Smart Homes

feel like your home might be intellectually inferior? There there? Yes, this past year I have I have you well two thousand fourteen, I used several colorful metaphors to describe certain aspects of my home as a dumb stuff was happening. I mean, you know it's it's things breakdown and don't repair themselves. Doors don't open for you, your closet doesn't give you what you want to wear in the morning you have to go looking for it, dangers everything on

Final Jeopardy, and then forgets to perform it in the question. Yeah, My my biggest pet peeve is that when I walked through the door, Gallivant is not automatically playing on my TV. I mean, that's just I don't get it. You may guess from that awkward introduction that today we're going to talk about smart home and the rest of it is going to be smooth sailor. Yeah, Jonathan, Yeah, did you recently go to c E S. I did recently go to CEF the Consumer Electronics Show. Are you sure that

S doesn't stand for circus spelled wrong? Well, it doesn't stand for anything these days. It's just c S. Yeah. Yeah, that used to be Consumer Electronics Show, but now it's just CES. Sort of like that, you know, they they they've decided to go super celeb on us. It's like KFC. It's like these letters could stand for any right, right, and Uh. At ce S there are a lot of big themes that came out that year, lots of stuff that you know, the various companies were really focusing on,

and one of the biggest was smart home technology. And this is something that we've seen at c S year after year, but this year was kind of like critical mass. I would say, you know, this was where I suddenly saw more examples of it. In fact, there was an entire section of the show floor set aside just for smart homes and uh. In fact, one one exhibitor had built out a booth that was a home and you walked through it and saw that saw how the technology worked.

Within the context of a home. But we wanted to talk kind of all about smart homes and sort of where the idea came from and where it's going and some of the pros and cons of it. But to begin with, I just wanted to talk a little bit about where where this whole automation and smart home technology got its start. Sure, because it's not actually a new idea. No, no, So you're going to take us back to smart caves,

they're not quite that far. I'm gonna go to the early twentieth century, and that was when we started seeing uh, electronic and mechanical appliances first hit the market for the general consumer. Now, there were earlier examples in the nineteenth centuries, sort of the predecessors for the technology we depend upon, but we really saw the mature in the early nineteen hundreds.

So this is stuff like you know, washers and dryers and dishwashers and uh, you know, eventually other things like toasters that wouldn't burn your house down and things of that nature. So this was all about saving effort, labor, yeah, yeah, and and it actually made a huge impact. We did a series of episodes on on washing machines and dryers in uh in text app Yeah, back when I was on the show, and it's it's pretty it's actually pretty

interesting stuff, right, and uh, really interesting to see. I mean there's a whole political, kind of controversial part of the washing machine, for example, people who should have gotten credit and didn't. But there's also just the overall story of how can we create labor saving devices so that people can maximize their time and not spend it all

doing backbreaking labor that could be handled automatically. Um So that was sort of the the germ of the idea, right, But it wasn't until the nineteen sixties that we start seeing kind of a giant leap forward on this. Now we had seen technology start to take on more and more automated style roles. Like the original washing machines, you actually had to monitor them, you had to change them,

turn them on and turn them off manually. They didn't have automatic shutoffs or timers or things like that that developed throughout the decades. But the nineteen sixties we go kind of a a jump ahead, I would say, with the Echo four, which was a home automation system. It was also known as the Electronic Computing Home Operator and It was made out of surplus electronic parts and it was housed in a tall walnut cabinet, and um it was I missed the days of putting electronic X in

wood case. Yeah yeah, kind of like the old televisions as well. Yeah. So well, this thing could supposedly handle finances, the home finances. It could compute shopping lists, so if you said you wanted to make a certain thing and you told it what ingredients you had, it could tell you which ones you were missing and therefore you need to go and get them. Um. It could also control the thermostatic, could predict the weather and even turn appliances

on and off. It was designed by Jim Sutherland, who was an employee at Westinghouse, and he built it for himself. I gotta say, I'm skeptical about how good this thing was at those tasks you just list, well, you just listed, and it never it was never put into any kind of production, like this was literally his his home project.

Probably telling right, didn't go into production. I mean also computer technology at the time being what it was, I'd like to think of it as operating under the same sort of rules as the Pewee Herman Rube Goldberg device at the beginning of Pewee's big adventure to feed his dog, you know that kind of thing. Um. There is also, uh the Kitchen computer, which was another device that was meant to automate the home. This one came out the year after Echo four was sort of um displayed in

like a popular mechanics article. Uh So, this one came from Honeywell, and it could store recipes and tell you what sort of meals you could cook based upon the ingredients you had available. So if you said, like, I've got these five ingredients, what can I make with this? And it could give you a list of different recipes to try. Uh, all of that convenience could be yours for the low low price of ten thousand, six hundred dollars in nineteen mid nineteen sixties money. That's like the

cost of a couple of houses at that time. Yeah yeah, yeah, but hey do you'd never have to worry about what to make for dinner because you just tell it, like, I got a bottle to catch up some Jolke cold be nuts. What can I whip up here's a recipe for lasagna? Um So, by the nineteen eighties, home automation was becoming more of a reality, although in these cases it was a lot of contract or work. So if you wanted to have a system put in, you had

to go out hire a contractor. They would come in and usually the various elements of your home automation would actually rely on infrared sensors and transmitters, so the same sort of technology that most remote controls rely on today. You know, you may not realize this. When the nineteen seventies remote controls were mostly well, at least some were

using sonic signals. Yeah, where you would press a button and I have a little piece of metal inside the remote control, and when it flexed, it would give off ultrasonic frequencies and the television would respond to it, which is why if you dropped your change and there was a hard floor, you could accidentally change the channel, or if you played with a slinky near the TV, you

could affect it. But eventually it was pretty cool. I actually had one of those TVs when I was a kid, and I could I could have a slinky and play with it and things would happen on the TV. And I thought, I guess I should be glad that Palter Guist had not come out yet. So at any rate, the the infrared sensor technology began to come down in price, and that meant we could incorporate in more and more stuff.

But this meant that you had a remote control to handle things, right, It wasn't truly automated in the sense that we think of today. It was just you were you had a step removed. You didn't have to go and turn on a switch or plug something in. But uh it was also a niche market. It was pretty expensive because usually you had to have, like I said, a contractor come in and install this stuff. It wasn't plug and play. Uh, so it really limited the number

of people who could actually do this. You know, I kept on hearing about home automation. It was very much a bleeding edge adopter kind of thing at that point. So by the late ninety nineties as when we first started seeing appliances that could connect into a computer network, not just have some sort of sensor on it that would allow it to operate when you use a remote control, but something that could interact with a network through WiFi

or a wired connection. So this is when the first first start seeing things like networked refrigerators or networked washers or network dryers. They weren't really that good. They didn't do a lot of things that would have necessitated them to be connected. When they were first coming out, it was really a novelty. I remember the first time I saw one. I looked at and I thought, oh, that's really cool. Um, why would you do that? Like, what

what's the benefit? And like the benefits were pretty tenuous. You could you could right yourself a program and see

to control your washer. It was you know, it involved a lot of like like refrigerators, the example I always think of it, It involved a lot of work on the part of the consumer for it to have any meaningful impacts, things like logging the stuff that's going into your refrigerator, so that way, when you're are at work and you're thinking, oh, I would like to make such and such, do I have all the things I need?

But it would mean that you were the one who had to actually maintain essentially like a database inventory, which does not sound appealing to me. That just seems like a different type of labor that I have to do. Why would that even be connected to the fridge. You could just keep a spreadsheet on your computer. Yeah, good,

good point. An excellent point. I mean, yeah, at the point that you're logging something in Excel anyway, Like you don't really need to have your fridge send you a facts telling you to get more eggs, right, unless you're in back to the future too, in which case all communication is done to facts. Yeah, we've established that, done

by multiple duplicates. By the end of two thousand fifteen, your fridge will be facing you repeatedly throughout the day and through all of your rooms in your house, all of which have their own facts, including your closets, including your closets, um so all caps you've got food poisoning, that explains the vomiting. So the the way the automation has changed a lot over the last couple of years is that again technology has continued to get less expensive.

Like the basic sensors, the basic connectors that allow us to network things together have all come come down in price, which means that there are a lot more consumer level options, right. And I think we're also just now getting to the point where some of these applications might actually be useful,

Like they really do increase your convenience in certain cases. Right, And we've got we've got a lot of development, not just in the hardware side, but the software side, which is where a lot of that functionality is coming from. It's not, you know, the the hardware is not demonstrably that different from the earlier generations. It's not like a

smart refrigerator is that different from a regular refrigerator. But the apps that are designed around it to allow you to leverage that technology have matured over the last couple of years. And I think that's why smart home technology is starting to hit it big because we are are our user interface has improved to the point where now people can say, oh, I get it now, now it makes sense. Yeah. I would say also that we have

a lot of unrealized capacity now. I mean, we're at a stage technologically where you could have fridge that actually could log everything you put in it without you having to intervene. But it would require stuff that we don't do, like say putting r F I D tags on all of our food products or something like that. You can maybe have some sort of scanner essentially attach a scanner to the to the front of the fridge that would

read a UPC code or something. Right. Yeah, But so I'd say we are closer to sort of the fantasy of the smart home than we were before, even if even if in a lot of cases it's not actually realized, we could do it now. Yeah, and there are several examples I thought I would give. Actually I'm just going to do three because obviously if if we wanted to,

we could have an episode. Yeah, they're There are hundreds of products on the market that fall into home automation and smart home technology, but just to kind of give you a very brief broad overview of some of the options. One is sort of the plug and play approach, which is where instead of you going in and replacing a specific system like the lighting or the security of your home, you have these these modules that essentially plug into wall sockets.

That's what where they get their power. They connect to your network and then you plug stuff into them and that allows you to have remote access to the power that goes to that appliance. So Belkan has the we Mo switch plus Motion, which is a plug in play automation gadget that does exactly that. Right, You you plug this thing into the wall, you plug your up your appliance into the sensor. You use a smartphone Apple to access it, so you can turn it on and off

it will. Now clearly this only works if whatever gadget is plugged into the Wemo has a permanent on feature. Right, So if you are talking about something like a lamp, that's very easy. You turn the lamp to the on position when you activate the Wemo, then the lamp is gonna come on. When you turn it off remotely, the lamp goes off. Other devices obviously they have more input than that. You know, you need to do something more than just turn it on, and this will not help

you with that. So if you plug your toaster into one of these things, it's not gonna push the lever down so that you get toast. It'll it'll provide power to it, but it won't it won't actually activate the

toaster toaster oven. Yeah, I was just thinking, probably don't want to remotely activate that when you're when you're not home, but I'm going to but maybe croc pot, you know something like that, where you're like, oh, I just want to have this thing's gonna take four hours to cook, It's gonna be on a certain level of heat that I feel comfortable with. I don't want to have to come home to start it. I don't want it to just be on warm for all day. So at some point in the day I'm going to go onto my

smartphone app and turn my crock pot on. Now I'm hungry. Thanks, thanks Internet. Um. Another example is the nest thermostat, the learning thermostat. And we've talked about this on I think we've talked about four we're thinking. I know I've talked about on tech stuff. UM. This is the thermostat that came from a couple of engineers who used to work at Apple, and then they developed this smart thermostat UH. The place for birds to live, a smart thermostat and

home for birds, right, That's why it's called nests. In this case, the the nest is is your is your little nest at home, and you want you want your nest to be comfy. So the thermostat has a lot of features that are very easy to explain to people, like the fact that you can remotely change the temperature on your thermostat no matter where you happen to be used the app, you connect to the internet, you change it. Your your nest is UH is hooked into your home

WiFi system. It gets the command changes it in that way your your house will the climate control will kick in, whether it's heat or air conditioning or whatever. So this is useful obviously if you want to be able to adjust the temperature to maximize your eco friendliness and not run it when no one's home. But the thing is the Nest also has a microprocessor and an algorithm that allows it to learn your behaviors and do this on its own, so that you don't have to send it

the commands. Right, You don't have to say, all right, I'm at the office now, let's turn the heat off, or I'm coming home, turn on the air conditioning because it's really hot outside. So that way when I get home in half an hour, it'll be nice and cool in my house. The Nest, their amstetics itself starts to learn what your routine is and anticipates it ahead of time and and makes those changes for you, which is

pretty awesome. And that's really where we're getting at with the smart It's not just the connectivity, but the fact that it can start to anticipate what you want. Then we have the Phillips Hugh light bulbs. Have you guys seen these? I love thee I almost bought some they're a little more dim than I would prefer. I would them to be a bit brighter. But they are beautiful and they can change different colors. They have led in them.

You can use a smartphone app to adjust it, so you can change like whatever you like if you want, Hey, you know what, my living room is gonna have neon green light for tonight. I could do that, or I can be like, let's go purple. Could do that. But on top of that, there's the smartphone. Have you seen

the smartphone app Lauren? Okay, they have a smartphone app where it listens to the TV shows you watch, and for certain TV shows, depending upon what's going on on the screen, it will match the lighting in your room to match the mood on screen. It gives you TV mood lighting. Yeah, exactly. So like the detectives are going into a dark room, your lights come down, the there's there's like a photographer flashing pictures. Your your lights are

flashing in sync with the TV program. I don't think I want That sounds horrible, but I'd give it try. I wanted, I mean, I'm interested. I wanted to all my all my rooms, and I want speakers going to all my rooms, and I want the app and all my rooms so that my house is just constantly flashing, like and I want to just watch the omen over and over. That's all I want. Oh yeah, I wonder if it responds to the sound of lightning strikes. It's it's the way it was designed. I can't remember which

shows in particular it's it's matched up to. It's only a couple, but it because obviously, you know, in order to pull this off, you already have to know what happens in the show to match the lighting. Yeah, it's it's not a sound cue that it's that it's listening for. It's a it's a digital programmed sound que I'm sure, just waiting waiting for Homer to say, sure is dark in here, and then like all the lights come off,

go off, and you're like, huh. If I could just do a really good Homer voice, I could freak people out. So yeah, but that's just that's just three products on the market. There are so many of the dozens and dozens, and they cover everything, right, they're covering you know. I just talked about some very simple systems, but things like you could you could have smart locks on your doors, so that you could use a code or a Bluetooth device where your luck um unlocks automatically when that device

gets within range. Or you could have security system like video surveillance that that's a very popular one that you could have as part of your smart home. I'd imagine a very good application of something like a smart lock would be being able to let somebody into your house remotely you being there. Yeah, there are quite a few versions I've seen. Some of them allow for you to give a a like a four digit code to somebody that only works within a span of time. So let's

say there's yeah, exactly. So like you have a dog walker. Let's say and the dog walker says, okay, I'm gonna be at your place between twelve and two. You could say, all right, I'm gonna be safe. I'm gonna go from eleven thirty to two thirty. This pen will give you access to my house, and then after two thirty it no longer works, and before eleven thirty it doesn't work. Uh,

that sort of thing. In other cases, you could just do it remotely yourself, so that they could call you when they get to your doorstep and and yeah, and you could just press the like unlock that door button on your phone and let them in. And even at the at ces we even saw one that was a doggie door, a smart home doggie door where you could you could allow the doggie door to swing free so the dog can go outside. When the dog comes back in, you can lock it in place again. And you know

that sort of stuff, which I thought was kind of neat. Yeah, so, uh, you can see where the convenience comes in. You can see where some of the benefits are to kind of segue into benefits. That remote access is a big one obviously, right, the ability to control the systems of your house wherever you happen to be. That could be for lots of reasons.

It could be that, again, you're trying to save money, so you don't want to spend you know, you don't want to you don't want to be consuming electricity when you don't need it. Um, it could be that you're doing it for security. So you might be going out of town for a few days, but you want your lights to come on as if someone's home so that you don't give the indication that hey, there's an empty

house here. That kind of stuff, UM, A lot of different reasons why you would want to remote access and the idea of algorithms that could learn your behavior and anticipate it. That's really really intriguing. Oh yeah, that's that's real sexy. I mean that's kind of the just just making things easier again, like like making things easier for you so that you can devote your brain power to

whatever else you want. Exactly. Yeah. I said that you could put it towards enlightened pursuits, like watching The Bachelor. It's trying to come up with the show I would least likely watch, and that one was the first that I thought of. Um, but at any rate, yeah, it's it's exactly that idea of being able to to save labor, save effort, to have kind of an effortless existence in your home as much as possible, and the mundane things

get taken care of. So if we look at the ideal smart home and we go forward ten years, and this might even be a conservative vision of the smart home of the future, I imagine this scenario. You come home, you walk towards the front door, which automatically unlocks for you. Uh, it might be that it just recognizes who you are through some sort of facial recognition, or maybe it's because of the way you walk, or maybe even your heart beat,

depending upon how it's detecting this sort of stuff. It could be communicating with electronics that you have on your person, and that might be the handshake. Um. Anyway, it unlocks immediately, so you don't have any need for keys. You don't have to fumble for anything. You just you open the door, you close it, it locks behind you. You're good to go. Uh. Then you walk in the day, the lights in your house adjust for the level of brightness of the time

of day so that it's not too bright. If it's in the middle of the day there's a law of natural light, or maybe it's at night and it's a little brighter so you can around your area. As you walk around, music matching your mood comes on. Maybe it even is aware of what your schedule was like, because if you happen to have an online schedule, it might say, oh, look at that, Look at all the meetings Jonathan had. He's probably out of his mind with the stress and anxiety.

Let's play exactly yakety sex just on a loop and uh, you know, let's let's turn all the carpets into treadmills, and he never actually gets anywhere. It'll be fun. Uh, maybe you're beyond that. Maybe your kitchen has already started to give you suggestions on what meals you could create based upon the stuff you have at hand, and saying, you know you're you're totally like stressing out. Here's a comfort food recipe. Or maybe it's um, you know, I I see that you posted on Facebook that you want

to lose weight. Here's a low calorie what recipe? I mean? It could get either awesome or creepy invasive, depending upon your perspective. Um, sometimes I I go between the two,

Like that would be kind of creepy. Uh. Maybe your entertainment system pops on as soon as you enter the living room and goes straight to your favorite show, or maybe gives you a selection of things to view, things that it knows that you'd be interested in, and gives you the option of like, well, I want to see the one that's in the middle row on the top. That kind of stuff. Uh. The window shades could be adjusting themselves for whatever time of day or whatever natural

light is coming in. For example, I've got a west facing wall for my living room. Uh if I were coming in to watch movies, then I would want those shades to come down to block that light from creating glare. It could do all of that sort of stuff automatically.

The temperature is exactly how you like it. Uh So, I mean this is the sort of stuff that you can imagine the smart home of the future having, And it's really not that far away, I say, ten years, But this is stuff that it would take a little finagling, but you could do most of it right now. It might not be as seamless or work as easily as you would hope, but it's right right, and it might not. I mean it might take significantly longer, in fact, than

ten years for this to be a common occurrence. Sure, yeah, because this is stuff where people of a certain income level would be able to make that kind of investment. I mean, it has become significantly less expensive than it was when you had to have a contractor come in and install all this. And a lot of the technology we're seeing today is designed to essentially plug into the stuff we already have, like those Hugh light bulbs just screw into regular light sockets. Yeah, you don't have to

have a special one. All the technology is built into the bulb itself. You know. Somehow I imagine that this kind of thing would become more common in new homes than as us. Yeah. I think it all depends on the person as well. Like my home is relatively new, but I could see myself making In fact, I have I've got internet connected lights in my living room, so I can turn the lights on in my house right

now or turn them off or dim them. I like to do that when my wife is at home and I'm not and I make her think that it's haunted. I almost always get a text immediately afterward saying knock it off. She's like, I know it's you, and it always is. But yeah, I can see this definitely being something that gets built into newer homes. And because because even even with the ease of installation, it's still a

level of investment and both money and in time. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, if you look at the way that smart options have been integrated into cars. For example, I've got a I've got a car from two thousand two, and um, it's got a CD player and a tape deck. Yeah, and I can play m P three players by putting a special connecting tape in the tape deck and running a line in the game I used to play that. But but but you know, um so there are ways of

getting technology into even even my older car shop. But but it's a lot easier if it's just built into the right going going and getting an aftermarket you know, system is an option, but that is a that's a big investment, and it requires that you take your you're not gonna be making I would never make that conversion myself. I wouldn't know the first thing about installing a new entertainment system into my vehicle, so you know, I would have to have other people do that, and you know that.

I actually think that a lot of the smart home stuff is significantly easier than the car. But but if you're talking about everything, who I mean, that's a lot of work, right, That's there's not like the one stop shop where you just turn your whole home into an automated superhouse, right, So so that's actually kind of kind of a drawback. Really is is the kind of rate

of potential adoption for this technology? What are some others? Yeah, I think it's important to explore some of the drawbacks because anytime you have a new, a new sort of genre of technology coming into our lives. There's gonna be a lot of kinks to work out. Yeah, and there and meddally, there are a ton with smart health technology, and it would be irresponsible of us to suggest otherwise. There are quite a few things we could talk about. One is, uh, it's a frustration for consumers. It's the

whole locked in ecosystem. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, if if you're going to have your music system communicating with your television, then do you need to have a music system and a television created by the same company, right? Or if you have a smart washer and a smart dryer, do they have to both be of the same brand? Uh? And even maybe even models that were produced very close to Yeah, because as technology improves, sometimes it's not as

backwards compatible as you would like it to be. And uh, or if you want your refrigerator and stove to work together. And I've seen, like I've seen full systems where there's this full integration between multiple appliances. And appliances are big ticket items. I mean these are expensive, right, and most of us, uh, I think it's fair to say most of us in this room, myself included are not necessarily the type who are ready to go out and buy a pair or more major appliances at the same time.

Yeah no, not not this week anyway. Who knows what next week will bring. Yeah, that's another reason we might be seeing this more often in new homes, right, major like whole room renovation right right, because because that financial investment is significant, and if you are locked into an ecosystem, that's a problem because most most consumers, I would think,

I like to have some options, right. They don't want to end up saying, well, I love this washer and I really like this other dryer, but there's no point in getting the two because they can't communicate with each other because they're made by different manufacturers and they they speak differ print languages. And that's a real problem with

home connected homes. There are a lot of systems that are dependent upon one another and they have to speak the common language, and that means you're locked into a specific manufacturer, whether you like it or not. Yeah. Sure,

And I mean also just for controlling them. Like imagine if you've got if every appliance in your home is a smart appliance and you have I don't know twenty five apps you have to use to manage every single one of them, right, Like my lights I was talking about, that's a specific app on my phone, right, So if I got one from my locks, that would be a separate app. And if I got so if I got a security system with cameras, that would be another app.

And if I got you know, etcetera et other. And you eventually get to a point where you have, I have a page on my smartphone that's just all the apps that handle my my house, and that alone is frustrating. On top of that, I'd say we can't always count on these apps being incredibly user friendly and frustration free, Like what if half of those apps are cons instantly, Like do you want to install this proprietary toolbar and ads for things? Sure? Sure? And I mean and they

can be I mean, software gets buggy. Apps are frequently kind of buggy and need continual updates. And you know, some there's definitely some devices or some apps that work better on one platform or another. So you might have some devices that work better or only work with one platform or another. Like if you're an Apple user, you might not be able to use that Samsung TV that Yeah,

that would get like incredibly frustrating. Could you just imagine telling people like this house my house, it's amazing if I were an Apple user, but because it's pretty much a standard, I gotta do everything by hand. Anyway, it's a dumb house. It's a stupid house. But the the you know, that's that's a great point. It's really possible that the appliances, like you you could get hardware that you think is amazing, but the apps are terrible, or

vice versa. You could get an app that has a great user interface, it's really well designed, it's smooth, but the actual appliance isn't that great. And these are all issues. This is why we want to see lots more options in our when we're making our choices for these sort of things. Oh yeah, that that is definitely. I mean, as we have discussed on the show before, the future is probably not going to be as perfect and smooth

as movies usually portray it. Um, you know, even smart homes biggest success story so far, Nest had a recall in that affected four d and forty thousand units of Protect, which is there smoke and carbon monoxide alarm. Yeah. It the thing with that by the way, in case you're wondering what the recall was about, it didn't like explode

or anything like that. Just the computer could get confused by input from the motion detector while simultaneously detecting smoke or carbon monoxide and thus failed to set off the alarm, which is I mean, if you've got an alarm as designed to you just sort of things, that's a that's a pretty big flaw, especially if you're in the room and there's a carbon monoxide leak, right, you kind of want to know about it. In that case, it's it's

otherwise undetectable. I mean, this is yeah, that is absolutely a fundamental flaw in the technology, right. So so I do think that we're going to see a lot of glitches like that in these early years, and that that could, you know, possibly put a lot of consumers off and slow the process of of overall rollout and development. Yeah. So a lot of these kind of things could affect multiple types of smart home devices, whether they're for automation

or for remote access and connectedness. But there are some flaws with the idea of the smart home that are specifically related to the connectedness, the remote access. The fact that you're going to be transmitting data beyond the sort of perimeter of the house itself. And I wanted to bring up one super disturbing example that I actually came across because Josh and Chuck were talking about it on

one of their videos not too long ago. Speak not their names on this show, Josh and Chuck of stuff you should know who speak not their show name on the No I love Josh and Chuck. Yes, of course, if you're not a fan of stuff you should know, you should be. But anyway, what they were talking about was in April two thousand and fourteen, and there was this story came out. So what I found was there was a Cincinnati area of Fox affiliate that that reported

on this somebody hacked a baby monitor. Oh yeah. Supposedly there was a woman in a house in the in this area of Ohio and she woke up in the middle of the night because she heard a man's voice in her baby's room. It turned out her baby monitor camera was moving without her moving it, and someone was yelling at the baby through the intercom, wake up baby,

that's not cool at all. Nope. And then the father entered the room and apparently the camera turned to him, and whoever was on the other end yelled some very unpleasant, unkind things. It was reported that the camera they used was a Fostcam wireless I P camera, and this is a camera that, of course you can get remote access to because it's designed to be able to be accessed

through an app. So if one of the parents is, say, out at the store or something, and they want to they want to check in on the baby through their phone, they can do that. On one hand, that seems like a really good convenient thing to be able to do. On the other hand, if you don't have all the proper security measures in place, this can allow this kind

of behavior. Well. Yeah, if you have any system where there's going to be two way communication, then that means that while you have the access to get in and have have this remote ability to to actually access your your home, if security is not well designed or well implemented, uh, then so could someone else. I mean, that's the idea is that if if you are able to uh to make this connection, then other people who are able to breach that security can do the same thing. Yeah, exactly right.

So this original article, this Fox nineteen article from Cincinnati area. They cited this so called solutions expert I don't know quite what that means, named Dave Hatter, and they said that he explained that you've got to change the password on these things, and you've got to keep the updates relevant, but the systems aren't gonna necessarily take care of you like this this camera. It apparently required a firmware update to patch a known security flaw, but the camera doesn't

do that automatically. You've got to like go to their website and download it. And if you don't do at then you have this major security vulner But that's a flaw that I think could have easily been solved by a push notification. But I mean sure, but I mean,

you know, maybe they weren't. I don't know, um. And also I mean I don't know about their WiFi status, like whether they had a good password on their yeah, because because like WiFi routers, you know, they almost come always come with the log in as admin and the passwords password, and a lot of people don't change that,

which is we'll talk more about that in a second. Well, it actually gets worse because there was a Newsweek article from November that pointed out how a Russian website was recently displaying video from people's in home internet connected devices, including CCTV, webcams and baby monitors, and this included more than four thousand homes and businesses in the United States, two thousand in France, and five in the United Kingdom.

And again this was chalked up to unprotected devices like this is why, this is why Matt Frederick of Stuff they Don't Want you to Know has has tape over all of his webcams. This is also why you had so many people up in arms when Microsoft said the Xbox One originally was going to ship with the Connect and that was that like you had to have a connect and that only that, but the Xbox One itself

would always be on. And those combinations where you haven't always on device that also has a camera pointed into your space. Yeah whatever, Yeah, yeah, that's that's that. A

lot of people balkedd that reasonably. I would say, well, I've seen a lot of commentaries on the Internet who I don't know, seemed to me to be unsympathetic to the people being spied on here because they're like, oh, it's stupid, you should know to change your password and stuff like that, and I'm like, but let's not victim blame here, right, I mean, yeah, it's good to know to change your password, but a lot of people are

not especially tech savvy. They don't deserve to be spied on because they're you know, they don't know a whole lot about how to best protect technology. I think that's something that the people who do know what they're doing, like the manufacturers of these devices, should really put steps in place to to you know, make sure that proper security is being enforce So, in other words, you develop a product so that when you first set it up, it prompts you to change the password and won't let

you continue until you've done so. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's fair to say, well, what a total nano rod won't change their password, you know, you find that their baby gets fed on. That's silly to me. Yeah, I agree, it's there. There are two sides of this. Jumping ahead a little bit, but that's okay. There's two sides of this. One is that I think there definitely needs to be consumer education where people are aware of the possible UH security breaches that could exist if they

don't practice good security. I think that is necessary because even if you have this essentially you know policy that that's some companies adopt to UH, to prompt people to change their passwords. I don't know that you can mandate that, and even if you did, technically you should be changing it fairly frequently anyway, or at least regularly. So has a lot of work on the back end. And honestly, the companies that make the stuff have a lot more pull than we consumers do. So UH, I think you

have to take a two pronged approach. You have to put the pressure on companies to say, let's let's try and give people set them up for success. Let's let's make sure we design things that that encourage good security, and maybe that encouragement includes requiring it. And then on the other side, teach people, the consumers, why this is an important thing, so that you don't become a victim. Yeah,

I agree. But one thing that I think is worth pointing out is that all these devices we were just talking about are sort of like video streaming or media streaming devices. But that's not the only way that a connect did a remote access device could compromise your privacy. I mean, it doesn't have to be videos. Just pure

data could compromise your privacy in interesting ways you wouldn't expect. Yeah, we had a little example when we chatted about this earlier about imagine that you have one of these Internet connected thermostats and someone is able to access it and just see how you are heating or cooling your home

throughout the year. That could be information that's used to shame you, especially if you heard like a politician running on an eco friendly campaign, that would be you know, we we saw similar things when there was a information about al Gore's uh energy use in his home, like that was being used to try and shame him as he was doing his Inconvenient Truth tours. So this is

stuff that actually happens. I mean, it's that is uh, maybe a fairly benign example, because I don't know that many of us are going to be running on campaigns where we're really dependent upon putting forth an image of being eco friendly while secretly we're like bern all the coal I don't know that that's going to be that common. But there are other examples as well. Just anything that is going to be monitoring you in any way, whether it's just to say when you're home and when you're not.

Obviously that could be useful information for someone. If someone's you know, electronically casing your home and says, uh, because I'm able to look at these systems, I can see that this person is regularly not at home at these times of day. That kind of stuff could be dangerous. There are other issues as well. Uh. We talked about internet connected locks. Obviously, you want really good security on anything that's going to be a lock in your home.

You don't want people to have remote access to it. And in fact, there was a a black Hat USA conference where some hackers demonstrated that they were able, or at least they published the papers say they were able to uh access a z wave based internet connected lock and unlock it. They were able to hack into it. They didn't have the access to it authorized access, they

got unauthorized access and were able to operate it. That being said, in that particular case, it was because the manufacturer had created a product that had a bug in it, a flaw on the programming that did not incorporate the security protocol properly, and in fact we're able to address that with a patch, and once the patch was made, the hackers could no longer access that lock. So it's not that there was a fundamental flaw in the technology,

it was that the technology even poorly implemented. Well, you need to make sure sometimes there's just not an easy way to do this, but you need to make sure that the that it was properly implemented. Yeah. Yeah, and that is absolutely the responsibility of the product designers software team exactly. Yeah. So it's one of those things where I mean, there's a big there's a point where you

put your trust in some other company. Now, some security experts have pointed out that in order to hack into an internet connected lock, for example, like to be able to get access to a house, we require so much effort that they're just easier physical ways of doing the

same thing, like drilling out a lock. I mean, I I think that there's I think that there's probably a lot easier ways to to break into a home, and I really hope that we're not heading towards the future where people have incredibly intricate digital locks and large plate

glass windows, right exactly. Yeah, you can end up literally hacking with an AX and and that was something that the security expert said, It's like, well, we start to obsess over the vulnerabilities and technology that we're depending upon, and we're ignoring the fact that very that that generally speaking, it's a very small population that that's capable of exploiting those vulnerabilities. But there's a larger population of people who

those vulnerabilities that doesn't even enter their head. That's not an issue. I could kick your door in, you know, I couldn't hack your smart lock. Yeah. So so, I mean that's one of those things is that while we are bringing up some of these negatives, in some cases it's kind of a moot point. Really it's not that big a deal. But there are other things too. I mean, I could imagine a hacker getting access to uh internet connected thermostat and then cranking up the heat when you're gone.

I mean that could actually be a very dangerous thing. Let's say you've got pets and they crank the heat way up on a hot day. It's not good. Yeah yeah, I mean, you know, even if they're just trying to like prank you by like raising your heating your electricity boilers, that yeah, it could be bad for your fish. Yeah, there's lots of stuff that could be really seriously a problem delicate they are, okay, yeah, I believe you. I don't have any fish meet me neither. I just their delicate.

I used to, but then I set my heat too high and burnt fish. No, they really really to require constant care. This is why I don't own fish. I would kill all them here. So, yeah, there's a lot of there. There are things to be concerned about with this kind of technology, but uh, that doesn't mean we need to be afraid of it. We just need to be vigilant. We need to make sure that the implementation is proper. We need to make sure we're taking the

best steps that we can as consumers. We need to continue to pay attention to what companies are doing as manufacturers, and as long as we're all doing our part, we can make sure we get to that amazing future where our smart homes are anticipating our every need and everything's awesome and and relaxing, and it frees us up to

watch so much of The Bachelor. Yeah yeah, yeah, maybe, I mean I gotta give supernatural break Sometimes Sam and Dean need to go on their own for a while, and then I need to just look at a rose for a for a bit. That's all. I've got needs. I don't know what you're talking about. I'll tell you

all about after the podcast. Any rate, Uh, this was an interesting topic to really kind of dive into and explore, like the positives and the negatives and and it's something that we plan on doing a lot of in the future.

And you know other other technologies that are kind of emerging tech and sort of take a critical look at them and say, where are the areas where we need further development to make sure it's a technology that is going to be good for us, not something that's like, oh, let's all adopt this and then realize that was a mistake, right, like those three D televisions everyone got a couple of years ago. Whoops. All right, Well, that wraps up this episode.

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