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.

Some companies have taken this in a different direction. They have a "delete all email after 30 days" policy, with no exceptions, except for legal holds required for gathering evidence in specific legal situations.

Having and following a policy are the only requirement. It doesn't have to be a rational policy, it just has to be a policy. A policy of timed destruction, even if it's only a month, fits the requirement, and it helps avoid deep legal fishing.

He probably is a tinfoil hat conspiracy loon, however, there is a grain of truth to what he is saying. Digital camera sensors can have a unique fingerprint. Dead pixels, model specific JPG quantization tables, sensor size, all these things can help a digital forensic analyst match a camera to the photos it's taken. The same is harder to prove with an analog camera.

No, the IR sensor can't be used as a camera. However, the unintended uses for the ill-minded are still plentiful. An IR sensor majes a dandy occupancy sensor, and determines when you are home or not. A power meter can reveal energy use rising as the lights come on at 6, peaking when you make the morning's tea or coffee, going down as you shut off a few lights, and then two short spikes when your garage door opens and closes as you leave. A Honeywell thermostat may even have your vacation return date programmed into it. Such patterns and data (while not exactly the same for everyone) can be analyzed to figure out when your house is most likely to be empty. Robmyhouse.com would benefit.

That's a common ailment, known around here as 'CRS Syndrome'. As in Can't Remember Shit.