Consider this scenario.

1. Evil hacker creates some malicious javascript that does three things: it attempts to connect to a local Asus router; upon finding one it reconfigures it to allow external access; after successfully hacking a router it opens a connection to his server to report another victim.
2. Evil hacker sets up a rogue WiFi hotspot in a coffee shop near your office, and lures people into connecting to his evil open proxy (check out the WiFi Pineapple if you want to see how such a device works, or if you just want to purchase one.)
3. The evil proxy injects the javascript into the bottom of whatever pages the victims visit, and modifies the cache-control directives to cache those pages for a long time. This is called a cache poisoning attack.
4. The evil hacker waits for one of those victims to return to your office with their poisoned laptop, reconnect to your network, open their browser, and re-visit one of the poisoned sites in their cache. The malware script launches in the user's browser, attacks your router from within the trusted side of your network, then visits his site to report "mission accomplished, here's the IP address of another hacked router." All of this is of course invisible to the average random coffee-drinking employee.
5. ???
6. I don't know exactly what happens in step 5, but it is likely nothing you would consider good.

This type of attack was fairly common when google was using http instead of https, and evil proxy operators could count on lots of people visiting the google page. It's still easy enough to do, and remains one of the biggest risks of trusting any unsecured wifi networks.

More often than not, the evil hackers are just phishing for random victims. But by setting up his access point in a coffee shop frequented by your employees, this is one way the evil hacker could target you specifically.

Don't forget the robust community that supports Vera. It's easy to create new devices, and people have. This is extremely helpful for devices that Vera can't reach via Z-wave or any other technology. For example, I installed a "device" that talks to the Craftsman AssureLink web service to find the status of my garage door (the AssureLink internet bridge talks only to their service, and I haven't yet found it to offer a locally accessible interface. Time to break out wireshark, I think.)

There are also many "virtual devices" people have written to do all kinds of interesting things. One will monitor other devices, and fire an event when certain combinations of things are met. I have a virtual switch that pings our phones' local wifi IP addresses so the house knows when we're home. It can fire an event when our phones connect to our access point, or fire one when we've been out of range for 15 continual minutes, or whatever. Someone built an interface to Apple's locator service, so I could have the house know when I was approaching within 5 miles, but that had the unintended consequence of draining my iPhone's battery flat after about 6 hours - I uninstalled that one.

Sorry to deliver the bad news, but home automation systems will never contribute more than about 100 milliFonzies to your Coolness score. There is very little cred amongst most people about having an automated home; only the nerds seem to care, and the Nerd Equivalent Factor of .1 means that even if your home automation system rated a full Fonzie, the owner simply cannot be that cool.

I also have a Vera (the older Vera 2) and highly recommend it. No cloud server needed, although you can optionally set your Vera up to communicate with their servers for free, if you want. (If you don't want, you can set up a VPN to access it from outside the home.)

It's built on OpenWRT, and has a robust community building support for all kinds of devices. It's primarily a Z-wave controller, but it can talk to Insteon systems if you buy the appropriate hardware.

I'd recommend getting whatever the big version is, instead of the Lite version. My Vera 2 is running out of horsepower, and I don't have all that many devices.

I can't figure out if he's trying to be Fozzie Bear or PacMan.

And what makes you think I missed it? Heinlein was a strong advocate for a military-based society; Verhoeven camped it up to its absurd extreme.

It's camp. It's entertainment. Laugh. But if you are concerned that people are learning social structures from it, then you've probably been watching too much Fox News.

That's irrelevant. If demand goes up because of whatever-external-market-force, then price will go down as competition increases. If LowerPrice+NewTax goes below CurrentUntaxedPrice, then the cost goes down. The tax is only a component of cost, and it's foolish to believe that it's what will set the price.

i realise several people have said it already, but i wanted to add that i bought a macbook pro with the 2560x1600 LCD, dual core with 8gb of RAM and it wasn't until loadavg went above 4.0 for over a minute that i even realised that it had a fan at all. it's an aluminium case (watch the edges: they are actually quite sharp).

now, people may say they are expensive but i managed to get hold of one that had been imported into the UK, and had a US keyboard, it was only $USD 1500 where all the ones with UK keyboards were $USD 2,000. given the resolution of the screen and the amount of RAM i considered it to be a serious major bargain and a long-term investment: i anticipate running this machine for at least 5 years.

now, the only down-side is that it has a 256gbyte SSD, which these days is quite small. it does however have USB3 so can use external ultra-fast USB3 SATA drives. but that's not the main down-side: the _real_ problem is that in the EU, power is not earthed properly. so when you plug the PSU in, there is considerable EMI which can actually give you an electric shock if you happen for example to put your foot on a metal radiator.

checking in /var/log/syslog it was *swamped* with SATA resets, so much so that i actually had to move to a tmpfs for /var/log and restart all services so that they used it (there are better ways to do this). the debian page for macbook pros with SSDs describes a workaround which carries out a reset on the SATA device (i forget what it is) but i found that this was *nowhere near* adequate, even if added to a cron job and run every single minute. the problem was of course compounded by the fact that each SATA reset was accompanied by a syslog message which, of course, resulted in a write, which, of course, went wrong, causing another reset. by moving /var/log to a tmpfs i broke the loop, and the resets only occur every 5 to 30 seconds, which i can live with.

it's actually good that i'm running debian because if this still had a proprietary OS on it there would be nothing i could have done about the problem.

anyway, _despite_ this, i would *still* recommend 100% getting a macbook pro [and replacing its OS]. the screen is awesome: i left xterm at its default font size, very quickly got used to the tiny characters, and - get this: i can fit *TEN* 80x51 xterms on one screen! i think that's absolutely hilarious, and for programming it's absolutely amazing. currently i have 4 xterms *on the same screen* with a firefox window that's at 1300 x 1200 pixels! i could make it more but i find that web pages don't really properly stretch beyond that as they're usually designed for around 1200 pixels wide at the most, these days.

so, yeah - get macbook pros but please for goodness sake dump the OS.

While I haven't personally used GoGo, I presume that you have to click "I Agree" after being shown a bunch of legalese that probably includes something like this:

"By clicking 'I Agree', I consent to having all of my traffic monitored while using this service. This includes traffic I might otherwise think would be private. Furthermore, by clicking 'I Agree', I grant such access and I renounce any claims of improper use of the data."

If you click "I agree", you pretty much give up any chance of fighting said nonsense.

Yeah, that related article stated it poorly. Its conclusion was only "Internet as a public utility will likely result in new taxes". It ignores the fact that supply and demand drive pricing, and overall cost.

Starship Troopers was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who likes to push action movies just over the edge of campiness. Action movies that don't fit either the comedy or drama genre fall flat, because frankly, shoot-run-shoot-chase-shoot is tedious. You need to either care deeply about the characters portrayed, or be entertained by laughing at the absurdity of the situation. Verhoeven emphasizes the absurd, which makes scenes like the one where Clancy Brown throws the dagger through Jake Busey's hand during training ( then yells "Medic!") hilarious.

Before I saw it, there was a part of me that wanted Starship Troopers to be a serious movie worthy of the title of Sci Fi, and I remember being initially disappointed that it wasn't. But because he turned it into a "fun" movie, I came to appreciate it as entertainment.

Check OpenHAB, which allows you to build the automation system on open source code, and doesn't require "the cloud". (I'm using Vera, which is a more mature and stable alternative. Vere doesn't require the cloud, which is great; but while it's built on top of OpenWRT, it's not an actual open source code product.)

But the bank breakers come in the form of the devices. I've bought various Z-wave switches at prices ranging from $10 to $100, with the bulk of them costing about $40 a device these days. At this rate it doesn't take much time to spend a thousand dollars on it.

I've tried to save money by picking them up on clearance, but I've also learned that the usability factor goes down once I started mixing the kinds of switches I installed. We prefer rocker switches, with a familiar top-on/bottom-off action; GE/Jasco makes some so I picked up a bunch for $10 each at the local Radio Shack, and there are other brands. Leviton makes a bottom-toggle pushbutton switch; I bought several from Monster at $20 closeout prices. But the variety of switches in the house was very confusing to guests, so I ended up removing all the Leviton switches anyway. Not a money saver if you can't use them.

Whoa! You're a brave man...,Anonymous.

I think this is where the more novel stuff is likely to happen. Maybe someone will display a usable version of OpenHAB, or figure out how to skin a home automation app well (hint: everything I've seen so far sucks out loud.)

F**king magnets, how do they work?