I just hope they never start embedding mobile radios in TVs to circumvent people who know better than to connect their TV to their network.
This is my concern with almost any "smart home", IoT type devices now.
As we've already seen with cars, it's entirely possible for a whole industry to shift towards anti-consumer measures like mandatory remote access, and for neither market competition nor laws and regulations to rein them in.
In other news, car theft was essentially a solved problem, where it had become so difficult to drive away that the most effective strategy was literally to break into someone's home/office and steal the real keys. Today, car theft is on the rise, and numerous researchers have demonstrated compromising the security of numerous models from entry-level to expensive prestige vehicles in a matter of seconds.
Not all remote control is good. Not all data sharing is good. Being permanently online is not always good. At some point, we as a society need to realise that and start regulating the products and services we use accordingly... Ideally before some mass hack breaches the privacy of millions of families with smart devices putting cameras and microphones in their homes, or causes every car of a certain model to suddenly accelerate to full speed in the middle of town or slam on the brakes on a high speed road, or otherwise causes some other kind of widespread damage that can't just be ignored or recovered afterwards.
This is my concern with almost any "smart home", IoT type devices now.
As we've already seen with cars, it's entirely possible for a whole industry to shift towards anti-consumer measures like mandatory remote access, and for neither market competition nor laws and regulations to rein them in.
In other news, car theft was essentially a solved problem, where it had become so difficult to drive away that the most effective strategy was literally to break into someone's home/office and steal the real keys. Today, car theft is on the rise, and numerous researchers have demonstrated compromising the security of numerous models from entry-level to expensive prestige vehicles in a matter of seconds.
Not all remote control is good. Not all data sharing is good. Being permanently online is not always good. At some point, we as a society need to realise that and start regulating the products and services we use accordingly... Ideally before some mass hack breaches the privacy of millions of families with smart devices putting cameras and microphones in their homes, or causes every car of a certain model to suddenly accelerate to full speed in the middle of town or slam on the brakes on a high speed road, or otherwise causes some other kind of widespread damage that can't just be ignored or recovered afterwards.