Robot vacuums in multiple US cities were hacked in the space of a few days, with the attacker physically controlling them and yelling obscenities through their onboard speakers.
Having a vacuum, or microwave, refrigerator, toaster, washing machine, blah blah blah connected to the internet is the dumbest thing you can do, Why are you giving corporate America access to your personal space? “Big Brother” is not who we should be worried about, it’s corporations selling you in-home surveillance devices that pretend to do other tasks. This is literally how Humanity loses it’s freedom and autonomy. Not to mention how easy it will be / is for psychopaths to stalk you.
I’m a huge fan of IoT, but requiring all this stuff to access internet is just so wild to me. It’s 2024, we all have a LAN* at this point (even though non-tech people think WiFi == internet).
I stupidly bought iRobot products and the app is such a glitchfest, it wants to talk to AWS’ shithole
us-east-1to do anything and of course the app is always telling me about “great deals” on newer products.* Careful when using an ISP-supplied router though, now your ISP wants access to your LAN for “totally innocent” reasons
At this point I use Home Assistant for everything IoT and won’t buy any product I can’t use LAN-only through HA.
The unfortunate exception to this rule is TVs. You can’t even buy a “dumb” TV anymore. I put up with LGs after disabling every setting and data agreement I can for privacy’s sake, but none of them are good.
My plan is to buy something Valetudo compatible, and have it all run in network.
I try really hard to stick to the policy of “if it needs internet access to operate, I won’t install it on the house”
Me too once these die off.
In a weird way, this is possibly the best thing the hackers could have done after gaining access.
Having your robot vacuum start yelling about hating black people gets media attention in the way an announcement at a security conference just doesn’t.
I doubt any of the victims who were black would be too pleased. I think this is the makings of a good class action. The only way these companies are going to start securing the Internet of shit is if it becomes too expensive not to.
I wouldn’t expect any of the victims to be happy about it, but this definitely could have been worse.
And hopefully these things will become known as the vaccum that shouts slurs at you.
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