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> But there's the upside to everyone putting a password: You can choke off all those household devices that demand Internet access! Not for long. As those dev
by elihu 10y ago
> But there's the upside to everyone putting a password: You can choke off all those household devices that demand Internet access!
Not for long. As those devices move to prepaid low-data rate cellular service, you won't be able to stop them from phoning home, short of RF shielding.
(Sometimes I wonder if a lot of the older electronic devices we consider junk now will become desirable in the future because they "just work" without the various user-hostile spyware, DRM, rootkits, anti-repair features and remote-exploitable security vulnerabilities that seem to be proliferating in modern devices.)
- pdimitar 10y agoThat's exactly the reason why I curse myself for not going into an engineering highschool and university and becoming a professional electronics engineer -- on top of being a programmer. Nowadays I feel like a helpless puppet in the hands of vendors that want to make their tech transmit as much data as possible to their servers. I am not even sure the TV I have at home (and to which I didn't give any internet access) can't secretly negotiate a connection with my router. I too feel that some of us have to start collecting some older tech just in case.
- Arizhel 10y agoOlder devices are going to have limited capabilities due to their older technology, plus when they break you won't be able to repair them because of the unavailability of parts. A better solution is to build our own devices using readily-available parts, such as Raspberry Pis, and make the designs and source code freely available. Then these things can be updated as technology improves, and their cost will be low because they won't have their availability constrained by being out of production.