entirely agree. and you can tell a lot about me by
watching the temperature sensors at my house
(http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/home_temp.html)
Such as what?
Whether he's gone on vacation, probably--since he's at a .edu, there's a
good chance he gets a week or two off at Christmas; if he goes away at
that time, he'll probably turn down his thermostat before he goes, and
it'll show up on the sensors. A water meter would be an even more
reliable indicator.
Burglars, obviously, prefer to break into empty houses; watching every
house in town is too much work, but having a tool do it for you over the
net would be easy.
Hmm. I bet the current data-over-water-pipes meters are subject to
tapping--since the pipes run into everybody's home, it'd be like a shared
Ethernet. With the right cable (say, a single wire from the pipe to the
serial port, maybe with an amplifier), and a bit of software, you could
monitor your neighbors' water usage. The water companies probably didn't
think to encrypt the data. Once again, trusting the topology is a Bad
Thing.
/=======================================================\
|John Stracke |Principal Engineer |
|jstracke(_at_)incentivesystems(_dot_)com |Incentive Systems, Inc.|
|http://www.incentivesystems.com|My opinions are my own.|
|=======================================================|
|A mime is a wonderful thing to waste. |
\=======================================================/