Pretty much all embedded devices smart enough to support TCP/IP, as well. I'm pretty sure that my router is currently the most 'IoT' device in my house, though also the least conceptually novel.

There are some honestly interesting, tricky, and (at least partially) novel problems in 'IoT'. Making devices that are networked, can talk to each other, and actually do something useful with that ability is a real challenge. Even more so if you want compatibility between multiple vendors, support for use cases the vendor didn't more or less build for you(ideally without requiring that the user be a software engineer), or some semblance of assurance that there aren't a zillion security and privacy issues, innumerable covert channels, and other disasters.

My apathy is mostly derived from the fact that most 'IoT' doesn't actually seem to be doing much of that. Plenty of stuff that lets you use the internet as a very long serial cable to connect to its config interface(which is fine, the internet is a great way, if secured, of very, very, cheaply connecting from arbitrary distance; but brutally non-novel), some walled-garden 'ecosystems' that support very limited interaction of devices between two vendors who have explicitly agreed to cooperate and updated their products to make that possible; but otherwise it's mostly the same old IP-capable firmwares that devices expensive enough to have the capability have used for at least something like two decades. Useful; but not terribly new, and often implemented so badly as to be a liability.

It's honestly a trifle disheartening. While arguably in need of some serious maintenance(especially the 'security' of the earlier versions), SNMP is arguably closer to an 'IoT' design(pretty much just add the ability for devices to advertise their MIBs to other devices on the network, rather than having the admin hunt them down and load them, and you are closer to being ready than most actual products are). That isn't really a flattering thing.

SNMP is quite useful; but it is a bit crufty and conceptually ancient. The fact that everyone's shiny, new, 'IoT' things, with their markedly-more-capable-and-way-cheaper embedded hardware typically can't advertise their capabilities and manipulate one another in some vaguely sane way at the same level as some seriously old hardware is not terribly impressive.

Even if the actual implementation is some XML-soup-and-'cloud'-bullshit horror, conceptual parity or superiority would be nice to see.

Alex, your multiple repostings of identical content is spam.

I have used your software. It works as advertised. However, it doesn't justify multiple copies of the same message in the same thread. That doesn't do anything except make people tune you out as "mere noise" even if what you have to contribute might not be.

Honestly.

And you don't have to talk about yourself in the third person. OK?

Peace.

--
BMO/Dan

The idea is that limiting police powers in order to safeguard freedoms (and with them, the balance of power between the individual and the government) is acknowledged as making the job of police harder. The polices' job being harder does, in fact, mean that some number of criminals will go free some of the time, criminals who otherwise would have been caught and prosecuted. This is why absolute security is the antithesis of absolute freedom, so the question then is how to balance the two. When you safeguard liberty as your first priority and assign a lower priority to the effectiveness of law enforcement, you understand that you are taking a higher risk that you yourself will be harmed by a criminal that law enforcement could have stopped.

That's why freedom is not for cowards. The problems you worry about are well known to people who understand and value freedom. They choose freedom anyway. They also realize that the danger with which you're so concerned has been overstated. You're much more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist, and any factual inquiry into that based on facts would lead you to the same conclusion. Incidentally, you're also more likely to be injured by lightning. In the last 100 years, many, many more people were killed by their own governments than by any foreign enemy, so the credibility of this danger has been well established. Limited, transparent government is a time-tested manner of managing this danger.

As an aside, if terrorism is truly such a great problem and we want to reduce it in a real and effective manner, we should also stop giving excuses to the people who hate us. It's much easier for an enemy to justify their position, raise their troops' morale, and recruit new members into their brand of exteremism when they can point to concrete acts of ruthless domination the USA has actually committed. Law enforcement would certainly be more effective if its list of potential suspects could be reduced, facilitating a more focused approach on those that remain.

Anyway, the real spirit of freedom, the more value-based, individual, and courageous part that you and so many others keep failing to even recognize, let alone try to understand, is that those who understand freedom realize that a few more guilty men may go free. They consider that a small price to pay, an exchange of a finite quantity that numbers can describe in order go gain something priceless and worthwhile. It's yet another instance of failing to comprehend a viewpoint because you do not personally share it, therefore you get sidetracked by related but irrelevant issues because you have no idea how to articulate a meaningful response to it.

So what do you call them?

By any other name the sheeples are still acting like sheeps

They do not like to think, they do not like to think so much that they let others to do all the thinking for themselves

And when that happens, someone else do come out and does the thinking for them ... that someone is nothing but the authority

So the authority tells the sheeples that what they are doing --- that BLANKET SNOOPING THING is "good for them" because it will "protect them from the baddies", you know, them "terrorists", them "pedophiles", them with "bad intentions"

And the sheeples bought that shit wholesale --- with line and hook and barrel and everything in between

You want your democracy, so be it, but do not tell me that calling a spade a spade is undemocratic

We can call the "Sheeples" a "Rose", or a "Tulip", or even "Alfalfa", but that name change ain't gonna change their character, not even a bit, Sir !

Sir,

I do agree with you that we do need hope, but we must *NOT* forget the fact that 'hoping' ain't gonna do us, or anybody else, any good, especially when what is happening now, from top down (well, the governments are *ON THE TOP* of the people, no matter which government, no matter which nation)

Nowadays governments treat their citizens with contemp

They suspect their citizens so much that they actually take steps to ensure that every single thing their own citizen does must be checked, categorized, and actions must be taken on whoever they suspect (for whatever reason)

Hope in itself is no longer sufficient to fight those fascist, my friend

We no longer live in the 1960's, Sir

We no longer live in a world where the government listens to the people

No man. We are living in the world where the governments DEMAND to be respected, or else

That's the reality all of us are living in, no matter if you live in Canada or China or Saudi Arabia or America or Great Britain, it's all the same --- you, a citizen, better be a sheeple, or we will mark you, we will follow you, we will watch your every single move

>clarityray

Is dead.

Acquired by Yahoo.

Just so you can update your spam. HTH.

--
BMO

They feel entitled to make a profit by any means necessary, while you feel entitled to their content or service by any means necessary.

The former is true

The latter isn't. If the "content providers" suddenly put all their stuff behind paywalls, I'd ignore them. I wouldn't even bother trying to "subvert" such paywalls. You know that "you've used up your free views for this month" BS that you run into with the NYT and such? My panties don't get in a twist, I just close the window and go elsewhere. I don't use bugmenot even today. I'm one of very many people who feel this way.

Let me reiterate: I block ads. They post their content and they take their chances. If they put up the paywalls, they "disappear" for me and I'm fine with it.

So let's ask the "what if everyone did that" evaluation of human behavior to examine what damage might be done if all that revenue disappeared from the Internet: Many "content providers" that depend purely on ad revenue would close (like Gawker Media, Dice, etc.,) and it would wind up like it was back in the mid 1990s shortly before the explosion of commercial "content."

Please, please let this happen.

--
BMO

Actually, the social shunning/shaming of those who advocate positions that are detrimental to society does serve a useful and positive function. Consider the way most people would respond to someone who openly advocates racism, for example. The response such a person receives would not be a pleasant one and really would discourage them. This is a good thing and it's a service to everyone else.

The only difference between racist views and pro-authoritarian views is the method by which they damage society for everyone else. Honestly the idea that your safety is in terrible danger from terrorism, and that giving up freedom and privacy is an acceptable solution, is a form of cowardice. It enables tyranny and those who advocate it are enablers. It's also inconsistent with reality: you're more likely to be injured by lightning than by terrorists, and you're very much more likely to be harmed by police or other members of your own government than any terrorist. If you were truly interested in your safety you would religiously monitor weather reports and you would advocate that the federal government be reduced in size and power.

Meanwhile, it's a fact of life that not all opinions are equally valid. Some, like yours, are rooted in ignorance and cowardice and have proven extremely dangerous each time they are put into practice, as an honest reading of history would reveal to you. Yes, the USA is not the first nation to use the idea of a foreign threat as an excuse to curtail civil liberties. The delusional among us seem to believe that it does happen to be the very first nation that will do this without causing a complete disaster (which has always taken the form of a totalitarian government under which human life is without value). Neither an understanding of history nor of human nature could possibly support this delusion.

I'd like to leave you with two quotations that this conversation reminds me of. You see, we (collectively) keep rehashing these same old debates not realizing that great effort has already been poured into thinking about what are not new issues. The first is from C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The other is a dialog between Hermann Goring, a leading member of the Nazi Party, and a man named Gilbert, during an interview conduced in Goering's prison cell during the Nuremburg trials, on April 18, 1946:

-----

Goring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

----

Something I hope you will consider.

I suspect that the mania will be tempered by the fact that it will be fairly easy to classify all sorts of projects, that you were already doing, as "IoT" if you wish to seem super cutting edge and so on without actually making any changes.

There's a vague sort of notion about what "IoT" is supposed to be, cobbled together from some mixture of analogies to SCADA and industrial control systems and science fiction; but it is broad and ill formed enough that all sorts of things that can connect to a network in some way, and any and all software associated with them, can be covered without stretching the truth too hard.

Plus, until the various squabbling factions decide how to actually make the 'things' interact usefully with each other(the current preference seems to be 'appoint either Google or Apple as Feudal Oligarch', with 'don't even bother, everything you buy will have its own terrible app!' as the runner up), the 'internet' bit is really just being used as a convenient remote access to the control panel(and for monetizing users, of course), which is much less hairy and challenging than actual interactions among things in some conveniently configurable and/or emergent-without-being-pathological way.

Any guesses about how many existing 'embedded system that connects to the internet in some fashion' projects were dubbed 'internet of things' in order to bring this new buzzphrase to prominence?

Yeah, yeah, I know, at some point the scale and pervasiveness of embedded connectivity may reach a point where it is different in kind, not just degree, from past use; but I submit that we aren't there yet by a nontrivial margin. For the moment, "IOT" seems to mean 'has a terrible smartphone app' or 'last model, you connected to the serial port to configure the system; when we revised the hardware it turned out that adding ethernet would be cheap and lots of customers wanted it, so we added it.'

Dear Sir,

I may have been thinking too much. In fact, you may even say that I am paranoid - but at the stage that we are in today, that the blanket snooping activities into almost everything that we do online and off, we do need to question why the authority's need to do it, rather than accept what they are telling us by default

Yes, they tell us they are 'looking for terrorists' but is that true?

I mean, if they are 'looking for terrorists' the obvious target for those 'terrorists' are those from a particular religion (that peaceful one, to boot)

But is the authority looking into that group only?

Far from that. They are snooping in on ALL OF US, on our email, on our surfing pattern, on the site we go to, on what we download, on our phone conversation, on everything everybody is doing

Then why are they doing it?

Surely the 'looking for terrorists' excuse ain't gonna cut it no more, there gotta be more than what they are telling us

Yes, I am paranoid, I admit it. But you can't blame me from being paranoid

I am from China, a country which is being ruled by some really despicable regime. At the point when I left China the entire society was in turmoil. People were being pulled out on to the street and beaten, sometimes killed, just because they were labeled as 'anti-revolutionary'

I have had that kind of experiences. Most of you do not. I know what the authority is capable of doing, and what they will do to maintain their control over us, the peons

The more I look at what's happening in the so-called "Western countries" the more it resembles that despicable regime that is controlling China

Yes, I am have been 'overthinking', as you put it, but I rather be paranoid and right and be well prepared (as well as knowing what preventive actions to take before the shit hits the fan), than be totally unprepared and suffered the consequences

But it's all up to you guys. What I am telling you is what I, and many millions of older generation of Chinese had gone through --- we do not trust the authority, we do not trust anyone but ourselves

If you guys insist that the authority is to be trusted, that they are doing what they are doing for 'the good of the people', then that's your right to do what ever you want to do

But when the shit hits the fan (which I fervently hope it will never come true) don't blame me for not forewarning you guys

It happened in China, it could happen, and I repeat, it could happen elsewhere, including the Western countries

Not really.

With a suitable search warrant, the police can tear your house apart to find your stash. You cannot legally prohibit them from opening your house, and you cannot stop them from executing the search warrant to the full extent of its authorization.

And likewise, you cannot prohibit them from opening the encrypted volume.

Then it's a decision for a judge to make. The judge would be the one to decide if, by not providing a password, you are violating the court orders. You can provide evidence for your story, and the police can provide their own evidence. If you claim that somehow you had a 50-gig corrupt file, and the police show encryption software and logs of file access on volumes that don't exist, you're going to have a hard time convincing a judge of your story.

A better analogy would be evidence locked in a safe. The police can see the safe and can infer that it holds evidence, but you can claim to have forgotten the combination, or claim it's an antique to which you never knew the combination, or claim that it broke. If you can make a convincing case, you have a shot. If the police have evidence that you opened the safe a day earlier, you're pretty much screwed.

If the court orders you to teach the police how to read your language, then yes, you are in fact required to do so.

You could try teaching them incorrectly, but that's effectively obstruction of justice and/or perjury, depending on how it's handled.

Oh lord, she liked the third one? man just shows you women will eat the most dumb stilted "romance" dialog if its delivered by a pretty boy, because the whole "love has blinded you?" scene was so damned tone deaf and unlike actual interaction by...well anybody not doing a line reading for dinner theater it just made me cringe the entire way, fucking terrible!