It's scary to think about the potential for leveraging IoT devices for DDoS attacks. Your dishwasher, fridge, thermostat, mattress, chairs could all be partipants without you even knowing.
It's an arms race, and we measly individual consumers with real life concerns that don't center around defending our psyche from nonstop sensory ambush stand a very poor chance.
I think it is silly. You think it is silly, but people will buy this crap. They think apps will solve their problems.
People with money to spend are choosing design, real estate (location over structure), experiences and food.
It's really more than sufficient to me. In fact, with everything else I have going on, I don't need my refrigerator texting me whenever it thinks it deserves my attention. That would actually be inconvenient.
Then, there's this hidden cost of the purported "convenience". More stuff updating, hacked etc. And, with the thousand other devices, now I have to spend time configuring what I want to manage, etc.
Reminds me of something I read years ago about the hidden costs of some tech. In one anecdote, subway riders were excited when A/C was installed on the train. Now, they could ride in comfort. What they didn't realize was the A/C exhaust heated the platform another 10 degrees or so, and they were actually less comfortable while waiting.
In all seriousness, it could be a good niche market "not internet capable".
Alternatively, in the summertime they could crank up your heat and potentially kill any pets you have at home.
http://www.recode.net/2016/9/29/13099092/samsung-exploding-r...
What if you have wood floors? What if water shorted electrical devices? All of this could cost you thousands in repairs.
My main concern is these devices causing bodily harm
That's a good situation for mandatory safety codes (such as the FDA requirements for 2 physical interlocks on microwaves [1]).
[1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...
But would you notice if your thermostat was running a little slower than usual? Would it even occur to anyone that their dishwasher might have caught a virus? These things could participate in DDoS attacks all year long and nobody would suspect a thing. And even if someone did, fixing them would be much more difficult than taking your laptop to the nearest Best Buy (or even impossible, thanks to DRM).
But then I'd guess the crooks will just compromise the router itself.
In 99% of cases these devices are exploited using vulnerabilities in the software or configuration added by the vendor (such as telnet access with root:root), not bugs in Linux.
>open source
How exactly would a permissively licensed kernel get vendors to disclose the source code?
But, it seems that ISPs could play a more pivotal role in combating this, and that they'd have financial incentive to do so.
For instance, what if we built more security/detection into routers/gateways (especially those that ISPs push)?
What if we combined this with mandates for ISPs to better monitor their traffic and established minimum standards for doing so?
I won't be surprised if we see, before the end of the year, news along the lines of "Toaster catches virus, leaves owner with $5K data bill." Why bear any costs when you can pass them on to your captive customers?
If the network starts to serve an increasingly disproportionate amount of illegitimate traffic for n customers, then the ISP will have to increase throughput (and costs) to continue serving n customers.
It's tempting to argue that they could just pass the extra costs on to customers, but that obviously makes them less competitive, especially vs an ISP that better manages costs.
Most home/consumer routers lack the capability to throttle a specific device, and most consumers wouldn't think to configure this if the capability was there.
There's a good argument to say that they should be throttled by their own software, but the basic premise of the issue is that IoT software is badly designed, badly programmed, and badly maintained, so I wouldn't hold out much hope of throttling in the device itself.