Weekly update

I've started playing around with YouTube's "create video thumbnail", which hopefully will give me back a bit of time in my day (it used to be a manual job in Photoshop) and be a bit more interesting. And on that note, the imagery it's chosen this week is spot on: that Lockwood ES2100 electric strike looks like the perfect solution for my first fully installed Ubiquiti Access door lock. Having the door position sensor built in really simplifies things, and hopefully Ubiquiti will later add suppor...

It does feel like I've bitten off too much and am now chewing like crazy this week. The 3D printing talk with Elle in Oslo, the "normal" NDC infosec talk, the cyber-broken talk with Scott in Copenhagen and then those ratbag hackers keep dumping more data too! Oh, and still finalising all the IoT door lock stuff, along with mapping out all the cameras, APs and door hubs in Ubiquiti's designer to make sure we don't miss anything there. It's ordered chaos... just....

I genuinely think I've nailed the IoT door lock situation! Well, Ubiquiti has, but I think I've worked out how to put it all into a residential house and have it make sense. There are a few basic tenets: 1. Main power (never have to rely on batteries) 2. Fail-secure (needs to remain locked on power outage) 3. Local control (no cloud latency to contend with) 4. Manual override ("the house is on fire, let me out") Which is exactly what we have here in this week's vid (and sorry about the sec...

The current ransomware situation is a bit of a kludge (deep breath): a lot of ransomware (which often doesn't even involve "ware", it's just extortion) is carried out by kids who successfully make a truckload of money but can't spend it without getting caught and the companies they breach rapidly get piled onto by class action lawyers that keeps them busy fighting and being cautious not to say anyting to customers lest that then gets used against them in litigation. That's mostly it; more in thi...

A little wind noise, a little connectivity flakiness, and a little lip-sync issues from YouTube, but look at that view! 🤩 Back to business, it's the Brinks Home FAQ I found most interesting this week. I mean, how do you write your own FAQ then fail to actually answer most of the questions?! Being conscious that they're the target of criminal extortion and are genuinely the victims here, I still struggle to grasp how simple incident response questions can be so lawyer-speaked as to remove all se...

Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy, no, it's just not the same. It's not the same ubiquity of high-quality coffee shops and passion for what many view as the art of making espresso-based drinks. There's comparably little tolerance for the likes of Starbucks (who have not fared well in Australia), and other mass-pro...

The Origin Energy breach down here in Aus is all over the news this week, and as with many breaches, it's multi-faceted. You've got them leading with "don't worry, your credit card is fine", the hacker leading with "they didn't respond when I tried to report it", and now news that the two parties have "come to an agreement". Maybe money was paid, or maybe Origin made some promises to restrain the hounds if commitments about data deletion were made. But both outcomes, of course, provide no guaran...

I reckon this week's video on how Claude is tying together info from UniFi, Home Assistant and the Pi-Hole is an absolute ripper. Or at least the concept is - if ever there was an actual value proposition for AI it's taking lots of noise and converting it into a useful signal. Or, sometimes, it's just helping you see the woods through the trees, and that's exactly what Claude helped me do last night when every Sonos unit in the house refused to connect to any music service. It only took Claude a...

"Build a smart home", they said. "It'll make life so much better", they said. Well, life wasn't very bloody good at 23:00 the other night after travelling 33 hours from Paris only to find the IoT doorlock batteries dead and the 9V "jump start" procedure completely failing! Eventually, the locksmith arrived and opened an old-school physical lock on another door in an alarmingly short time. So, lessons: 1. Battery-powered locks suck and will eventually lock you out of your house 2. Don't trust...

How's this for a location?! I mean, last week was nice with Scott in Mallorca, but Marrakech is, well, wow 😮 Anyway, about those data breaches... This week I'm talking about the futility of attempting to remove piss from a pool, yet here we are, with various companies wanting to place that message alongside the very data breaches they can do nothing about! As I say in the post, I don't question the good intentions behind setting up a service to try to scrub data from legally operating data brok...