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Home webcams that were hijacked to help knock popular websites offline last week are being recalled in the US.
Chinese electronics firm Hangzhou Xiongmai issued the recall soon after its cameras were identified as aiding the massive web attacks.
They made access to popular websites, such as Reddit, Twitter, Spotify and many other sites, intermittent.
Security experts said easy-to-guess default passwords, used on Xiongmai webcams, aided the hijacking.
The web attack enrolled thousands of devices that make up the internet of things - smart devices used to oversee homes and which can be controlled remotely.
Will we go through this over and over with toasters, refrigerators, and every other connected appliance?
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Webcams Used to Attack Reddit and Twitter Recalled
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:10PM
Well... OK... other than you got Betteridge backwards, he says the answer is always no but in this case the answer is obviously yes.
You can tell BTW that it was a professional hit. I know goofy as hell non-professional people and if they powned "all the worlds webcams" they would do something hilarious like make every image the camera ever returns be the goatse guy or the lemon party to tubgirl or . Or whatever the top meme is on /pol/ at this instant. Or creepy as hell eye or face staring back at the viewer with "big brother is watching you" maybe add a NSA logo to make it authentic. Or a NASA picture of the surface of the moon or mars, or even funnier a (fake?) pix of the supposed TV stage set for the faked lunar landings. That would be hilarious. Remember that "art project" statue of naked Hillary Clinton? Yeah I ... I ... can't even say it. Viewing that might turn me to stone like medusa. Maybe to keep the meme rollin and not just get the cams replaced immediately that type would add an overlay so every webcam video has pedobear waving on it. Anyway yeah the point is professionals hit stuff that doesn't really matter like twitter but will get coverage so they can blackmail like banks and stuff, whereas non professionals would almost certainly gain access, take a huge bong hit, and travel down an entirely different path.
The idea of some Chinese company getting all its cameras powned and they continue to take pictures but only display the goatse guy is like something I'd read in an 80s cyberpunk novel by Gibson. Either that or a multinational conspiracy to hunt down a guy who stole 4 megs of ram, oh wait that was an actual 80s cyberpunk novel although not a very good one.
Like many Stross readers I immediately freaked out at the news of powned cameras and make sure they were not loaded with project SCORPION STARE. Although goatse or SCORPION STARE I'm not entirely sure which is more psychologically scarring.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:14PM
Wait, Hillary is the goatse guy? My god, that explains so much.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:23PM
Well... OK... other than you got Betteridge backwards, he says the answer is always no but in this case the answer is obviously yes.
I didn't have him backward. When the question is
Will we go through this over and over with toasters, refrigerators, and every other connected appliance?
I obviously want the answer to be "No", in order to *not* go through all this again. (Of course I expect we will see the same problems for each and every new IoT device, but that was the slightly neurotic point: By putting the question into the headline, thus invoking Betteridges law, we might have changed it to "No" :-))
I agree that I would probably also have had some more entertaining ideas for the camera, but i.e. if someone is just a convinced privacy-fan, I could also imagine how he would use a classical surveillance device to disrupt a couple of cloud-services.
Cyberpunk: Talking about someone getting in trouble for a RAM module, I just read Neuromancer [wikipedia.org]. Although there the RAM story was only a tiny side-story. I can highly recommend that book.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:59PM
Ah I get what you're saying. Although by the strict definition if you want to Betteridge, it should be rephrased to
Do we want to go through this over and over with toasters, refrigerators, and every other connected appliance?
then the Betterridge answer is "no" and pretty much everyone agrees it should be "no"
As for the Neuromancer it was in your face randomly too abstract and too precise, like "ICE programs" come on pull my other leg way too soft sci fi vs the detailed and realistic biochemistry hacking the poor guy went thru. I didn't like the extreme density, it has to be read like 10 times to catch everything and catching everything feels like picking thru a mystery novel. I don't really like mystery novels, which might be part of the problem. I didn't like how the narrative sped up for the hard sci fi and slowed down elsewhere to the point of being noticeable. As if he didn't like the setting so step on the gas.
As a point of comparison "snow crash" was written about a decade later and just smells more realistic despite fundamentally being more ridiculous. Its kind of a science fictional "inspired by Jaynes". Its more of a smooth narrative, no sense of speeding up and slowing down, more of a story teller than a ... whatever neuromancer is.
Maybe "snow crash" is a story told by a story teller and "neuromancer" is a dramatic re-enactment documentary. Or sort of an unrealistic history vs an alternate history.
One thing they both have in common is endless desire to turn into movies that never works out, and either its going to be a long complicated miniseries for both or its going to be hopelessly dumbed down and suck. Given hollywood I suspect the latter. Some books just are not suited to be movies. Maybe snowcrash world would make an interesting and workable anime series, however.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:06PM
I'm remaining quietly optimistic about the upcoming Snow Crash movie. I can't picture Neuromancer being anything less than a couple season long series itself. "Extreme density" is a perfect phrase to describe to use for the it, and I say that enjoying detective novels myself.
I agree with the idea of a snow crash anime. It was over-the-top enough that I could see it transitioning well. Maybe done by the guy that did Aeon Flux back in the 90s if he's still around. THAT would be interesting.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!