Thought you’d approve. But then, you do naivete so well. Why mess it up? Leave the cyn to me - I distrust everybody, and you’re much nicer than that.
I think you may be in the wrong room.
Banana skins turn brown when frozen.
Well, looks like I’ll be babying along this vintage '70s SubZero refrigerator for a few more years if I can help it…
On a more serious note, I’ve never trusted networked computing devices in the home to have any security on them worth a damn. I’ve applied my security to the NAT/router level, where I block unsolicited incoming traffic, assign IPs in the DHCP database to each of my own devices to help see what’s connected and when, and check the logs from time to time to see if there are any odd connections being made.
There are no embedded systems with Internet access in my house other than a couple of Blu-Ray players, everything else is either a PC or a cellphone. If there should be other devices at some point then they’ll be QoSed down to where they can’t do anything quickly on the Internet as theoretically they shouldn’t need to do anything quickly, and it should be fairly obvious if something’s up based on the logs. We’ll just have to wait and see.
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Well you never know when that skinny lady from down the street will come over and inhale a 72 oz steak in under 3 minutes.
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Not a terribly impressive description; but they fairly clearly mean ‘the devices either had public IPs or enough relevant ports forwarded that they might as well have, rather than being behind a nasty little plastic NAT box (which, while not designed for anything resembling real security, does break a lot of unsolicited inbound traffic)’.
That’s a fairly salient distinction in the world of devices-with-terrible-security.
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I have no opinion there, since fresh-off-the-vine and week-in-the-vegetable-crisper tomatoes taste equally foul to me. But my wife maintains a collection of warm, limp, wrinkling tomatoes in a basket on the countertop (“maintains” may not be the right word) and we don’t talk about it, since it seems to make her happy.
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Are we saying here that the NSA will know how much ice cream I eat?
All is lost.
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What??!? You connected your Blu-Ray player to the network?
I’ve noticed that every electronic device sold for living-room use these days is offered with a crippled Linux based player-of-some-services, to be connected to the net. As an antidote, I put an old Mac Mini on top of the Internet-enabled disc player and connected it to display its output on the Internet-enabled TV set, instead of connecting those other devices to the network at all.
And my refrigerator has only a compressor, a couple fans and an ice-maker, as God intended.
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One of the players connects to do updates, and was made before the Blu-Ray standard was fully ratified, so it has done a couple of system updates, that’s it. The other one connects to Crackle, Youtube, and most importantly NPR, so I can listen to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! off-regular-hours easily.
I have supplemented these areas with PCs, I’m liking XBMC. Works fairly well. Some day I’ll get that MythTV setup built and running, but to do it the way I want will be a fairly major undertaking.
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Creepy toaster - waaaant!
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It’s also worth noting that Intel has decided that the Internet of Things is where it’s at. Intel CEO Rattner speaking about CES and ‘context-awareness’:
He described the process in terms of not only "hard sensors" that track physical attributes such as light, heat, pressure and motion, but also "soft sensors" such as a user's calendar, social network activity and Web browsing habits. "What context awareness does is collect all of that, some of which is up-to-the-minute on the physical sensors and some of which is accumulated incrementally over a long expanse of time through these soft senses, to create devices that really anticipate your needs," he said. Rattner said such tools will "be like your best friend" because they will "know where you are in space and time, and understand the relationships you have with other people and other things." The challenge for programmers and engineers, he concluded, is "with that [sensing] knowledge, what will these future applications look like?"The very moment my refrigerator refuses to open so I can retrieve that [insert unhealthy food/drink here] is the moment my neighbors will report explosion sounds emanating from my backyard. And probably lots of laughter, too.
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Wow. Dark Star. Kudos for that.
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Yep!
And also, can I watch?
Thing is, sure, they’re building out more and more of this stuff into consumer-level products, which is just fine. But the money and logistics pretty much demand that development at this point is locked into just a few companies and their customers who can afford to develop this way right now - which leaves us with companies focused on building tools to sell you stuff they can use to sell you more stuff. They want to generate sales and perceived benefits to you - not actual convenience. I think we already know just about how much our privacy and safety mean to them already.
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You may watch depending on my at-that-moment level of infuriation. I’ve learned enough to keep it at smoldering when confronted with run of the mill level agitation, but given the right amount or type of prodding, well, that tends to bring on the lulz at a much faster pace. 
Maybe the corollary to all this networkable stuff will be that the router companies expand and strengthen administrative controls, or just make them easier to use, such that end users can properly control our once-dumb modern conveniences. But then, as my favorite saying goes, wish in one hand and shit in the other. Which one fills up first?
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Those bananas were shooped. I can tell by the cadmium yellow bushtrokes
All this talk of bananas and meat joints and no one has noticed the straight-from-the-bowels-of-hell jello mold concoctions so popular with the nuclear housewife in the 50’s.
“Mayonnaise, grape jello, Vienna sausage and broccoli…your family will love it!”
Refrigerators, maybe not. Multifunction copier-printers? Oh yeah.
That family desperately needs an Ice Box Man to keep them from standing there with the doors wide open.
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I’d be pretty proud of my refrigerator if it joined a botnet. Look at you! Don’t have wifi, ethernet, 3/4G, or even a CPU and here you are joining the internet and spamming people? Seriously impressed.
Not one of those people who’s going to get curmudgeonly about a refrigerator. I can see uses for internet fridges but I don’t have money to buy a new one just for that purpose. My biggest thing is less the terror of interconnected devices and more the concern that this’ll inspire brand new ways to irritate and flood people with unwanted stimuli. I’ve got a ten year old microwave that irritates me more than I can say.
Java demands twice a day to be updated on my system because I don’t run directly as admin and it’s too daft to update under UAC. Duolingo sent me daily-or-more Notifications, plus a weekly email until I got fed up and poked its settings. It’s one constant barrage of demands for attention that have a huge impact when taken in aggregate.
My refrigerator isn’t a huge source of comfort for me but at least it’s not constantly demanding my attention. It’s there when I need it and leaves me alone when I don’t.
Maybe GE deserves credit for making a microwave that stopped me from taking my fridge’s simplicity for granted.
I’m not saying that we can’t have high tech fridges and microwaves but until companies and designers have respect for human emotional and psychological needs, I’d really rather they didn’t.
P.S. Sorry for picking your post specifically to reply to. I liked where you were going with the post.
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