4 ms·

Yeah is is the reason the only IOT product I own are light bulbs. If they fail it's not that bad. I definitely wouldn't trust a smart fridge, lock, thermostat,

Yeah is is the reason the only IOT product I own are light bulbs. If they fail it's not that bad. I definitely wouldn't trust a smart fridge, lock, thermostat, etc...

slg 9y ago
With maybe the exception of a lock, I wonder if that fear is justified without knowing the catastrophic failure rate of the "smart" functionality. There are plenty of ways that these devices can save you from the failure of "dumb" devices by keeping you aware of the status of your home. For example which scenario is more common: -A smart thermostat mistakenly turns off your heat in the dead of winter while you are on vacation causing your pipes to burst. -A smart thermostat lets you know that the heat is not working in the dead of winter while you are on vacation because the furnace died which allows you to fix the problem before your pipes burst. I don't know the answer to that, but I am not sure why we should assume the first scenario is more common without any real evidence.
- bluGill 9y ago
  > A smart thermostat mistakenly I disagree with your use of the word mistakenly here. With IoT we need to worry about intentional remote attacks. This is not a mistake. If we are not dealing with a malicious attacks then I would suspect that the second problem (system failure) is more likely.
  - slg 9y ago
    Hacking of IoT devices in another fear that has questionable justification (don't get me wrong, many IoT manufactures are verging on negligent with the level of security on their devices). Most hackers aren't chaotic evil caricatures raining down destruction just for the lolz. They are usually trying to gain money or power. What is the goal of taking over my smart thermostat and turning off the heat? What is the likelihood of that actually happening?
    - bluGill 9y ago
      > What is the goal of taking over my smart thermostat and turning off the heat? There are several 1: Look what I can do. If it is easy enough expect some kids (think 13 years old) doing it and laughing at the possible chaos they have caused. 2: lets rain chaos on those evil [insert any other country that you are at war with]. If I were to do this I'd change things so the average temperature was about right, but the heat and cooling would take turns changing the temperature by half a degree. Most people won't even notice right away, but their utility bill will be more than their monthly income and on a national scale the country is forced to dip into energy reserves. > What is the likelihood of that actually happening? 1: Very high. For any individual kid it is low, and like for an individual thermostat, but if you are the exception it doesn't matter that only 10 people were hit worldwide, what matters is you have to replace all your plumbing 2: somewhat unlikely, but if anyone can pull it off they can cause a lot of problems for the target country.
      - slg 9y ago
        Are we really at the stage that a country declaring cyber war on my thermostat has a higher likelihood than my furnace breaking? I am not saying that your example aren't possible. I am saying it is a game of odds. I have no reason to believe the odds of a catastrophic failure are increased by the introduction of a smart appliance to a greater extent than other catastrophic failures are decreased by said appliance.
        mahyarm 9y ago
        A smart thermostat can cycle a furnace on & off at high frequency and cause it to break down. Same with smart light controls. If there are specific models that burst into flames when you do this, then you can cause half a town to catch on fire at once. You could also hack all the smart thermostats at once and cause annoying brownouts due to crazy simultaneous demand happening all at once. You can also cause peaker plants to go on and off at an annoying unpredictable frequencies by making these spikes short. But to be honest, I doubt anyone will do this, since most vital infrastructure is relatively easy to sabotage and nobody has done it. A group of 100 organized assholes could do horrible damage to the US power grid today by going out to the middle of nowhere and blowing up a bunch of high voltage power transmission towers.
- cjCamel 9y ago
  It's still easier to break a window or kick in a door than to hack a smart lock. (I don't have one though)
  - cwilkes 9y ago
    It is easier to break one physical door. You want to break millions of virtual doors you need IoT devices.
- post_break 9y ago
  I got too comfortable with my smart lock and got locked out of my apartment once. It was not fun.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Definitely take the same precautions with respect to having a spare key somewhere that you'd presumably take with a dumb lock. (Not that I haven't burned myself a couple of times in the past, pre-smart lock, by locking myself out without a spare.)
- ghaff 9y ago
  Which is why I have a dumb thermostat (well, not totally dumb, but an old Honeywell manually programmable thing) plus a little homebrew Raspberry Pi project that tweets some basic information and will send me an email alert if the temperature drops below a certain threshold. I'd rather have the IoT device just be a sensor while the thermostat itself is more or less as dumb/reliable as possible. As you suggest, there are still failure modes but at least the thermostat isn't adding to them any more than necessary.

Yeah is is the reason the only IOT product I own are light bulbs. If they fail it's not that bad. I definitely wouldn't trust a smart fridge, lock, thermostat, etc...

slg 9y ago

With maybe the exception of a lock, I wonder if that fear is justified without knowing the catastrophic failure rate of the "smart" functionality. There are plenty of ways that these devices can save you from the failure of "dumb" devices by keeping you aware of the status of your home. For example which scenario is more common: -A smart thermostat mistakenly turns off your heat in the dead of winter while you are on vacation causing your pipes to burst. -A smart thermostat lets you know that the heat is not working in the dead of winter while you are on vacation because the furnace died which allows you to fix the problem before your pipes burst. I don't know the answer to that, but I am not sure why we should assume the first scenario is more common without any real evidence.

bluGill 9y ago
> A smart thermostat mistakenly I disagree with your use of the word mistakenly here. With IoT we need to worry about intentional remote attacks. This is not a mistake. If we are not dealing with a malicious attacks then I would suspect that the second problem (system failure) is more likely.
- slg 9y ago
  Hacking of IoT devices in another fear that has questionable justification (don't get me wrong, many IoT manufactures are verging on negligent with the level of security on their devices). Most hackers aren't chaotic evil caricatures raining down destruction just for the lolz. They are usually trying to gain money or power. What is the goal of taking over my smart thermostat and turning off the heat? What is the likelihood of that actually happening?
  - bluGill 9y ago
    > What is the goal of taking over my smart thermostat and turning off the heat? There are several 1: Look what I can do. If it is easy enough expect some kids (think 13 years old) doing it and laughing at the possible chaos they have caused. 2: lets rain chaos on those evil [insert any other country that you are at war with]. If I were to do this I'd change things so the average temperature was about right, but the heat and cooling would take turns changing the temperature by half a degree. Most people won't even notice right away, but their utility bill will be more than their monthly income and on a national scale the country is forced to dip into energy reserves. > What is the likelihood of that actually happening? 1: Very high. For any individual kid it is low, and like for an individual thermostat, but if you are the exception it doesn't matter that only 10 people were hit worldwide, what matters is you have to replace all your plumbing 2: somewhat unlikely, but if anyone can pull it off they can cause a lot of problems for the target country.
    - slg 9y ago
      Are we really at the stage that a country declaring cyber war on my thermostat has a higher likelihood than my furnace breaking? I am not saying that your example aren't possible. I am saying it is a game of odds. I have no reason to believe the odds of a catastrophic failure are increased by the introduction of a smart appliance to a greater extent than other catastrophic failures are decreased by said appliance.
      - mahyarm 9y ago
        A smart thermostat can cycle a furnace on & off at high frequency and cause it to break down. Same with smart light controls. If there are specific models that burst into flames when you do this, then you can cause half a town to catch on fire at once. You could also hack all the smart thermostats at once and cause annoying brownouts due to crazy simultaneous demand happening all at once. You can also cause peaker plants to go on and off at an annoying unpredictable frequencies by making these spikes short. But to be honest, I doubt anyone will do this, since most vital infrastructure is relatively easy to sabotage and nobody has done it. A group of 100 organized assholes could do horrible damage to the US power grid today by going out to the middle of nowhere and blowing up a bunch of high voltage power transmission towers.
cjCamel 9y ago
It's still easier to break a window or kick in a door than to hack a smart lock. (I don't have one though)
- cwilkes 9y ago
  It is easier to break one physical door. You want to break millions of virtual doors you need IoT devices.
post_break 9y ago
I got too comfortable with my smart lock and got locked out of my apartment once. It was not fun.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Definitely take the same precautions with respect to having a spare key somewhere that you'd presumably take with a dumb lock. (Not that I haven't burned myself a couple of times in the past, pre-smart lock, by locking myself out without a spare.)
ghaff 9y ago
Which is why I have a dumb thermostat (well, not totally dumb, but an old Honeywell manually programmable thing) plus a little homebrew Raspberry Pi project that tweets some basic information and will send me an email alert if the temperature drops below a certain threshold. I'd rather have the IoT device just be a sensor while the thermostat itself is more or less as dumb/reliable as possible. As you suggest, there are still failure modes but at least the thermostat isn't adding to them any more than necessary.