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Why is this low quality fear mongering Fox news post on the top page of HN? There is no evidence of "hacking" here, and Nest's official response was that the pe

Why is this low quality fear mongering Fox news post on the top page of HN? There is no evidence of "hacking" here, and Nest's official response was that the person had a poor or breached password. I get that this would be a nightmare situation, but it has nothing to do with Nest (at least with the current info)?

danso 8y ago
Hacker News is not just about "hacking". I posted it here as a reflection of the status quo about what people (don't) know about the implications of connecting home services to a centralized network.
- bluetidepro 8y ago
  I wasn't referring to "hacking" the way you took it. I meant it in terms of how the article used it, I totally agree and understand Hacker News is not just about hacking, in the context you mean. I just meant like this article, in general, is pretty low quality and just about poor password usage from the person they interviewed. No data breach or anything in terms of Nest.
- zenexer 8y ago
  The article itself is very low quality. This isn’t even news. Stuff like this happens to thousands of people every day.
jancsika 8y ago
How is two-factor authentication not a prerequisite for using Nest in the first place? I know we've moved as a society fairly quickly from expecting users to generate entropy to something that is actually secure. So it's understandable that some companies lag behind. But Google is attempting to connect everything they can to the internet. If the bar for them isn't to at least prevent the easiest, most obvious hack from causing catastrophes then we're living in an idiocracy. A user reusing passwords is bad. But in a civilized technological society the consequences for doing that cannot be a disembodied voice appearing communicating with one's child to give them nightmares. Google's security teams surely know you can't "educate the user" to stop reusing passwords. If their official response is, "We did the right thing by suggesting two-factor authentication," then it doesn't matter how many engineers they throw at the problem. Evil is afoot.
- hkchad 8y ago
  They only seem to support SMS 2 factor, yippee...almost worse than just have a really good password.
- zenexer 8y ago
  Nobody else forces 2FA, so it’s not really fair to blame Google here. Even Apple, while strongly encouraging it, doesn’t actually force you to enable it.
smt88 8y ago
Local Fox affiliates != Fox News Still low quality, but for different reasons.

danso 8y ago

Hacker News is not just about "hacking". I posted it here as a reflection of the status quo about what people (don't) know about the implications of connecting home services to a centralized network.

bluetidepro 8y ago
I wasn't referring to "hacking" the way you took it. I meant it in terms of how the article used it, I totally agree and understand Hacker News is not just about hacking, in the context you mean. I just meant like this article, in general, is pretty low quality and just about poor password usage from the person they interviewed. No data breach or anything in terms of Nest.
zenexer 8y ago
The article itself is very low quality. This isn’t even news. Stuff like this happens to thousands of people every day.

jancsika 8y ago

How is two-factor authentication not a prerequisite for using Nest in the first place? I know we've moved as a society fairly quickly from expecting users to generate entropy to something that is actually secure. So it's understandable that some companies lag behind. But Google is attempting to connect everything they can to the internet. If the bar for them isn't to at least prevent the easiest, most obvious hack from causing catastrophes then we're living in an idiocracy. A user reusing passwords is bad. But in a civilized technological society the consequences for doing that cannot be a disembodied voice appearing communicating with one's child to give them nightmares. Google's security teams surely know you can't "educate the user" to stop reusing passwords. If their official response is, "We did the right thing by suggesting two-factor authentication," then it doesn't matter how many engineers they throw at the problem. Evil is afoot.

hkchad 8y ago
They only seem to support SMS 2 factor, yippee...almost worse than just have a really good password.
zenexer 8y ago
Nobody else forces 2FA, so it’s not really fair to blame Google here. Even Apple, while strongly encouraging it, doesn’t actually force you to enable it.

smt88 8y ago

Local Fox affiliates != Fox News Still low quality, but for different reasons.