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Turning lights on at 3 a.m. is a nuisance. Knowing when lights go on and off can tell you when the people are not in their room - which could help if you wanted
by eloff 11y ago
Turning lights on at 3 a.m. is a nuisance. Knowing when lights go on and off can tell you when the people are not in their room - which could help if you wanted to break in and steal their stuff. Overall quite disconcerting how lax they are with security.
- Kliment 11y agoI think the implication was that some asshole can obtain photos of you sleeping by opening the curtains and switching on the lights in the middle of the night. A nuisance, sure, but also a massive violation of privacy.
- Biganon 11y agoYou'd need to access the balcony first, assuming there's one. Why would you think of that first?
- eric_h 11y ago> You'd need to access the balcony Or a camera equipped drone.
- pidg 11y agoThis is starting to sound like the plot of an NCIS episode.
- syntheticnature 11y agoOr CSI: Cyber, except they need to add something brain-breakingly wrong to those of us in the know for that.
- noir_lord 11y ago"I've got RED CODE!!!" - Queue hacking montage. It made Tron look technically accurate.
- hamburglar 11y agoDon't worry, this hotel also has a modbus-controlled window washer's crane on the same network.
- Jemmeh 11y agoI would say most hotels have a first floor with rooms. I was at one recently where the "balcony" was connected by a small path to the pool, so it was purposefully easy to access.
- larrik 11y agoI didn't get that implication at all, that's some creepy stuff there.
- knodi123 11y agoWait, doesn't everybody think about the voyeuristic implications of any new technology?
- forgetsusername 11y ago>the implication was that some asshole can obtain photos of you sleeping by opening the curtains and switching on the lights in the middle of the night. So, somebody is going to set up shop across the way, in what is probably another commercial building, commit a couple of crimes, all to take a picture of some random, likely unidentifiable person sleeping in a hotel bed? Personally, I'm not very worried about that. I mean, it's not like there aren't easier attack vectors for creeping on people in hotel rooms if you were so inclined.
- na85 11y agoHow about setting up shop next door to get pics of $random_politician getting a blowjob for blackmail material?
- uptown 11y agoYou or I, probably not. But just this week Erin Andrews won a $55 million legal case where somebody had intentionally booked a room next-door to her hotel room, then modified the peephole to her room, in order to film her naked. Certainly, there's people intent on prying into the private lives of others.
- AJ007 11y agoPretty big deal if you are not protecting your customer's privacy http://abcnews.go.com/US/erin-andrews-jury-set-deliberate-75-million-lawsuit/story?id=37460110 http://abcnews.go.com/US/erin-andrews-jury-set-deliberate-75...
- garethadams 11y agoBecause of this[1] Chrome extension, I wasn't sure whether you were talking about Donald Trump [1]: http://somerichasshole.com/ http://somerichasshole.com/
- johannes1234321 11y agoWell, if lights (and the article mentioned TV) repeatedly goes on at 3 a.m. this ca give quite bad reputation to the hotel. A few bad ratings hat reservation sites can have a notable impact on the business.
- jerf 11y agoTurning the lights on a 3am is a nuisance. Writing while true; do turn_on_all_lights $IPADDRESS; done is enough to ruin your night's sleep. Fighting with the lights that won't go off will probably pump enough adrenaline into your system to wake you up enough that you're not going back to sleep anytime soon. And why not do that to the entire block of addresses you can reach, of course? It's no "steal identity, rack up tens of thousands of debt" level of nuisance, but it's enough that some basic security is definitely called for. Given the capability of the devices on both side (i.e. we're not dealing with "embedded" 1MHz processors here), client and server side validation of SSL certificates on an SSL connection, combined with some basic physical security to detect that someone's pried the Android off the wall (this can be something like "seal" stickers; we're going for detection here more than prevention), would have had a pretty good cost/benefit ratio. (Remember, the goal here isn't to make the security "perfect", merely to make hacking it more expensive than what is being protected, which in this case still isn't that much. Nobody's going to risk being physically fingered as the room that pried out the Android tablet just to screw with lights.)
- ams6110 11y agoGiven the capability of the devices on both side ... Your're not wrong, but the other point is they are swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. What wrong with a simple light switch for gods sake. Why would a hotel spend hundreds of dollars to do what a $2 device can do more reliably and securely?
- Someone 11y agoThere might be significant cost savings in the ability to power off a room remotely instead of having to send someone over when a guest checks out. I would be more worried about the tv, the faucets and air conditioning, though. Also, some hotels manage to have the tv showing a welcome message when you enter.
- soylentcola 11y agoSure. I work in a large university building and can power up/down various systems from my desk for the same reason. But it doesn't require a full tablet computer in each room. These are simple network addressable devices on their own VLAN that allow me to (for example) create an interface that sends a string of commands like a remote control, provided I give proper auth. If you're a regular person in any of the rooms in the building, you can't easily gain access to the VLAN, much less connect to any of the networked controllers in the rooms. As a result, I can shut things down from my office or set up schedules to do the same. I can monitor usage and save resources (lamp hours on projectors and lighting, etc) The idea of using a full-on tablet computer is just silly and sounds more like something I'd do while tinkering at home and was looking for a use for some old phone or tablet sitting in a drawer. It's not something I'd put in any enterprise or commercial space.
- oh_sigh 11y agoAlso, you may be able to start a fire in someones room by constantly switching lights/outlets on/off