[Dailydave] Junk Hacking Must Stop!

[Dave Aitel]

Look, I get how we all love free trips to various locales other than
Seattle or Boston or whatever (which are not, technically "locales" so
much as just "places people happen to live"). But one more hacking talk
about breaking into some random piece of electronics that people might
use somewhere like a Internet-connected bed-warmer, or a MRI machine, or
a machine people use to make MRI machines, and the whole hacking
community is going to be wearing the cone of shame for a week!

your blackhat talk was not accepted!

Yes, we get it. Cars, boats, buses, and those singing fish plaques are
all hackable and have no security. Most conferences these days have a
whole track called "Junk I found around my house and how I am going to
scare you by hacking it". That stuff is always going to be hackable
whetherornotyouarethecalvalry.org.

I get that Barnaby hacked an ATM. I thought it was stupid then, and it's
even stupider now when your basic ATM runs XP so it can display ads to
you while you take money out of it. But it's not stunt hacking unless it
can *wow* you. If you are wowed by someone owning XP these days, then
you are out of it and need to be re-reading Carolyn Meniel's HappyHacker
website. Yes, there is Junk in your garage, and you can hack it, and if
you find someone else who happens to have that exact same Junk, you can
probably hack that too, but maybe not, because testing is hard.

Cars are the pinnacle of junk hacking, because they are meant to be in
your garage. Obviously there is no security on car computers. Nor (and I
hate to break the suspense) *will there ever be*. Yes, you can connect a
device to my midlife crisis car and update the CPU of the battery itself
with malware, which can in theory explode my whole car on the way to
BJJ. I personally hope you don't. But I know it's possible the same way
I know it's possible to secretly rewire my toaster oven to overcook my
toast every time even when I put it on the lowest setting, driving me
slowly but surely insane.

So in any case, enough with the Junk Hacking, and enough with being
amazed when people hack their junk.

-dave :>

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