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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#181

Post by failingslowly »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

> if you want people to be more environmentally conscious [...] they need far better data

This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free with smart meters. (There are others, such as enabling better grid control.)

> You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes.

My one updates every few seconds and has a set of traffic light LEDs at the bottom giving a visible guide to energy use.

https://www.edfenergy.com/smart-meters/using-a-smart-meter/c...

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#182

Post by pmontra »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #146
b112 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem like useful advice. Understanding reality is always useful advice. Wishing reality isn't as it is, won't help. The mindset I have described, is how one must view all electronics. Unsecure.

But what does that mean in practice? Throw them all into the fire and go back to pen and paper?

Same thing as the security of the lock on our doors. We know that if somebody really want to get into our homes they will. In the case of IoT and computers add to it the automation of the attack.

What do we do with our homes? Tradeoffs.

We put some valuables in banks, we keep some at home. We insure precious items, if we do have them. We curse when burglars steal from us.

We also install curtains so people outside cannot look at us and at what we are doing at home. There are several level of protections to do the same thing for networks and devices. Of course vulnerabilities mean that they are not perfect. Curtains are not perfect too. Add to that imaging through walls with WiFi or mobile network signals, but that's still fringe at best even if you should read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469920

So, tradeoffs and be conscious of them.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#183

Post by cm2187 »

caslon wrote: post #147
cm2187 wrote: post #141

A bit of a dick move to remove the root password on an IOT device of a flat you only rent.

It was completely non-functional before, so there's really no loss.

I see half of the article about how he struggled to get the password, so not that dysfunctional.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#184

Post by leoedin »

alanfranz wrote: post #88
azalemeth wrote: post #38

A fun read! I feel compelled to say that all British (type G plugs) _have_ to be fused as the ring main has a maximum current of (typically) 30A yet the plug and socket maximum is 13A. So every appliance plug is fused, and the consumer unit has an RCD on most accessible circuits in addition to a circuit breaker. Some plugs don't make the fuse obvious, but the traditional values are 1A, 3A, 5A, 7A, 10A and 13A (iirc -…

Why don’t you use a 13A circuit breaker in UK? That’s what we do in the rest of the EU, I think. There’s a main input to the house which usually is around 15A-30A , then we’ve got multiple sublines with individual circuit breakers, typically 10A or 16A.

That seems really low. Most houses in the UK have a 60 - 100A supply. Just my stove alone can draw about 7.3kW - about 32A.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#185

Post by eastbound »

a2800276 wrote: post #154
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them. It also makes it more convenient to compromise the device from across the street (or across town with a directional antenna). Though of course that's not a problem if your security is up to par and the device continues to receive regular security updates, and we can only surmise that the author ha…

> we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case. Exactly what I was thinking! What luck that the author found the single IoT device out there that's a cobbled together piece of bodged electronics designed by a graduate from a webdev bootcamp with a Corel Draw focus. A device that, while only ~15 years old is not only hopelessly useless, but also obsolete an…

I’m passionate about the problem of software maintenance:

- Can we solve this with some companies dedicated to maintaining simple code (1 probe, 2 charts for each IoT, or more if the IoT subscribed for more) multiplied by 10k different IoT objects over 30 years?

- How would upgrading all of them look like? Can we batch the upgrade of NPM’s package.json? Can we define a minimum toolset, say NPM+Next+React, for long-term support?

- How can we keep software engineers passionate for that software over dozens of years? Can the challenge of upgrading and migrating to newer frameworks and applying security upgrade be ever a trove of genius and a competiton of the best hacks?

For the moment, when it’s done, it’s all GitHub Actions. Released in 2018. Well, not a good start. Plus everyone has a different pile of … in their actions, it’s all custom code, nothing is standardized, and each new IoT requires a new guy writing new ones.

- Is this already done in some part of OSS (openWrt?) and how do they deal with the boredom of engineers?

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#186

Post by Semaphor »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #122
b112 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

device continues to receive regular security updates Have to reply to this, and my response was covered a bit by your statement of "security up to par". Nothing should be considered secure. All those bug bounties are to entice black hats, into giving up juicy pre-0day vulnerabilities. So just because a device is up to date with security updates, we all must understand, there are countless bugs unknown, needing to be…

> Consider everything that is network connected as compromised. Everything. This doesn't seem like useful advice. If you know something is compromised, you're going to want to stop using it and build a clean system etc. You can't just do that continuously the instant you've built the new system. Likewise, how does monitoring even work? Every device and app wants to phone home to some random server. The connection wil…

I agree with your first part, but not with your second. It really depends what you use, you can easily build up a while home automation system that doesn't phone home or require internet at all

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#188

Post by cjfd »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

Sounds pretty good as such. The worry to have these days, though, is if we can also get this without energy usage data being traded between all sorts of shady companies and/or criminal organizations.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#189

Post by smingo »

Putting the WiFi SSID and password on the side of the energy monitor sensor box allowed for this:

> The whole thing was quite dissapointing. However, I do have a few Raspberry Pico microcontrollers lying around at home. If I could connect to the WiFi network of the energy manager directly and get the data from the server, I could just extract kW consumption from the API, multiply it by a correct rate and then display it on some Grafana instance.

Love it!

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#190

Post by verisimi »

cjfd wrote: post #188
jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

Sounds pretty good as such. The worry to have these days, though, is if we can also get this without energy usage data being traded between all sorts of shady companies and/or criminal organizations.

> shady companies and/or criminal organizations.

You mean energy companies and governments?

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