http://www.greglindsay.org/blog/not-sosmart_homes_and_the_internet_of_things/
“For more than a month now, my house has been haunted. There’s nothing supernatural about it; there are more than 15 million homes infected with the H@untedM@nsion worm, BuzzCNN reported yesterday. Every morning between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.—never the same time twice—my bedroom lights begin to strobe, and Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” kicks in again. I would replace the smart lightbulbs (which were the hackers’ initial entry point into my smart home) with dumb ones, but then I’d lose the tax credits.
“Fortunately, I sleep on the floor of my Amazon Prime kitchen, which hasn’t interacted with my Microsoft bedroom since the acquisition talks broke down in 2019. It’s annoying when I ask for the weather report and both Alexa and Cortana talk over each other trying to answer. Even with my circadian rhythms shattered by the cacophony upstairs, Alexa knows me well enough to have started the coffee ten minutes ago.
“I wish she had stocked the fridge with milk, however. I haven’t had dairy in months, after hackers took advantage of my flirtation with the paleo diet to tweak Amazon’s predictive ordering routine to have racks of lamb and other big-ticket meats delivered. They ship them to me through their referral code; this earns them pennies but costs me a lot more. If I give them away or throw them out, more arrive automatically. All I can do is let them rot in the fridge, pitting the algorithm’s learning function against its zombie programming.
“While the coffee brews, I take a shower. As part of the haunting, my security camera ritualistically snaps a photo while I’m au naturel. When the haunting started, the first picture was accompanied by an automated email threatening to post my less-than-paleo physique to my Facebook account daily, unless I paid up – 300 μBTC, or about $20 US, to their bitcoin wallet.
“There isn’t sufficient power for me to work from home today. A 2022 Supreme Court decision granted power utilities the right to requisition stored electricity in my Tesla Powerwall during “periods of emergency” (i.e., summer), so by around noon I won’t have enough power to both charge the car and run the smart lights. And I’ll have to get back before 7 p.m., when the power normally comes back on. AT&T Cisco’s Smart+ Connected Collection service has started refusing to unlock the door without a pro-rated daily payment to cover the utility bill. It’s a good thing I never upgraded the door to the garage, so I can still hack its Bluetooth lock and sneak into my smart home.”
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/142068760607
