'Have You Changed the Password on Your Smart Fridge Lately?' - Granite Grok

‘Have You Changed the Password on Your Smart Fridge Lately?’

Nest thermostats offline in massive outage during U.S. heatwave

Nest outage cuts remote users off from Dropcams, thermostats

internet-of-thingsBeing a techie, I always wanted a “connected” home and started way back when X10 was the cool thing to play with.  Not exactly robust, sometimes glitchy to run and control.  I did give it up but always thought about picking it up again.  But when I read that a Government official, Carol Browning,  thought the advent of Smart Meters was license to have Govt change the relationship between electricity consumers and their power generator, I gave up on that REALLY quickly:

And so [we will be] giving people and companies a role in the management of how we use electricity.

Notice the collective “we” and then the “giving” part – it’s as if Gubmit

was always in charge of that “last mile” situation and NOW they would allow us to “have a role”.  That is, until some govt flunky says “You don’t need that” and throws a switch.  That’s when I decided I would continue to have a “dumb” house – and now with a dead furnace, you can bet your bippie that I won’t be getting a NEST or any other kind of smart thermostat – it’ll be yet another “round Honeywell” for me.  No “smart” security system that connects out.  No smart fridge that can do resupplies on its own or allow me to peer inside it when I’m at Market Basket.  No irrigation system that goes out to fetch the weather to see if it should water the garden – the list goes on and on.  I just don’t need the hassle and just don’t want to be in the situation of having to depend on something that might not be there when it is needed – including “smart” guns. While there may be advantages for “being in the collective for data aggregation”, sometimes it just pays to be self-reliant.  Sure, takes more time, more effort, and more planning but there may come a time when “stuff happens” makes you self-reliant whether you like it or not.

The post title is from here and it talks about Dyn (here, here, and here for more). However, given what happened this weekend at New Hampshire’s Dyn (a substantial DNS provider that underwent several massive DDoS attacks), the deal was sealed.  The wry comments is that the botnet(s) that made up the attacks were now made up of units in the Internet of Things – “smart” devices, like DVRs, fridges, NEST type devices, door locks (and the Ring doorbell?) not typically considered as being infected with malware.  Yet, there’s a lot going on techie sites about just that.

Thus, there is something to be said for dumb – no, those devices can’t talk to each other and be controlled by your smart phone or tablet.  Nor can they be at risk of going out of whack because they can’t do the “ET, phone home” back to the Cloud – how can they when the Cloud is in the digital equivalent of a N’oreaster complete with a scrambled phone switchboard?

 

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