201–210 of 325 posts
But since hacking is cool, we like this stuff.
Weird thing also is that using WiFi years ago was basically giving your data, when SSL websites where so rare. And we didn't even cared for it...
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Under pressure in an interview, yesterday, I found myself saying "'The Internet of Things' is short for 'The Internet of Things you don't need, sending surveillance data you don't want, to people you don't know.'"
> to people you don't know What is worse, your data being sent to people you know or to people you don't know ?
This is absolutely fucking preposterous. The 'Internet of Things' or whatever you want to call it – controllable peripherals, ubiquitous connections, stuff like that – is a pretty cool concept. I want to be easily able to do things like ask 'when will my laundry be finished?', or have my central heating come on when I start heading home. Not because it's massively beneficial, but because it removes some minor annoyan…
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I've been in many hotels that required the key card to enable power to the room. Some hotels used a simple switch activated by presence of an object in the slot. Many could detect if the NFC tag key was present, but not read the value. Only a few I have seen actually verified that the key was the right key.
I've seen those too. They're quite inconvenient because they actively prevent you from charging your phone or laptop while out of the room. They should leave some marked outlets enabled but usually they only do so for the mini-fridge. And of course "fancy" places build that into a cabinet.
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> It's easy to build it in a way so that the worst that the software can do is cause it to turn into a "dumb" fridge. If it's so easy, why don't more companies do it? Why didn't Nest build their thermostats so that when the battery runs out, it reverts to a "dumb" thermostat instead of turning off your heat? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/bug-nest-t...
Honestly, i'm not sure. It's clearly more work to do it that way, as you'd need multiple "layers" of firmware/code which all need to communicate and run on their own, but i personally see that as insurance against the exact situation you are describing. Nest is far from what i'd consider a good IOT company. They are the epitome of vendor lock in, proprietary and buggy code, and shitty support.
This is exactly the mechanism that gets people in trouble going to China for manufacturing. They say "I want you to build widgets" and they get a good price quote, and say "Wow, this is awesome!" because they have in their mind that "making things in China is cheap" but in reality its that if you cut a lot of corners you can make things really cheap, and since the contract doesn't say you can't cut corners, it is all "perfectly" legal. But the manufacturer knows what the buyer doesn't, and exploits that information asymmetry to make money at the buyer's expense without the buyer having any true recourse.
The hotel in question could have said in the RFQ, "System will be impervious to network traffic snooping and at no time will systems or a guest supplied computer be able to access the controls in another room."
Had they said that, the price quotes would have gone up and had the system the author speaks of been delivered, the Hotel could recover the costs of installing it from the vendor. But they hotel didn't even know they needed to ask for that since they no doubt would assume, "nobody would make something that shoddy would they?"
I learned about this when I saw one of the rules in a NetApp hardware contract that said "Manufacturer will install all components shown on the schematic on the final units in their designated locations." That seemed really odd. I learned that before that clause had been part of the standard contract, there had been a manufacturer who decided unilaterally that half of the noise suppression capacitors in the schematic were "unneeded." Units from that manufacturer started failing in odd ways in the lab.
Should be fairly simple to setup remote blackmail-material-collection. :(
I'm amused by the use of Modbus. I worked on Modbus networking back in the 1980's at Modicon (a company that disappeared long ago that created the "standard"). Using a protocol invented before the internet to control devices on a semi-public network is insane. The original Modbus was designed to communicate with factory devices controlled by logic controllers over serial and eventually over a custom token ring networ…
Of course, there are no security provisions whatsoever. If you can get a device on the LAN, you're golden. Every device, fully open to monitoring and control of every attached piece of equipment.
In the new world of inexpensive, battery powered LoRaWan to Ethernet bridges with tens of kilometers range, I can't even begin to imagine the industrial carnage we're heading for. A sufficiently funded attacker could find ways to implant remote monitoring and control in virtually every facility, where they can get a minimum-wage cleaning staff member hired. That means -- pretty much every facility (short of military, perhaps).
Exciting times.
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I've been in many hotels that required the key card to enable power to the room. Some hotels used a simple switch activated by presence of an object in the slot. Many could detect if the NFC tag key was present, but not read the value. Only a few I have seen actually verified that the key was the right key.
I've seen those too. They're quite inconvenient because they actively prevent you from charging your phone or laptop while out of the room. They should leave some marked outlets enabled but usually they only do so for the mini-fridge. And of course "fancy" places build that into a cabinet.
Though I wouldn't be surprised that the cleaning staff would "clean" it up if you weren't there. Might want to put out the Do-Not-Disturb sign too.
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There are way to build things so that this isn't a problem. Modularize. It's easy to build it in a way so that the worst that the software can do is cause it to turn into a "dumb" fridge. My problem with this whole hatred of iot is that it's not productive. it's a bunch of people commenting how the trend is dumb and how everything was so much better in the past. Nobody ever gives suggestions on how to improve it, or…
> It's easy to build it in a way so that the worst that the software can do is cause it to turn into a "dumb" fridge. If it's so easy, why don't more companies do it? Why didn't Nest build their thermostats so that when the battery runs out, it reverts to a "dumb" thermostat instead of turning off your heat? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/bug-nest-t...
Very few actually pull operating current from the 24v C wire if it even exists on the given system. If it doesn't, R (the switched 24v power for Heat and Cold signals) isn't guaranteed to continually have current. Only when your Heat is turned on (probably a standard toggle lightswitch on the side of your furnace) will there be current on the Rh line, and only when your AC is enabled (possibly a breaker shunt on the side of your house near the condenser unit in a small box) will there be current on the Rc line.
Nest tries to recharge it's battery by trickling the C wire, if available, and if not it will try to charge off of one of the R wires, either during normal operation, or it will try and "pulse" the heat signal to pull a little bit of current to keep going. Thermostats were designed at a time where they didn't even consume any electricity on their own. We're trying to retrofit computers into signaling system, not a circuit.