Comment by iugtmkbdfil834

8 hours ago

Surely, there must be a way that does not force the devices onto world wide web..

Seems like 95% of devices could be managed with a hardware filter that only allows through a handful of very rudimentary signals (more like Morse code than a full digital transmission), and then of course a properly designed on-device API that defines those signals and doesn't allow you to trigger a defrost remotely, when that should only ever be done with somebody physically present for example.

  • Morse code is a fully digital transmission.

    How exactly would a more obscure (or even “analog”) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.

    • The point is having the digital transmission simple enough that you can use fully *physical* filters to discard everything but the 3-4 messages you need through. Of course it is still digital, but my point is, it is a physically enforced studied, safe subset and doesn't allow for full network access. There are of course a variety of ways to further firewall that, but something needs to act like as much of an air gap as possible while allowing for remote communications.

      1 reply →