On Friday, January 24, 2014 5:27pm, "Dave Taht" <dave.t...@gmail.com> said:
 

> and also, suddenly every device with a web server on it on 80 and 443
> is vulnerable, ranging from your printer to your fridge.
 
One of the reasons I like the "Cerowrt project" is that it focuses on fixing 
the aspects of the Internet plumbing that are due to careless practices like 
presuming that a printer or fridge will be protected inside a "firewall" and 
thus need not be designed correctly.
 
It reminds me of the attitude toward safety taken by the Auto Industry prior to 
Ralph Nader.  (whether you like Nader or not, his point was correct at the time 
- GM and Ford engineering did not design sufficiently safe cars, and that had a 
huge social impact that individuals could not cope with).
 
We now have printers and fridges that are "unsafe at any speed", just as we 
have access networks that are knowingly designed to get bloated under stress, 
amplifying the stress rather than ameliorating it.
 
Now there may be "temporary kludges" that can protect the printers and fridges 
thus misdesigned - and NAT firewalls are possibly OK in that light.  But 
honestly, I want to be able to connect to my printer from anywhere.
 
For a few bucks I can probably build a front-end box for my printer that is a 
printer server based on encrypted connections (using SSL with certificates, 
perhaps). E.g. for each printer and fridge, a Raspberry Pi with a USB WiFi 
interface, connected directly on IPv6. That's about $50 per badly designed 
consumer electronics device.
 
I'd prefer, however for the printer makers, etc. to make this a standard.  To 
do so, we need an open source project like Cerowrt to show the way, perhaps 
starting with the front-end box that implements the standard, since adding 
software to a printer or fridge itself is hard.
 
 
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