Safe from what?
daemonology.net
daemonology.net
My front door is locked. That will probably keep out the neighborhood teenagers who might be wandering around looking to grab a laptop off of someone's table. It wouldn't keep out a burglar with the minimal skill of "kicking down a door". But the obvious adult activity inside of the house serves as a fine deterrent in that case. A group of 3-4 armed criminals might not be kept out by a few unarmed people, but sturdy steel doors with heavy deadbolts, barred windows, an alarm system, and armed residents could be adequate in that case. But that wouldn't keep out a military attack force; I'd need my own army for that. But since there's nothing in my home that would be worth sending an army for, that's an unnecessary level of security.
The point of security measures is to make it more costly for someone to break in than it's worth for them, while simultaneously making it less costly for the consumer to gain that level of security than a successful attack would cost.
What type of threat does an attacker pose? What could they gain access to? What are the potential damages? What's the cost of mitigation? Your chosen strategy should be based on the answers to those questions.
Things get a bit hairy when every municipality has a SWAT team who might or might not know exactly which house contains a drug dealer.
Security on the internet is even hairier. When data that was originally collected for benign purposes can be aggregated and repurposed in all sorts of other ways several years down the line, it becomes difficult to tell whether you're dealing with neighborhood teenagers or an army.
/s
Every year an x number of kids die from a very large number of possible causes and unfortunately not all of those are preventable. But we all love children (well, at least most of us do) so that's an easy score for a headline writer.
The headline as I see it now is "Several baby monitors vulnerable to hacking," which is more descriptive than the given "Is your baby monitor safe?" but wouldn't have made as succinct of a headline.* Would the same post have been made if the headline were "Is your baby monitor private"? If it's not private, that'd be news to me, even if all somebody gets to overhear is "Goodnight, Moon" for the 10,000th time.
*I'm not saying "hacking" is a good word either, because that can mean a lot of different things, including "make the thing blow up."
Presumably the current news interest in baby monitors is whether they're safe (or which models are safe) from people using simple Google or Shodan searches to find these devices and use them to annoy or snoop on you, since that's exactly what's been happening.
Anyway you're imploring the media to do something it doesn't do -- to be more technical and less alarmist -- which is admirable but probably also futile.
And what a wonderful utopia that would be.
Just another example that you can get results that sound like "utopia" by enabling the right business model.
1) Distorting economic choices away from genuine preferences. Would we have such an obesity epidemic without Cola?
2) Distorting economic incentives away from genuine needs, most people working in advertising are actually generating negative work (they work to make others work against their interests and needs). All those producing advertising sustained products are also working perhaps at right angles to consumers genuine needs. Every billboard that is made, every campaign launched, every shill lying signifies in the final sense a theft...
3) Advertising funded businesses, ignoring direct influence via advertising spend (HSBC and the telegraph). The advert based funding model drives a 'buzzfeedization' where information services work for maximum distraction rather than providing information people want fast. Google wants you to be online more, not so you can get more done but so you can see more adverts. Will they tailor their search results so be slightly worse than ideal to keep you there longer? It would make economic sense to do so.
Businesses should be regulated very harshly to force them to compete on price, innovation and service delivery. No capitalist wants to compete in an efficient market, they must be forced.
It's just that the structure of digital media tends towards article-at-a-time rather than issue-at-a-time or even subscription consumption. For this reason, the structure is naturally geared toward clickbait-y titles everywhere, while in traditional print media the temptation for "clickbait" is mostly restricted to the title page.
See, CBC, just as alarmist and as factual as the author would prefer!
Fact is, the headline is intended to get you to stop and change your focus on this story so the news outlet can sell your eyes to whatever advertiser they promised you to. Let's not be naive.
Of course, if you're building a product or supplying a service, you should be concerned about any attacker and any outcome which your potential customers could plausibly be worried about [...]
The article starts pointing out that the question makes no sense and then gives a sensible interpretation of what it could mean to talk about safety without qualifications. I didn't read the CBC article but it seems at least possible that it talks about all the issues anyone could possibly be concerned about.
Anyway, the reason they don't give a figure of merit or context is because infinity is a good limit since it will never be reached. You can't beat an ideal, so they can easily circumvent Bettridge's Law by forcing you to affirm their sentiment, although to a useless question.