Home Device & Appliance Spying: Are You Okay With This?

[oathmark1]

I was wondering what the mood out there in the computer vet world is about things like Alexa, smart TV's, washers, refrigerators, toasters, and all of the corporate and on corporate software that is sold "over the counter" which contains "under the counter spying/backdoors."

The way that I see it is that the phenomenon of "capital accumulation" is larger than any other form of logic not because I believe that it is but because I see it supercede the veneration of human beings morally, ideologically in so many examples today and throughout history. It is that there are so many rivers that are so large of revenues weather from governments or non-government organizations that damming them is impossible due to the cultural acceptance or obliviousness being so wide spread. And I mean so much money on so many levels synergistically accumulating revenues that this "diatribe" or "code logic" can be developed and distributed professionally, so that majority of people see it as the only way they've ever known, and anyone that sees another way is an outrage.

So in the case of governments and corporations selling products both hardware, software, and appliances as congenial as a thermostat or door lock to an app or an OS it's the most profitable data collection and narrative control or "human coding" platform that's ever been wheeled out and put in play.

They sell that data, and one of the biggest industries that uses our data is politics and government. And this area gets complex, so I'll just...

 

[oathmark1]

So I guess the bottom line is how would you "debug" everything you have? Is is a realistic goal to have in the first place? Would you open up hardware and programs, then eliminate leaks?

I really don't care what anyone thinks about me in this regard. I don't think there is any shame except in a logical fallacy, and this subject doesn't pertain to one except that there are organizations which influence and sell to us saying they are this on one hand they are something completely different on yet another hand. That is shameful, and it is because that is logical fallacy.

 

[USAFRet]

You don't 'debug', you simply don't buy that crap in the first place.

My fridge has no business talking to my phone.
My security cameras have no business being WiFi.
My phone has no business checking me in at every place I go.

 

[thx1138v2]

USAFRet: I think you said it all when you said, "The 'S' in 'IoT' stands for security."

 

[Ralston18]

Not okay and very much agree with USAFRet with respect to not buying that "crap".

For the moment, it seems that we still have that overall option.

Bad enough now that we can no longer fix most things. Will get worse if we need to go online to even be able to use them.

E.g., change the refrigerator's temperature settings....

Everything as "a service" will doom us.

 

[kellysi]

When you take a look at it, just getting of the speeding train of technology will not help because there is already huge amount of data collected on each of us. That makes you wonder really, I do not take the opinions of society, but I do take opinion of people who ask themselves the same questions I do.

 

[The Paladin]

*cough* the matrix is real *cough*

seriously, I am the same, I turn trackers off, My fridge does not need to look inside itself and tell me what I should by as groceries, order for me on command and let me curb side pick up later.... (though Ill admit its sounds like a nice thing... except they should just deliver it to my house. lol)
My security system, alarm system are all wired, not Wi-Fi, not because I am Paranoid, because wired is 3-5x cheaper and does the same thing.

I work in the IT/Security Industry, I see what lengths people go to "protect" themselves, and its good for business
but I have my own perspective on what a "private person" needs. but if they want 6 cameras around their house.. who am I to contradict them?

 

[Ralston18]

I am not concerned about "privacy" per se. Privacy, I think, is gone. Period.

And not really sure that the trackers are being turned off or can be truly be "turned off". Very much a skeptic and, full disclosure, becoming even more so.

The problems are much deeper and more pervasive.

I tend to be more concerned about being forced to pay $ and more $ as everything becomes a service. And being forced to use those services.

Or constantly dealing with poorly designed systems, websites, procedures, rules, regulations, security settings, etc., that supposedly are for our benefit. And seldom are.

Sans any choice in the matter.

Yet it all continues to cost everyone more time and money. Stress and frustration aside. It could all be so different and easy if that was indeed the objective.

Having appliances "phoning home", making decisions, sharing data, etc. is certainly not in the best interest of anyone. There are certainly advantages to some things. Provided that they are true advantages for those involved; elderly, physically challenged, etc.. And not just tools to take more from us in some manner.

Recently worked on a "one camera" wireless security system for a house - just a test setup. Seemed that every installation step wanted web access, some Google download, create an account, provide personal information, etc...

Could not install a dishwasher myself because doing so would invalidate any warranty. Had to pay to get the dishwasher installed and have a warranty. Even then the required warranty "information" ,which had to be done online, was quite intrusive. Left any optional answers blank and guessed at the rest. Calls for warranty assistance refer to a website.

Just imagine some mandatory IoT for security reasons. e.g., we will monitor your gas furnace for gas leaks and if you do not do so your homeowner insurance will not provide fire coverage. And to setup the monitoring service, please submit the following information for verification purposes. Followed by several pages of required personal information. Much like a security clearance application.

One automobile nags us every six months for maintenance due. Not based on mileage - based on the calendar. (Car was hardly driven for four months.)

Read that one automobile manufacturer is now thinking about or even planning to rent cars based on mileage. Reason given was the immediate drop in value when you drive off the lot. I.e., "cheaper per month to lease by mileage". For the time being perhaps. Thing is that if you buy something, take care of it, at some point you will hopefully own it. No more monthly payments.

Unfortunately our technology is advanced enough to schedule failure shortly after the warranty ends or the final payment made. Imagine a car that reports every pothole - therefore the manufacturer can claim some failure was a result of the potholes, however small that were hit. Therefore not a design or manufacturing defect. Planned obsolescence is very real and even easier to implement. Lots of data being collected to analyze and fine tune the process.

Know of a situation where a bank is mailing monthly paper statements. Correct address at first then two of the four house numbers were somehow transposed. Bank is refusing to correct the matter without all sorts of documentation and personal visits by family members. One person being permanently in a nursing home. Most likely they will end up closing the account. That will be easier than going through the address correction process which is being treated as a "change" and subject to all sorts of security requirements. At least the mailperson is helping. Still delivers the envelope to the correct residence.

[Sidebar: Just amazes me how truly honest people cannot get things done, corrected, fixed, whatever while scammers and crooks can clean out a bank account faster than someone can get an address corrected. Or a fraudster can submit a fake tax return, get the refund, disappear, and leave the victim helplessly dangling in the face of crippling bureaucratic security safeguards that then seem to suddenly appear.]

Have seen other instances where "website upgrades" to online accounts automatically default back to "paperless". No bill shows up and then you get a "late notice" and extra charges. Or you make some required "I agree" check only to find that the fine print almost invisibly undoes other personal settings resulting in more junk emails, ads, pop-ups, and so forth. Have had that happen several times under the guise of "we are making improved security updates....".

No problem with being reminded to or even forced to change a password. Just do not sneak in anything else that benefits the company more than the customer.

Personally now treat all advertisements, "new and improved" claims, as if they are false. Not saying they are false - just treat them as if so. Look for the "got-cha's". All to easy to discover sometimes that the real end results are not likely to be as stated. Very common with free software, free trial services, or online forms. At some point you get asked for a credit card number. Refundable if you cancel within 30 days. Good luck with that....

Just recently literally learned of another technology "side effect". Family member died without a will - bad enough on its own merits. To make it all the worse, that person did almost everything online via a cell phone - no paper statements. No recent records or paper files. Very few bills via USPS. Family found some old account statements, along with some account logins and passwords but logins and passwords did not work. No records of security challenge questions and the responses to be made. Call for technical support aka "Forgot User ID or Password" or even just for "how do I" information and all stopped in a hurry. Cannot talk with you unless you have x, y, & z court documents. Obtaining those documents can take legal counsel, money, and weeks of time.

Bad technology did not help and in fact hindered the process. Online probate forms were no longer available but constantly referenced as needed. Website re-directs and links went nowhere applicable or useful. Circles in fact. Yet the county had spent a lot of money to tout the website and system. Most average users probably just gave up.

Seems that once a person is known to have died that information goes into the databases, gets flagged, spreads fast, and no one can do anything barring some likely expensive and time-consuming legal efforts via some form of the probate process. No one will talk with you unless you provide death certificates, proof of relationship, and who knows what all else. And the debt collectors start showing up very fast - and some are scammers. Troll death notices, obituaries, and try to intimidate relatives into paying. Yet scammers seem to get all sorts of data and information very fast. Even medical information.

And yes, I certainly do understand the need to protect estates, pay debts, and overall follow some judicial process - just that it has all become so skewed beyond reason. And Power of Attorney - of any sort, for those who do not know, becomes moot at death. And even can be problematic before death unless the POA specifically addresses the matter or problem at hand. E.g. getting an address corrected. Social Security does not even recognize POA - google "Personal Representative". Especially if you are or are becoming a caregiver for someone with Social Security benefits.

And we have all too many people, seniors (common targets and victims) and otherwise, who do not and/or cannot use technology. Just tell some company that you do not have an email address and/or cell phone.... Yet a website must be visited to even start finding help. And call-centers, no matter where located, are for the most part useless. Especially for the hard of hearing or otherwise impaired in some manner. Hard to reach a real person and often go in loops until the caller is disconnected. Proverbial automated "I did not understand your response - Good Bye". Hang up.

Know a person who received a brand name laptop as a Christmas gift. Still sorting out all the crapware and "phoning home" software. Common enough problem for sure but there is often no choice to be had. AKA "Pay us more or we install crapware that will make your computing life miserable." More like blackmail. Even paying more seems to be becoming a moot solution. Junk still gets installed.

Just think what it will be like, as a parent perhaps, to try to establish parental controls by calling the router's "service provider". Prove you are the parent and not the kid. Meanwhile some necessary website (to pay a bill) has somehow been blocked out.

Or, going a step further, eventually being forced to pay your router's manufacturer for configuration service. But after the provider service messes something up then being faced with proving you are the administrator/account payer and not a basement "kiddie" trying to circumvent porn site restrictions. Paying for such services will likely be just "paying" and no real service - just lip service. Real service costs money - not good for the bottom line.

Also, I wonder: the general news media constantly seems to find out all sorts of detailed personal information about anyone entering the news cycle - more information and much faster than the government. Within minutes sometimes. How does that happen? Privacy seems to go by the wayside very quickly with sufficient resources to delve deeply. Especially after the fact. Never before.....

The proverbial "Genie is out of the bottle" cliché applies. Technology is not the problem per se. The problem is how it is being twisted, abused, manipulated, and so forth.

Simply $ and greed for more $. And/or power - same difference I think.

But that has always been the case. The consequences are likely to go well beyond privacy.

Overall, does not bode well for anyone.

 

[oathmark1]

Ralston, it's all sophism. It's simply the master rhetoricians that are both masters of lingual logic of the minds and business management logic in the objective external reality, so that they can needle nose the finest overlaps, loopholes, contradictions, bends, deflections, moral vs. logic double binds, blind spots etc all...

....all with one magic element at the core: the way that 95% of people see things.

It is an informational art they are masters of, and they are paid excruciatingly high prices for their artistry crafts. Ohhhhh believe that.

When you see the big snow jobs just like you described in your reply about, you are looking at another kind of art, but it's a kind of warfare rather than something that one just observes and feels. I can be a kind of civil war or global one depending on how you personally measure these things, but it definitely is a conquest of a kind. This is of a master designed to cause specific feelings and thoughts while then have a specific effect taking place in the mind and/or life of the person that pays off very well all without the prey being informed. War is of no other kind of deception.

And it's this matter of being "well or ill informed" that is the key word: information.

The information phenom is an enormous phenomenon that is equally as big as the world, but equally as invisible to the world as say the atmosphere is day to day for the average person. Our minds are information and only information despite the liver like organ that is the brain. The new IT world is information. Money is information and central and lower banks printing off money is information distortion. Politics, supposed and pseudoscience, educations, culture, religion, cult, organizations....information. It goes on and on and on, and it all....

....all comes down to the ontology of that information just like in every hardware and software design but much, much more.


I don't want to go headlong into a full dissertation here, but the art of what you are talking about is an ancient one. That's fairly easy to figure out without too much research of the past and the informational, ontological anthropological orders and behaviors humankind has been based on, and I don't mean that it's all been for good; not by a long shot. There's been and still is so much of it for usurpation than anyone can ever grasp the entirety of.

And this ancient practice or what I'd rather call a phenomenon now has even more power with IT, and in the IT the chemicals and geneology are more manipulated for the same reasons that the rhetorical information is manipulated which again is another headlong dissertation that I want to avoid here.


It is to war and control by means of a ghost. That is the bad side of IT and tyranny and usurpation. It is to transgress without trace, through the fault of the trespassed, and therefore being felled by the target cache itself, for if you have landed on a victim's homeland, and you have brought your own victims to force the wealth out of their hands who too have to be convinced not without major risks in the arrangement of these services, then you have traces, history, costs, risks of all kinds of blowbacks in the immediate time frame and much longer after that. So the information about a thought, the feeling, a rule, a law, a belief, a science, the political anthologies, the software, the sensory data, the numbers, the finances, the statistics, the DNA/Genome, the molecular composition, the economical and security systems..... are like the concept of the non-kinetic ghost that comes to rob the non-kinetic and/or to subvert via implanting the non-kinetic. It's just a descrete ordering or rearranging....

....that when systematized on a large scale can accumulate the largest grabs of the largess in the world than any other tyrant in history has ever known.

With IT there is the possibility of having no government affiliation yet governing the governments and their hordes. There is no need for official names here be it a business, click, group, gang, faction, party, or what have you. We all know what it is. It deception, and deception is purely informational which again is a phenomenon that is not nearly understood enough to handle the oncoming IT world that will never revert back to the old world by the way.

One thing to fear is when you think about a pack of computers that are usurping based on informational deception and other qualities that have caused conundrum and failures intentionally for gain. You would destroy them or unplug them. Problem solved. As far as laws that are just like them, you would ideally vote them out, or surmount the gatekeepers that are beholden to them.

The thing to fear here is when there are such informational messes that are sole intended for deceptions that are stacked sky high, and the ones in power at the top of these ontological controlling structured fathomed out of thin air are threatened by us, the people and our tools such as IT and so on, they may wind up in a survival mode which is to eliminate not the problem of deceptive informational environment that they have conjured, but to eliminate the means of being eliminated themselves. They would simply elect to unplug us.

It's not this case that is the case in all cases, but at the top of these ontological ladders it is simply easy to neglect to do what was going to be necessary to sustain a major system or order of operation which many people are dependent and/or supported by which causes the eliminations I mention. Again it's not direct kinetic attack but an effect of active and passive non-kinetic machinations.

The thought on my mind at this point is a new kind of leadership expertise that is aware of these things, and I say so because it's obviously very easy to carry out such things or neglect such things while right in the midsts of the would be means of reprimandation or accountability.

All of the greatest heists and man made catastrophes have all been forged and dependant on the informational phenomena. It is first this that is where all insidious actions emanate from. It is the supposed inside hand that controls the outside hand of the world.

The stakes get higher with IT as it makes it much cheaper and easier to orchestrate, but the possibility of containing these nefarious effects from this specific element that is not a new element at all also becomes easier and more robust with the advent of the new IT world. It's going to take a cultural movement that learns, develops, and implements the containment by means of IT, and I hate to say this, but the people that are not being born of this new world despite yet being alive in the world at the front beginning of the IT world are almost always unlikely to understand these phenomena let alone have any aptitude for containment.

 

[Ralston18]

Reminds me of part of that movie quote:

"The only winning move is not to play." [Joshua the computer in WarGames]

And we are being compelled to play......

 

[oathmark1]

Exactly.

There are people that live lives of simplicity that would know what we are talking about but would not be very well versed in these things because they simply do not following them down the "rabbit holes."

I think there is a right way and a wrong way to use these things though. For instance with so much free access to information now is the time to educate yourself like has never been possible even when the only people that could be educated were the rich.

And don't exceed what you are. When annexing a product of any kind, subscription, service, algorithm, whatever....don't acquire so much that it's beyond you as an apparatus of yourself. If your hand can do more than what you can control, then your hand may beat itself or rather you. This is precisely what malicious computer programs are meant to do. In real life organs do wind up out of control such as with mental pathologies including ones that are entirely informationally based without any cellular malady whatsoever and of course there are the cancers of the organs etc, and so the strew of organs are being defeated by perhaps one organ in their challenge for survival. It's to collapse from within, so the wrong way to acquire along the lines of what we are talking about here is to allow your forte to collapse from within by including in it what you cannot detach from unskathed.

Between the cancers, mental pathologies often intentionally inflicted on people, and the stuff we're overall talking about it's a matter of the information being ontologically organized, so the remedy to these problems is the ability to define the specific ontology that has control of the subject, and then utilize ontological organizational skills in order to cause that problematic ontology to be rendered neutralized.

This is obviously mastery of things unseeable, so it is obviously where masters capture the greatest windfalls at the expenses of other. It is non-kinetic informational ontology with words, computer organization, and molecules involved in the biology, and that is precisely the direction the earth ship so to speak is going now faster and faster all of the time. Historically speaking when they in the future are looking back, they will see that this movement was explosive unlike any movement ever before now.

So what is in the highest demand now and the future are the engineers of this informational ontological skillset; people that can't be caught in the muck-a-muck but people who can capture the muckity muck, correctly identify its purpose, weak points, and assets, and logically reply with the non-kinetic neutralizer.

People need to be raised from a young age to be able to do that as that is how the masters of these kinds of phenomena are made which is during the language acquisition age, so that they don't just know, but they see, feel, think in the languages that are the sources of informational corruption. A person who learned to play a musical instrument, a professional sport, or speak a very socially intense language style from a very early age can see and do intuitively what someone who had begun to learn at the at of 20 or so. They can see what cannot be seen, and that is absolutely necessary for those who are to be competitive in the neutralization and reprimandation or at least just organization and legislation of the invisible information mayhem that is rising quickly.