this sensitivity coincides with the entrance of women into the work place. Granted I'm generalizing a bit, but in the spirit of not offending someone, I blame women.
Bah, I've worked with many women who could give shit as well as anybody, and a few who swore enough to make a sailor blush. They're not all fragile and boo hoo.
I think it's a generation (or two) who have grown up so damned coddled and protected from anything remotely troubling they have no concept of how to deal with a reality which doesn't conform to their insulated little world view.
This is kids of both sexes who have been treated like fragile little objects, and are now incapable of having adult emotions and experiences without being overwhelmed, because they've been shielded from such things.
There's a reason why the term "precioius little snowflakes" is so widely used, and it has nothing at all to do with gender.
Sure... my desktop is two 23" monitors... my latop is a 15.5" screen... and when I go on vacation I only bring my wee little tablet, because I have no intention of working on it, but with the Bluetooth keyboard if, in a pinch, I need to do something more it's better than a plain tablet.
At a 7" screen, it's for finding restaurants, getting driving directions, or other things which aren't going to need heavy typing.
I can't imagine trying to do work on a tablet of that size, at least not if I had other choices. But a few times, in a pinch a VPN client, an RDP tool, and the keyboard have saved my some problems. As a "Plan C", it can be useful to keep handy.
Since when have we reached the point where you aren't allowed to annoy or offend people? And at what point in Cleese's career has he ever done anything but? Satire and parody aren't intended to be inoffensive and in-controversial.
From what I've seen in the news, universities and colleges have become places where whiny little kids demand they only be shown a fair and just world which conforms to their worldview. Too damned bad.
There is no right to not be offended, and this shouting down of what other people have to say because you don't like it means you would shit all over free speech for your own ends.
Cleese is saying "to hell with these whiny kids, I'm simply not performing there because it's absurd".
I view this as no different than a bunch of church-ladies picketing to stop Andrew Dice Clay, or someone protesting outside of a place that sells bacon because they disagree with eating bacon -- it's the tyranny of a very vocal minority who feels it is their right to control what others do.
It's censorship to serve your own ends -- which would be followed by whining about your freedom of speech if someone else tried to do the same to you.
This is about modern kids deciding that the rights and freedoms they grew up enjoying should be curtailed such that they only extend to people who agree with them.
And that's the biggest pile of idiotic, self-entitled bullshit I've heard in a long time.
My Bluetooth keyboard has the same footprint as the case for my Nexus 7, barely weighs anything, charges from USB, lasts for hours, and disconnects from the case because it's only held on with 4 magnets. It weighs less than the tablet.
The iClever Portable Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard measures 10 by 3.5 by 0.3 inches when open. When closed, it measures by 5.75 by 3.5 by 0.75 inches. It weighs 6.24 ounces, making it one of the most compact and lightweight keyboards we've tested.
That review is from December.
You don't need to carry around a big keyboard, and for almost any tablet you can get a case which holds the tablet and houses a keyboard in not much more space than the tablet. Which means the detachable tablet can be yours for the price of an easily gotten accessory.
Buy one, don't buy one... it's up to you. But this is a problem people have been actively solving for years now.
You just might find there's actually a product which does what you want it to, without costing an arm and a leg, and without being a big bulky thing to carry around.
But, really, if you stand back, this is Yahoo rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
They're a business in decline, who can't figure out what they need to do to boost revenues, skating by on the billions they made at IPO, and desperately trying to remain relevant in a moving technology field.
This is just confirming my long-standing belief that tech IPOs (now and in the.com era) create companies with massive wealth, but no real revenue or business model, who eventually collapse under their own weight and inability to deliver.
Yahoo utterly failed to transition into other things which generate revenue, and mostly stuck with trying to be a web portal.
Which means management hasn't really got a clue what the problem is, or what the solution is. And yet CEOs get paid massive amounts of money to have no idea what to do next.
I'll incompetently manage Yahoo for a fraction of what she's charging.
I'll have to move a little used email account someplace, but other than that the demise of Yahoo doesn't trouble me.
This has been debunked. There is no keylogger. If you have a packet capture that says otherwise, feel free to correct everyone that bothered to look into it.
Purely to play Devil's advocate, but why would a keylogger show in a packet capture?
Microsoft sends home enough payloads of data that, if one was designing a super secret key logging mechanism, you'd just save up the data and send it with that stuff.
Sending packets with every keystroke would be wasteful and obvious.
Without seeing every data payload of what MS is including in their telemetry and other crap they've pushed into the OS, and accounting for all of it, I fail to see how you can make that conclusion.
If there's chunks of binary data MS won't tell you what it is, you have no way of knowing what's in it.
I have no idea what MS does and doesn't send, because I've never looked into it... but hiding a keylogger from packet sniffing when you already call home?
That's not exactly rocket science. In fact, it's the kind of obvious solution when you're already sending other data.
gesture typing (tracing the words) made me finally decide there was something better *for mobile*
I find I can "type" almost as fast with the Google keyboard by tracing my finger over letters as I can on a keyboard.
It's actually my preferred form of mobile input.
Now get up to the scale where my fingers can actually fit on a keyboard, physical keyboard wins hands down for speed and accuracy.
Bluetooth keyboards. They're easy enough to find.
If you're doing enough typing on your mobile device that you need to type faster, get an actual keyboard.
I've got a case for my Nexus 7 I paid like $30-$40 at Wal Mart (been a while, can't remember how much). It's got a Bluetooth keyboard in it, which you can sync with pretty much anything. I've actually got it paired with a couple of different things because they'll never be in use at the same time.
If you need a physical keyboard, they're cheap enough that you can solve that problem... apparently Logitech makes a unit you can get for $30 if you look around.
This is a solved problem, and has been for some number of years. A kickstand case to prop it up, and a Bluetooth keyboard turns any tablet into a "convertible" where you can type at properly.
You could do this long before companies started attaching keyboards to tablets. And you can do it a hell of a lot cheaper.
But the 7 external sites which all want to run javascript... I don't let a single one of them do it.
Javascript is best treated as malware. But you pick and choose who you let run it.
You sure as hell don't let any old website run any old script, and call 3rd party scripts -- because that would be idiotic.
And, shockingly, that's how most of the people who make web pages expect it to work... those ad and analytic companies and the other parasites in pages? Well, they can all fuck off and die.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the major issue with IoT is it's pointless marketing hype designed to sell products, and security (if any) is tacked on as an afterthought.
The security of the cloud will continue to be irrelevant if the security of the damned products is non-existent.
And for the next several years (at least) you should assume the security of IoT products was written by incompetent morons under the guidance of indifferent management ... because that's pretty much what we have now.
If you can access your home from a cell phone, chances are someone else can too.
Until companies face major fines, or CEOs get thrown in jail, security of internet connected devices will continue to suck.
Me, I'll continue to not buy this crap, and laugh my ass off as people keep learning just how badly done the security is.
Because nobody is suggesting they suddenly do that on another planet.
Having no current technology to get to the moon pretty much means anything trying to jump straight to Mars is entirely unproven.
NASA can't put people into low orbit without help, how the hell do you expect them to send people to Mars? Wingardium fucking leviosa?
Honestly, if they can't tackle the problem of putting someone on the Moon for a week, or a month (or at all) ... they have no way in hell of trying to solve some of the problems with going to Mars.
Permanently living on the Moon isn't even a pipe dream, but the only way to start solving some of these problems is to actually try to do it there ... put up a structure and go back to it hasn't been achieved, establishing a "permanent" settlement anywhere? They don't have anything remotely resembling that.
Trying to even get people to Mars would be suicide at this point, let alone trying to have them live there. At least not without developing and proving an awful lot of technology under realistic conditions.
It seems like the technical ability to go to the moon has more or less been lost, and then someone wants them to leapfrog to Mars.
NASA spent a bunch of years putting stuff exclusively into low Earth orbit (which was always a criticism of the Shuttle), and then subsequently lost the ability to do that ... and to add insult to injury they need to rent lift capacity from Russia, or buy rocket engines from them.
How anybody could expect them to go to Mars when they've not demonstrated the ability to go to the moon in 43 years?
Of course they don't have a plan ... they have neither the budget for it, nor the technology at the moment.
You keep telling yourself that, and I'll keep expecting the security of IoT to continue to be shit.
Until there are legal penalties, nothing is really going to change.
This is just more monetization and leveraging of synergies. That shit doesn't magically create security.
This should guarantee the IoT continues to have no security for the foreseeable future ... cloud-based IoT management should provide me hours of entertainment to laugh at the idiots buying this shit and getting pwned.
All those suckers, waiting to be fleeced. The mind reels.
Wow, you mean a cheap product someone bought off the interwebs doesn't adhere to a spec, or Microsoft has decided not to implement the standard?
I'm shocked, shocked I tell 'ya ... nobody ever doesn't adhere to a standard. Because they're magic!!
Sorry, ever since there were "Windows Modems", or any "standard" to ignore, people have been doing this shit. Most especially Microsoft and cheapo devices.
"Supposed to" my ass. Companies have been doing a terrible job of implementing standards since forever. I've long since stopped acting shocked when it happens.
One of two entities got lazy/cheap/sloppy here, and I'll plausibly believe either of them.
You're not supposed to be able to patent an idea, you're only supposed to be able to patent an invention ... far too many patents are really little more than the idea of "doing something kinda like this".
So many of them describe a concept already in use, or which is exactly the same in the physical world ... but digital.
And then seemingly it becomes a magic device whereby you can claim that "a system and methodology for doing something which is commonplace, but involves a computer and a network" is a unique invention.
In the many years I've been aware of software patents, the ones I've seen more or less boil down to software analogs of things we've already seen, and stuff many of us would have learned in a CS degree (and which was already common practice).
Then you just write it in fancy sounding bullshit, and pass it off as a unique invention -- and the morons at the patent office, whose only real criteria is if the checks clear, will rubber stamp it and suddenly you have a patent.
While we're at it, my printer sharing seems to not be working properly.
Which is this, "my crappy vendor has no current drivers", or "Microsoft hasn't written a driver for my crappy camera glasses"?
Definitely a big "WTF" on that one.
You mean like this? ;-)
Not likely:
First, they'll need to make a big huge one that actually works.
The making it wee part? Well, deal with that when you've got step one done.
Of course porn, people have been saying since at least the 90s that VR will never exist as a commercially viable thing without porn.
Apparently everything after the wheel and fire wasn't going to succeed without porn.
I'm surprised hybrid cars even managed a foothold without porn .. actually, wait, I'm sure rule #34 will come into effect, never mind.
So, maybe what we need to do is get the porn industry involved in all of those "Solve This Major Problem" things ... solve world peace and we'll show you our tits kinda deal. (And, so we don't have it too sexist, for the ladies we'll show you that Channing Tatum guy's backside or something, you can save the world in exchange for tawdry things too, we don't mind.)
LOL .. psychotic break induced by VR feedback loop via EEG ... wait, isn't that basically Total Recall?
That's a highly specific thing ... who funded this again? :-P
Having recently been a consultant at a company doing this ... that was their entire new strategy.
They were doing more with less, it was the new way forward, it was going to change the world, 80/20 was the new standard, no more of the white glove service, we'd focus on core functionality only and stop catering to the outliers.
Everyone not in management understood that to mean we're cutting budgets, and we're going to claim service levels won't suffer, while making policy which mandate service levels suffer because both of these can't be true.
What management understood that to mean wasn't clear -- either they believed they could do more with less, or it was doublespeak and they knew they were full of shit.
When average and mediocrity is the policy, WTF do you expect to get?
The people defining IT purchasing and driving strategy? They don't want anything BUT the safe middle of the road which won't get you in trouble ... and they want it to be managed in a foreign country as cheaply as possible, no matter how bad the service.
Yeah, you definitely missed the sarcasm bits.
This is just the modern version of "the beatings will continue until morale improves" thing -- the remaining people are expected to be so scared shitless they'll say yes to anything and magically produce awesoms.
Of course, it never works, but that seems to be the idiotic thinking of management.
Bah, I've worked with many women who could give shit as well as anybody, and a few who swore enough to make a sailor blush. They're not all fragile and boo hoo.
I think it's a generation (or two) who have grown up so damned coddled and protected from anything remotely troubling they have no concept of how to deal with a reality which doesn't conform to their insulated little world view.
This is kids of both sexes who have been treated like fragile little objects, and are now incapable of having adult emotions and experiences without being overwhelmed, because they've been shielded from such things.
There's a reason why the term "precioius little snowflakes" is so widely used, and it has nothing at all to do with gender.
Sure ... my desktop is two 23" monitors ... my latop is a 15.5" screen ... and when I go on vacation I only bring my wee little tablet, because I have no intention of working on it, but with the Bluetooth keyboard if, in a pinch, I need to do something more it's better than a plain tablet.
At a 7" screen, it's for finding restaurants, getting driving directions, or other things which aren't going to need heavy typing.
I can't imagine trying to do work on a tablet of that size, at least not if I had other choices. But a few times, in a pinch a VPN client, an RDP tool, and the keyboard have saved my some problems. As a "Plan C", it can be useful to keep handy.
Since when have we reached the point where you aren't allowed to annoy or offend people? And at what point in Cleese's career has he ever done anything but? Satire and parody aren't intended to be inoffensive and in-controversial.
From what I've seen in the news, universities and colleges have become places where whiny little kids demand they only be shown a fair and just world which conforms to their worldview. Too damned bad.
There is no right to not be offended, and this shouting down of what other people have to say because you don't like it means you would shit all over free speech for your own ends.
Cleese is saying "to hell with these whiny kids, I'm simply not performing there because it's absurd".
I view this as no different than a bunch of church-ladies picketing to stop Andrew Dice Clay, or someone protesting outside of a place that sells bacon because they disagree with eating bacon -- it's the tyranny of a very vocal minority who feels it is their right to control what others do.
It's censorship to serve your own ends -- which would be followed by whining about your freedom of speech if someone else tried to do the same to you.
This is about modern kids deciding that the rights and freedoms they grew up enjoying should be curtailed such that they only extend to people who agree with them.
And that's the biggest pile of idiotic, self-entitled bullshit I've heard in a long time.
My Bluetooth keyboard has the same footprint as the case for my Nexus 7, barely weighs anything, charges from USB, lasts for hours, and disconnects from the case because it's only held on with 4 magnets. It weighs less than the tablet.
You can even get ones which fold to the size of a phone.
That review is from December.
You don't need to carry around a big keyboard, and for almost any tablet you can get a case which holds the tablet and houses a keyboard in not much more space than the tablet. Which means the detachable tablet can be yours for the price of an easily gotten accessory.
Buy one, don't buy one ... it's up to you. But this is a problem people have been actively solving for years now.
You just might find there's actually a product which does what you want it to, without costing an arm and a leg, and without being a big bulky thing to carry around.
Sure, like rats leaving a sinking ship.
But, really, if you stand back, this is Yahoo rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
They're a business in decline, who can't figure out what they need to do to boost revenues, skating by on the billions they made at IPO, and desperately trying to remain relevant in a moving technology field.
This is just confirming my long-standing belief that tech IPOs (now and in the .com era) create companies with massive wealth, but no real revenue or business model, who eventually collapse under their own weight and inability to deliver.
Yahoo utterly failed to transition into other things which generate revenue, and mostly stuck with trying to be a web portal.
Which means management hasn't really got a clue what the problem is, or what the solution is. And yet CEOs get paid massive amounts of money to have no idea what to do next.
I'll incompetently manage Yahoo for a fraction of what she's charging.
I'll have to move a little used email account someplace, but other than that the demise of Yahoo doesn't trouble me.
Purely to play Devil's advocate, but why would a keylogger show in a packet capture?
Microsoft sends home enough payloads of data that, if one was designing a super secret key logging mechanism, you'd just save up the data and send it with that stuff.
Sending packets with every keystroke would be wasteful and obvious.
Without seeing every data payload of what MS is including in their telemetry and other crap they've pushed into the OS, and accounting for all of it, I fail to see how you can make that conclusion.
If there's chunks of binary data MS won't tell you what it is, you have no way of knowing what's in it.
I have no idea what MS does and doesn't send, because I've never looked into it ... but hiding a keylogger from packet sniffing when you already call home?
That's not exactly rocket science. In fact, it's the kind of obvious solution when you're already sending other data.
I find I can "type" almost as fast with the Google keyboard by tracing my finger over letters as I can on a keyboard.
It's actually my preferred form of mobile input.
Bluetooth keyboards. They're easy enough to find.
If you're doing enough typing on your mobile device that you need to type faster, get an actual keyboard.
I've got a case for my Nexus 7 I paid like $30-$40 at Wal Mart (been a while, can't remember how much). It's got a Bluetooth keyboard in it, which you can sync with pretty much anything. I've actually got it paired with a couple of different things because they'll never be in use at the same time.
If you need a physical keyboard, they're cheap enough that you can solve that problem ... apparently Logitech makes a unit you can get for $30 if you look around.
This is a solved problem, and has been for some number of years. A kickstand case to prop it up, and a Bluetooth keyboard turns any tablet into a "convertible" where you can type at properly.
You could do this long before companies started attaching keyboards to tablets. And you can do it a hell of a lot cheaper.
Come on "editors", if you can't post a submission which doesn't have unicode artifacts, it pretty much means you're not even trying to be "editors".
Surely you guys have a preview button too?
Because 3 unicode artifacts says you're ability to review what you're posting is sorely lacking.
But the 7 external sites which all want to run javascript ... I don't let a single one of them do it.
Javascript is best treated as malware. But you pick and choose who you let run it.
You sure as hell don't let any old website run any old script, and call 3rd party scripts -- because that would be idiotic.
And, shockingly, that's how most of the people who make web pages expect it to work ... those ad and analytic companies and the other parasites in pages? Well, they can all fuck off and die.