I was watching a TV show about Alaska, where some small town had their generator go out and they needed to fly in an engineer. In those tiny villages, the kind where an engineering degree means you can get a job somewhere else that can afford to pay you, remote monitoring and diagnosis is the only option they have. They had one guy in the town who had the keys to the building, knew to keep the fuel tanks filled, and could do some minor mechanical repairs to the system, but that was pretty much the limit of his capabilities.

Nobody in that town would be qualified enough to even understand those notices. Nobody there would likely know what software was being used, let alone visit the home pages of the company providing it. A town like that won't have the money to pay for monitoring services - they're going to be on a repair-only basis. And they're going to be the ideal consumers of a remote solution like the kind these firms are selling.

While this town may be a worst case scenario, it exemplifies the kinds of bad luck circumstances that would lead someone right into this risk, and CERT notices probably won't ever help them much.

I realize you're trying to make a joke in that all things are "things", but there's value in having a phrase that narrows the topic a bit. It's basically a catch-all term, like referring to the Internet's plumbing as "the cloud." The "things" in the Internet of Things are devices that aren't primarily information devices by design. A refrigerator may have a microcontroller to maintain temperature, but it wouldn't be called a computer. Adding internet connectivity to it still doesn't make it an information device, so it falls into the category of "Internet of Things".

Mobile phones, iPads, laptops, computers, these are primarily information devices that are generally not considered part of the IoT, although they may serve the user to interact with the things. And the line is very squishy. An IP-enabled TV set seems to straddle the border, and depending on context may or may not be part of the IoT discussion.

The "things" do offer benefits to people, just not giant big payoffs. A washing machine can alert you that the load needs to go in the dryer, or it can phone home for diagnostic and service information, potentially saving on repair bills. And certainly when the Smart Grid arrives, they will help people save money by managing usage. As many non-connected devices already have microcontrollers, adding a wifi chip and protocol stack may cost only a few extra dollars.

They don't have to be big benefits. As long as they deliver at least small incremental improvements, people will buy them.

I'm not saying that 50% of Americans will run out and replace every device in their house with IoT capable things. But as IoT devices hit the market, more and more people will start to acquire them as they replace their worn out goods. They will not arrive with a big bang, but in about 20 years or so, you won't be able to swing a cat in the homes of affluent Americans without hitting at least one or two IP devices. And what's the IoT going to look like then? Microsoft wants to be a part of shaping that now, because it is going to pay off big later.

Sadly, as for the people who can't afford to fix their cars let alone replace a broken washing machine, the gap is going to widen, and they are going to be left further behind. It's already apparent that they are stuck with bad choices, such as cheap-but-used energy-inefficient appliances. They can't afford to get to a managed, efficient refrigerator that could save them extra money over the long term, because they haven't the capital to spend today. That's part of the nature of an inequitable system. The only hope they'll have is that in 10 or 20 years that today's hand-me-downs can still get online and are energy efficient.

It seems like you really have no grasp on the concept of the Internet of Things. You're inventing ridiculous strawmen to slaughter to make your point. Nobody but you is talking about adding IP to showerheads.

The IoT is recognizing the idea that there are millions of IP enabled devices out there today, and the number is growing rapidly. The most visible examples include replacements like Nest or Honeywell thermostats, but other devices are entering homes, too, such as garage door openers, smoke alarms, light bulbs, and even washing machines. The most popular devices include entertainment systems that now can connect to Netflix or Hulu. Some of these will be successful, others won't. But the numbers are ever increasing, and people are buying them.

The market for them is also poised to go up rapidly. Today, they're primarily owned by early adopters, who are always willing to pay a premium. But there is something unusual about the IoT in that, by reporting back to a cloud, they provide valuable data to the manufacturers. More data gives them more value, so they have incentive to increase market penetration, and that means aggressive pricing and increased competition. This will result in more rapid adoption.

So with these diverse things entering the home, the demand to integrate them will increase. Microsoft has a large portion of the home PC market, and is perfectly positioned to provide that integration, even if it doesn't happen on Windows Phones. That is, as long as they do it well, and handle all the random error conditions that a diverse set of computers can generate. If it's not seamless and perfect, they'll fail again.

So how many of these people are actually needed in the federal government? It's not like having an extra cyber security guy in the FBI helps make Joe's Dry Cleaning a safer business. Security isn't transitive.

Regarding your iOS v. Android observation, that's possibly related to demographics. On average, university students tend to come from families with better educated parents, and better education correlates with a higher average income. I'm not saying every student on your campus was given an iPhone by a rich mommy and daddy, but I bet the average is higher than in the general population.

I already have a Z-wave hub for interfacing with home control devices, an AssureLink hub to interface with a Craftsman device, and a Harmony hub to blink IR at the entertainment devices. The Z-wave hub sits on my network, and I can access it directly. The AssureLink hub provides an interface only via their cloud, and can be accessed either from a browser or their smartphone app. The Harmony hub supposedly is Z-wave compatible, but in reality has no external connectivity at all, and pairs only with their remote. My Honeywell thermostat talks only to their cloud, and my Samsung appliances will provide a local interface only to their smartphone app. OpenHAB would be like magic if it could pull all these diverse boxes together.

However, the added complexity means troubleshooting will be an even bigger nightmare. Let's say the Z-wave controlled garage light isn't coming on when the garage door opens. Is the problem in the door opening controller, the AssureLink hub, the local network, the internet connection, Craftsman's cloud, the OpenHAB system, the Z-wave hub, the Z-wave's mesh network routing, the Z-wave light controller, or the bulb itself? The complexity is already outlandish, and the reliability of the mesh network is very poor - adding more complexity will not help it get better. At this point it's not worth even trying to integrate these devices, even though I'd like to.

And I understand what's going on - imagine someone who just pays an installer to plop an integrated box in front of them. They're going to get used to lots of disappointment.

Look at it this way: one of those Saturday courses on just about any money-making topic would have cost you over $100.00. So really, you learned the lesson for a pretty reasonable price.

That said, I wish you luck in getting a working product.

From your link: "RFID works by rectifying a strong local signal (not ambient RF) " [emphasis mine.] The scam in TFA is that they're ignoring the same laws of physics you apparently didn't bother to read.

Pro tip: If you're going to cite a source for your argument, you probably want to make sure it's not refuting the argument you're trying to make.

You've packed a lot of wrong into such a short post. If a system is insecure a "good" architecture is irrelevant - you're still screwed. And either way, neither architecture nor cryptocurrencies have anything to do with this problem, which is unpatched OpenSSL.

You bleeding heart liberals never know when to change.

Some really clever weapons systems, like the Crusader with the Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact (MRSI) system that delivers an array of shells to one area simultaneously, seem to have everything going for them: congressional backing, tech, whatever. Turns out that a weapon designed for WW2 land wars isn't so useful in fighting religious nuts in the deserts. Some simply get canceled because there isn't a need for them any more.

The 'things' you seem to be thinking about are computing devices that are all deliberately meant for data access. The 'Internet-of-things' things are the non-traditional devices, such as washers, dryers, light bulbs, garage doors, thermostats, and other devices with some other primary purpose that is not data access.

The concept is that today, 99% of the things on the Internet are computers first, and most people have only one or two. But when the day comes that everyone puts a hundred appliances on the net, we may need to be looking at the whole network differently. When other 'things' outnumber the people and PCs, then we can truly call it the Internet-of-Things.

But yeah, it's mostly generic marketing-speak, like "the cloud" has become.

I wouldn't want to go through gigabytes of anyone else's old giant email archive, not my dad's, grandpa's, or son's. I barely get through my own daily notes. I keep old emails so I can search them, but I don't think of myself as beig so important someday that anyone else will ever care.

But I do still have a few printouts of emails my wife and I exchanged, back when we were dating in 1980. Again, not that anyone else will care.

It's not that uncommon. We had six computers in our area crash within days of each other. Of course, that was corporate IT idiots pushing out a BIOS patch that destroyed our disk encryption keys, rendering the devices utterly unrecoverable.

And two weeks after the "oops" incident? The bloody idiots re-pushed the patch across the board, because some computers didn't get it; the update software blindly installed it a second time, wiping all the freshly recovered disks a second time.

I simply cannot believe the IRS admins are any more competent than our IT department.