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I think you nailed it: hackers don't want to write blog posts saying "damn, this thing was pretty well made". Perhaps an open-source effort to document & track

by wepple 10y ago

I think you nailed it: hackers don't want to write blog posts saying "damn, this thing was pretty well made". Perhaps an open-source effort to document & track what work has been done, even if it's just pulling firmware images and taking a look around. Maybe some kind of gamification to motivate researchers to pull things apart and report what they see.

Klathmon 10y ago
It's not just that people don't want to write about it, it's that people don't want to read it either. You'd never see a post on the front page of HN about how IoT device X was well designed and is generally secure, but you see (and will continue to see) them top out about how awful they are. Just look at this thread. Half the answers to "what are some good IoT devices" is "lol there aren't any"... The HN crowd doesn't want good IoT devices, they want to make fun of bad ones.
- sbierwagen 10y ago
  People don't want to read it, otherwise the front page of HN would be carpeted with astroturfed 5 star reviews of bad products. (See also: most Amazon reviews)
voltagex_ 10y ago
I'll write one when I find something worthy of it. I've got stupidly high standards though. I've bought everything from wireless hard drives to $250 Wifi routers to $20 ethernet/3G bridges and the quality of the firmware is pretty garbage on all of them. I see brand new devices on kernel 2.4 and 2.6 with no upgrade plans in sight, and hacked up kernel trees that have no chance of building except on the developers' Red Hat 9 (!) workstations. http://www.devttys0.com/blog/ http://www.devttys0.com/blog/ is another good place to follow. I guess it's more fun to write a negative article, not to mention it gets a lot more views.
- wepple 10y ago
  yeah, I love ttys0 blog, it's great. Perhaps a good strategy would be to still offer an interesting read despite a lack of "hey i found epic 0days and hacked everything": - here's my methodology - here are some cool ways they made this thing robust - here is how I tried/successfully defeated the defenses - some tooling I created to break this thing

by wepple 10y ago

Klathmon 10y ago

It's not just that people don't want to write about it, it's that people don't want to read it either. You'd never see a post on the front page of HN about how IoT device X was well designed and is generally secure, but you see (and will continue to see) them top out about how awful they are. Just look at this thread. Half the answers to "what are some good IoT devices" is "lol there aren't any"... The HN crowd doesn't want good IoT devices, they want to make fun of bad ones.

sbierwagen 10y ago
People don't want to read it, otherwise the front page of HN would be carpeted with astroturfed 5 star reviews of bad products. (See also: most Amazon reviews)

voltagex_ 10y ago

I'll write one when I find something worthy of it. I've got stupidly high standards though. I've bought everything from wireless hard drives to $250 Wifi routers to $20 ethernet/3G bridges and the quality of the firmware is pretty garbage on all of them. I see brand new devices on kernel 2.4 and 2.6 with no upgrade plans in sight, and hacked up kernel trees that have no chance of building except on the developers' Red Hat 9 (!) workstations. http://www.devttys0.com/blog/ http://www.devttys0.com/blog/ is another good place to follow. I guess it's more fun to write a negative article, not to mention it gets a lot more views.

wepple 10y ago
yeah, I love ttys0 blog, it's great. Perhaps a good strategy would be to still offer an interesting read despite a lack of "hey i found epic 0days and hacked everything": - here's my methodology - here are some cool ways they made this thing robust - here is how I tried/successfully defeated the defenses - some tooling I created to break this thing