This opinion piece sums up nicely, what many conversations have shown to be the concern of the experts about those neat little items we feel have some added value due to their connectedness. We tend to trade a couple of minutes of leisure time against the risk of our household appliances being the attack vector for all kinds of crimes and attacks.

Given the many webcams households have deployed and which are not only open to malevolent visitors from the internet due to faulty, neglecting, cheap implementation or even bad intentions, the next generation of connected tools and appliances need to be developed with security in mind. Unfortunately, there is no framework that is being built on this requirement as the “default” solution yet, so any rogue software out there could be used by any manufacturer of elements meant to make our lives easier, but actually bringing a whiff of “Brazil” to our homes:

“Terry Gilliam’s futuristic film Brazil was set in a technologically advanced society, yet the future it predicted was dystopic, convoluted and frustrating. Perhaps we’re heading down a similar path in the workplace and home: studies show that after a certain point, the gadgets and appliances we employ absorb more time and effort, showing diminishing marginal returns.”