Weekly update

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...

How's the view?! Back to business, it's now 8 years ago that Scott and I thought it would be a cool idea to build Why no HTTPS? We used the site to shame companies for not implementing their transport later security property, and to make it a bit of fun, we shamed by country as well. This helped people jump on the bandwagon of giving their respective countries a little "encouragement", and we hope they'll do the same now with Why no Passkeys? Following my infamous phishing incident last year, I...

I know enough about home cinema audiovisual to know there's a lot I don't know. It's conscious incompetence, if you like, which is different to the unconscious incompetence most people have on the topic. That's not to sound derogatory (it's spelled out that way in the competence model), rather it recognises that this is a super specialised area and as soon as you start scratching the surface, things get very complex and very expensive really fast. But it's also exciting, and what we've got in th...