Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by mrpg on Friday December 15 2017, @04:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the #-sudo-nano-/etc/hosts dept.

Internet of Things users need to become sysadmins, America's Federal Bureau of Investigation says.

That's a summary of the Feds' blog post, published this week, in which the agency's Beth Anne Steele wrote that Things are best deployed on their own network, with an off-switch.

Steele's post offered a checklist explaining how consumers can best secure their stuff, including a suggestion to: "Isolate 'IoT' devices on their own protected networks" – which means you'll want a firewall between your broadband modem and the switch that connects the devices.

The checklist might reach beyond the capabilities of the average IoT buyer, who just wants to swipe the phone app to control their lights (because the wall is so far away), but on its own, that's a point worth making. So here's the full list, with El Reg commentary.

"Change default usernames and passwords?" Brain shutting down. Too. Much. Techno-babble.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Friday December 15 2017, @07:33AM (2 children)

    by anubi (2828) on Friday December 15 2017, @07:33AM (#610174) Journal

    The problem is that we are not driving it. We have to install "drivers". Which are copyrighted works.

    If you think the internet is a problem, wait until we get self-driving cars, with Javascript ( legislated into cars so that businesses can enforce warranty terms or control who you have service your car and when ).

    I buy an clothes dryer, I expect it to dry clothes. If you wanna sell me one that calls me on my phone when my load's done, fine. But remember how many of us never ever figured out how to set the clocks on our VCR!

    I can't be spending my time debugging your stuff. Expecting me to do this is tantamount to you selling me a car, and expecting me to become an expert in OBDII P-Codes. If the car won't start or run right, that's what warranty repair is for. If the manufacturer has made something so finicky that he can't stand behind his work ( or if he was fixing the brakes, stand in front of his work! ), I have no business forking money over for the thing.

    My car comes with a controller set up at the factory to do a specific thing. It should do that. By default. I did not have to go in and tweak my transmission controller to get it to shift correctly.

    I firmly believe any IOT thingie should come correctly setup by default, and if your average guy that never set the clock on his VCR ( which I think was completely asinine on part of the VCR makers, given time codes are sent on the OTA VITS [wikipedia.org]anyway! ), then some designer needs to take the time to do it right.

    I am getting really fed up with having to sacrifice my privacy, knowledge of how the thing works, and being generally technically ignorant so Congress can pander to "Rightsholders" who want technological "locks" so only THEY can do something, not ME. .... Then have the gall to tell me the fuckup is MY fault! You don't know how much I would love to respond to Business the same way they present themselves to me when they hand me forms to sign with capital letters "READ CAREFULLY - THIS IS A LEGALLY BINDING DOCUMENT By requiring my enabling Javascript on your site, you agree to UNLIMITED LIABILITY for what your code does in my machine - said document spoken in the same way that Business does business with a Customer. But nice people like us won't talk that way to a Business.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 15 2017, @10:55AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday December 15 2017, @10:55AM (#610232) Journal

    Your post puts me in mind of the good people in the Right to Repair movement. "If you can't fix it, you don't own it" is one of their mottos.

    So now that we're in the era of corporate lock-down, rent-not-own, what's the recourse? The average consumer will reflexively buy the new shiny in front of them without thought to the implications, and that will cock things up for the rest of us. If it comes to software we have, thank the Maker, open source, but should we, can we, have the same when it comes to hardware? Will there be a System76 of washers and dryers? Do we start local manufacturing collectives where we take scrap metal and materials and re-process it into new appliances?

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Friday December 15 2017, @10:08PM

    by legont (4179) on Friday December 15 2017, @10:08PM (#610499)

    Yes, and I'd like to add to it... if you sold to me a device, it is supposed to work without giving me any harm and without any updates from you. If you need to update my device to prevent a harm, you'd better return my money and then some multiple of it.

    You have no rights to change the look and feel of my device either. It is mine and the interface is supposed to stay without changes forever and do correctly all the functionality that existed at the time of the sale. I have no time to learn whatever idiot updates your so called engineers decided to push out this week. I have other more interesting things to do.

    Finally, the most important. If computing is not the primary function of the device (such as for a car) it should work with computer removed. Why? Because the morons who design our cars got into a habit of fixing pure mechanical issues (say engine vibration) through a software updates (say by prohibiting certain RPMs). This makes engines bad because without computers they would have to actually fix the underlying problem instead of hiding it. Just wait till airplanes start falling off the skies because of a chip reboot. (Our computer got a cosmic ray hit, sorry have a wonderful crash)

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.