101–110 of 175 posts
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At which point you have a brick with a microphone, and a pretty blue light, right?
Not if it is configured to connect to a server in your home with all the data it needs to function.
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I'd love to see the INTERNET of Things be replaced by the INTRANET of Things. Remote access can be handled through a VPN, so there's no need for a remote server. I'm assuming that the device in question has computing hardware that's at least on par with a $9 CHIP. What's really needed is for secure and easy to set up VPNs (to connect back to your home network) to become a thing, then the remote access problems are ta…
So as a rough straw man sketch of how such a thing could work: 1. Consumer grade routers include a secure VPN endpoint. Whenever the router connects, it registers its internet-facing address with some vendor-specific DNS service under a name unique to that router but persistent at least until the router is factory-reset. 2. Devices on the local WiFi network can request a VPN access token. Optionally this requires a s…
I honestly think most of the pieces are there. My old router, an ASUS RT-AC56U, has an OpenVPN server built in. It also supports dynamic DNS through an Asus-provided service. iOS (and probably Android) supports VPN-on-demand.
This is basically all of the infrastructure needed to do what you suggest.
The only piece missing is the easy-to-use provisioning/management piece.
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Agreed. A bear that records voices and gives remote access should not need to store data on a server. Store the data in the bear. That's the way these types of bears have always been. The only thing new here is remote access... Storing my kid's private voice recordings on your server is just plain creepy even if you don't leave it wide open.
Sure! But in this case, part of the functionality was that friends and family could send voice messages to the bear, which are then approved by the parent in app, before being pushed to the bear. Based on how well the company is doing, it seems like this isn't really functionality that is deserved but it does sound like the justification for storing (some) messages is reasonable.
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The VPN does introduce a lot of complication, what if we had publicly routable IP addresses from any network in the world and then just used default deny policies on our firewalls to secure networks and encrypted protocols to secure data? Someone should really get to work on developing such a technology stack. /s Sarcasm aside, I completely agree with you and as soon as someone offers iPhone/Siri level functionality…
Apple is in a good position to do this. Unfortunately, they keep paring down their product line and I could reasonably see them dropping the Airport products. Maybe the OpenVPN guys can do it? They've got clients for every platform and seem to be present in some consumer-grade routers. Infrastructure-wise, iOS has on-demand VPN capability and I'm sure Android does too. All the pieces are there, the only thing it need…
I would love to see some of the features of iCloud moved into an Airport type device with expandable storage and modular hardware that I can simply swap out when it fails. I realize Siri level capabilities would take more hardware than the typical router contains but I feel like a Mac mini may even have the necessary horsepower to do the amount of cloud computing my iPhone requires in a day.
The hard parts are creating the map data to begin with and training the voice recognition but once those are complete why can't I just run them on local hardware?
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At which point you have a brick with a microphone, and a pretty blue light, right?
I have some ideas for a more strict but more user friendly household firewall device and corresponding UI, if something really really needs the Internet. But your lights, TV, etc. don't live in an Amazon datacenter.
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So as a rough straw man sketch of how such a thing could work: 1. Consumer grade routers include a secure VPN endpoint. Whenever the router connects, it registers its internet-facing address with some vendor-specific DNS service under a name unique to that router but persistent at least until the router is factory-reset. 2. Devices on the local WiFi network can request a VPN access token. Optionally this requires a s…
I like this idea. I honestly think most of the pieces are there. My old router, an ASUS RT-AC56U, has an OpenVPN server built in. It also supports dynamic DNS through an Asus-provided service. iOS (and probably Android) supports VPN-on-demand. This is basically all of the infrastructure needed to do what you suggest. The only piece missing is the easy-to-use provisioning/management piece.
I think you could even have a BT pin, so it would require a little security (eg, neighbors don't have your pin). It should be relatively straightforward to have a BT profile for "token authority".
It certainly would be reasonably easy to use on most devices: just press button and connect to the token device.
> The Germans had a good point: kids' toys which record their voices and send the recordings up to the web pose some serious privacy risks. It's not that the risks are particularly any different to the ones you and I face every day with the volumes of data we produce and place online (and if you merely have a modern phone, that's precisely what you're doing), it's that our tolerances are very different when kids are…
Yeah, I'm not worried about my kid saying things that will get him in trouble. However... he repeats literally everything that he hears, sometimes verbatim. Sometimes hours or days layer. To be honest, it's really creepy at times. Plus, he doesn't really have a filter, so he'll talk about everything he sees at school or on the playground, just chattering about all day to himself. So I'm worried about my kid saying th…
(No real source, but a random German article that quotes this anecdote: http://www.badische-zeitung.de/panorama/der-freundliche-herr...)
IoT should die a swift and permanent death. Alas, that wont happen.
Seriously? That's a fairly aggressive comment to just throw out there without any backing arguments. You really can't think of anything valuable about hooking up small devices/sensors to the internet? Do you really believe the potential for stronger security is so low that it's not worth investigating? I work at an IoT company and we take security far more seriously than some would say is necessary or even reasonable…
Even if a self-driving car drives perfectly for 10,000,000 miles before swerving in to a crowd of people, no one is going to buy one.
Okay, first of all: >the average parent.. is technically literate enough to know the wifi password but not savvy enough to understand how the "magic" of daddy talking to the kids through the bear (and vice versa) actually works [or] that every one of those recordings... is stored as an audio file on the web. If it is not considered amazingly stupid, or at least ignorant to not understand that the magic talking bear h…
> Hardly identity thief material. True, but potentially very dangerous material in other ways. It's not hard to image kidnappers piecing together stolen audio clips to create fake messages as part of a ransom attempt. Or scammers creating audio clips to scare parents and extract money. A large bank of audio clips from a child could be used against that child's family in all sorts of ways, especially if the parents do…