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As an embedded developer that has done contracting for people with all of the capital, and none of the misunderstanding of electronics, I'd like to offer a thou
by flyingcircus3 9y ago
As an embedded developer that has done contracting for people with all of the capital, and none of the misunderstanding of electronics, I'd like to offer a thought experiment. I realize that Amazon has all sorts of guardrails in place, but I can control anything in my house with Alexa today, regardless of Amazon's prior approval, because I can make anything in my house appear to my Alexa as a Hue hub.
The internet has already reverse engineered Alexa to make it a weapon, and unsavvy people like shiny things. So how long until an unsavvy wealthy person hires an embedded developer to integrate his entire house to work under the emulated hue model? Because the day its up and running, that unsavvy rich guy is going to throw a party. And that embedded developer might just show up and say "Hey alexa, set a timer for everyone's sleep monitors within your geofence. when they're all asleep, disarm the security system for 1 hour, turn up everyones binaural sleep aids for one hour, and hire me three ubers so I can make a clean getaway with the goldbars in the basement. Oh yeah, Alexa, unlock the vault.
- gamblor956 9y agoI realize that Amazon has all sorts of guardrails in place, but I can control anything in my house with Alexa today, regardless of Amazon's prior approval, because I can make anything in my house appear to my Alexa as a Hue hub. That's not even remotely true without a significant amount of physical hacking and a substantial amount of software programming. Most appliances are not smart devices and do not provide simple control interfaces, let alone APIs that can integrate with Alexa, et al.
- flyingcircus3 9y agohttp://lmgtfy.com/?q=emulated+hue http://lmgtfy.com/?q=emulated+hue I wonder if the embedded world has been utilizing the same economies of scale that web developers "discovered" 20 years ago. There are significant amounts of hardware hacking going on in every engineers house as they try to invent a better lightswitch. There are opensource projects, such as HomeAssistant, and Domoticz, which allow anyone to stand on the shoulders of these giants.