Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I was willing to overlook:
- The bed costs $2,000
- It won’t function if the internet goes down
- Basic features are behind an additional $19/mo subscription
- The bed’s only controls are via mobile app
My man would have been willing to overlook having Jeff bezos himself sleep in his bed with him before realizing what was happening.
This was written by Papa Bear himself
Trying very hard not to come to the conclusion that if you waste 2000 bucks on a connected bed, you have only yourself to blame.
Seriously. Unlike dumb TVs, dumb beds are not going away. Buy one for 400 bucks and donate the remainder of your bed-buying fortune. Your body won't notice and €1600 can do a lot of good.
I've read some people get help from the cooling these provide, but I think there's versions without subscriptions.
Also I've read of people buying shit like this in the hope it helps intractable insomnia, and they probably aren't thinking that clearly, because of sleep deprivation.
I share your suspicions but I'd go further. The bed industry has always struck me as an obvious scam that plays on people's nebulous health anxieties and also on the tempting cognitive fallacy that, since an 8-hour night is the same amount as an 8-hour workday, the exact physical makeup of your bed is somehow as important as your career or something. It all strikes me as almost completely irrational. People slept for aeons on straw and somehow survived. A bed is a soft flat object, any other abstract properties are just marketing IMO.
Also, eight hours is a modern invention! Throughout most of human history we slept several times a day, rather than just once.
I'm really liking siestas these days and can't go back to a single eight hour block.
Absolutely. The 8-hour sleep is probably just a marketing invention, related to modern electric light. In pre-modern Europe it was common to get up and do housework in the middle of the night.
When you blame consumers for allowing antisocial tech into their lives, you’re doing free work for the tech barons.
So nobody has any agency and we're all just helpless puppets on strings?
On the contrary. I want people to have their own opinions, and to buy the things that suit their tastes even if they seem silly to me.
And I want those things to have fair, consumer-friendly regulations applied to them.
And when companies try to abuse their consumers, and I want us to criticize the company rather than the consumer.
I can get on board with that.
To be fair it's more of a mattress than a bed
on a connected bed
If the protocol was documented and simple enough, and if you could make it talk to your smart home RPi, then one could replace AWS with nginx + a perl or lua module.
I want to learn more about this! Searching for "bed backdoor " right now
Talk about building a solution in search of a problem
The email address attached to the public key, [email protected], to me suggests the private key is likely accessible to the entire engineering team.
This assumption is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the authors argument that this is a big deal.
How so, it's clearly a shared account
I don't think that's a wild assumption to make
A shared account doesn't mean everyone who works there has access to it, or that those who do have access aren't subject to some type of access control.
The article basically goes on to say that the existence of this key makes a huge difference to the security/privacy of the product. It argues that using it, someone could access data from the device, or use it to upload arbitrary code to the device for it to run. However, those are both things the user is already trusting the company with. They have to trust that the company has access controls/policies to prevent individual rogue employees doing the things described. It seems unreasonable to say that an SSH key being on the device demonstrates that those controls aren't in place.
I agree to an extent, the user already uses a cloud service. So they have to trust the provider.
And as far as a bed goes, I suppose you can't expect the customer to ssh into it if something goes wrong and you have to fix it.
Both seems reasonable to me.
Yeah, its not unreasonable that you'd have a remote way to access the device to gather debug data with the customers consent. An SSH key in the firmware is a flexible way to do that, so long as there are good controls in place to ensure that it isn't misused.
Remember, the “s” in IoT stands for “security”.
I could completely see this email address being a shared email address and not tied to a single user.
I'm 90% sure it is not a single user. I just don't see how that really affects the security of the product, given that the company that sells it can already do the things the author is saying can be done if you have this key.
To be clear, I wouldn't buy this. I just don't think the SSH key makes it any worse than it already was
Would you rather one person have access to your device / data to potentially perform malicious actions or multiple people access to your device / data to potentially perform malicious actions?
And if you tell me multiple people, you’re full of it.
I think multiple people already have access to the databases that store the data the device sends. I don't really care whether they get the data from the device itself or from the database.
Similarly, I think multiple people have the ability to make changes to the firmware build and the systems that distribute it. So those people already have the potential ability to gain access to the device.
One person or multiple people having unauthorised access are both unacceptable. I'm saying that the users have to trust the companies ability to prevent that occurring, and that therefore this particular technical detail is mostly irrelevant
Great article, with a pretty cool (or warm) solution to the problem.
This is fucked up, but it's still somehow better than a Murphy Bed backdoor.
So, umm, my bed suddenly get too hard or soft at night? Yawn.