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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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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(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.
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(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!