Appleinsider: Philips Hue smart bulb allows hackers to attack your network

Philips Hue smart bulb allows hackers to attack your network
By Malcolm Owen, Wednesday, February 05, 2020, 04:50 am PT (07:50 am ET)

Owners of Philips Hue smart bulbs are being urged to check its firmware, after the publication of a vulnerability in how the accessories communicate with each other over Zigbee could allow an attacker to gain control over the whole home network.

I'm glad to see that Philips is going to be releasing a patch to close this attack vector, but this also underscores something I've been saying for a long time: IoT is not mature enough to be considered safe and reliable. Far too many smart appliances have been designed with little or no thought to security, and customers are the ones paying the price.

I love the concept of smart appliances, and I would love to have a home full of them, but there's no way I'm going to install them when there's a very real risk that doing so will allow criminals and hackers access to everything else on my LAN. I hope this tech will be secured in the future, but it certainly is not today.

Hello World on the Qualcomm QCA4020 developer board

I have recently started working on an IoT project involving the use of a Qualcomm QCA4020 Development Kit prototype board. The board has many useful features for IoT prototyping, but a clear set of "getting started" instructions is not one of them.

Qualcomm's developer network has published a Hello World demo application, but the procedure is for Windows PCs and I want to use Linux for my development platform. Qualcomm's SDK says that Linux and macOS are supported platforms, but any documentation resembling a tutorial is strictly Windows-based.

This blog post is the procedure I worked out for getting their Hello World demo working using a Linux PC to cross-compile the code and flash the Qualcomm developer board

AppleInsider: Software bug shuts down Nest thermostats, turns off heating for unlucky customers

Software bug shuts down Nest thermostats, turns off heating for unlucky customers
By Sam Oliver
Thursday, January 14, 2016, 06:19 am PT (09:19 am ET)

A buggy software update has caused many users of Nest's smart thermostat to wake up in the cold in recent days, as the devices have been found to quickly drain their batteries and shut down, leaving heating and cooling systems offline.
...
For users, fixing the problem — Nest says 99.5 percent of its customers are back online — means rebooting their now-dead thermostat, which is easier said than done. Nest's support site details a nine-step process that requires removing the device from the wall, connecting it to auxiliary power, and performing a series of incantations.

Ow. That's embarrassing.

A better question is: "Why does Nest require a battery to operate?" Every furnace and A/C system I've seen provides DC voltage to power thermostats. Why can't the Nest thermostat run off of that and only use the battery to maintain configuration during a power outage (or even better, use flash memory for storing configuration)?