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5G always-on-net and the "Right to Repair" On a collision course to disaster?
Posted by
cdev
on 07 Jan, 2019 17:55
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Imagine a world where even the most mundane hardware of all possible kinds are networked, have unique IDs, carry service or software contracts which cant be cancelled and have the item still work, and constantly order replacements for their consumables, etc. themselves.
In reading the emerging literature on 5G applications, this is what is staring out at me. 5G is going to bring out the worst in companies that already are looking for ways to lock in customers in the worst ways. Its also going to be a disaster for civil liberties and privacy just as the world needs more of them.
But especially relevant to electronics people, its going to be a disaster for people who just want to buy a reliable product and have it last a long time.
And a disaster for the 'right to repair'.
Every person who has an interest in the 'right-to-repair' should get involved in pushing for it and barring the things that are turning up which corporations are using to force their agenda on users, because 5G enabled DRM is likely to become a major factor with the potential of killing off the maker movement if they don't.
And people wont be able to turn it off without breaking the device.
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1984?
George Orwell was right, only missed the timeframe by a few decades.
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#2 Reply
Posted by
larrybl
on 07 Jan, 2019 22:20
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I think more like the zombie apocalypse is closer. I watched a couple videos about 5G and IoT, to the point of imbedded implants, and how almost everyone has a smart phone and is always glued to them. Now change gears to the Suspiciousobservers web site and watch the impending magnetic field reversal and weakening, Solar minimum, and the theory of a micro nova, or more than likely a large CME.
No power grid, no telecommunications, no internet. Back to basics big time. and the zombie apocalypse.
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#3 Reply
Posted by
tggzzz
on 08 Jan, 2019 00:56
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Imagine a world where even the most mundane hardware of all possible kinds are networked, have unique IDs, carry service or software contracts which cant be cancelled and have the item still work, and constantly order replacements for their consumables, etc. themselves.
In reading the emerging literature on 5G applications, this is what is staring out at me. 5G is going to bring out the worst in companies that already are looking for ways to lock in customers in the worst ways. Its also going to be a disaster for civil liberties and privacy just as the world needs more of them.
All of the problems you mention in your first paragraph either do exist or will exist with or without 5G. Conclusion: 5G is not the core problem that is causing your general anxiety.
As one example, why are you so worried about 5G + unique ids + civil liberties? Exactly the same issues arise with IP6 addresses!
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#4 Reply
Posted by
james_s
on 08 Jan, 2019 01:47
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I suspect the IoT landscape will change once the novelty wears off. It's not that different from the first internet revolution, everybody jumped on the bandwagon trying to use the internet for anything and everything. Much of that didn't work out so well and collapsed, then the ideas that did work were further refined and developed.
Connectivity is great for some things and can be less than useless for others.
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Sadly I think we are already partially there. There are already TVs and other devices that are "always connected" and listen to you and send your info to a central server. I wonder what kind of RF/protocol they currently use now? With 5G it will simply make it that much easier. They'll stick a 5G radio in everything possible and it everything is going to be cloud based and bypass your local security by connecting straight to the outside. A lot of items now days require an account or subscription of sort to even use them, like game consoles, I can see this happen with every day products like kitchen appliances. It makes me sick to even think about it. The masses will follow all of this and you will be considered "technophobe" if you don't partake.
Oh and let's not forget the CPUs with Intel ME. There are rumours they do have 3G. Nothing would really stop them from doing 3G or 5G. If you want security you pretty much have to design stuff yourself.
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#6 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 08 Jan, 2019 03:30
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Isn't honesty a better policy?
“It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry”
(R Buckminster Fuller).
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#7 Reply
Posted by
tggzzz
on 08 Jan, 2019 10:16
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Sadly I think we are already partially there. There are already TVs and other devices that are "always connected" and listen to you and send your info to a central server. I wonder what kind of RF/protocol they currently use now? With 5G it will simply make it that much easier.
WiFi, of course. With 5G it will be
exactly the same ease/difficulty.
There are other devices that listen continuously,
because that is inherent to their operation. Alexa is the poster child for that.
Oh and let's not forget the CPUs with Intel ME. There are rumours they do have 3G. Nothing would really stop them from doing 3G or 5G. If you want security you pretty much have to design stuff yourself.
Complete rubbish, technically. There are rumours the world is run by green lizards, the world is flat, and Elvis is living in Costa Rica.
As for "designing it yourself", you have to start by creating your compiler
from scratch (see Ken Thompsons's seminal "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf ), and your hardware, to avoid the Intel ME problem. And then your OS, and all the applications.
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#8 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 09 Jan, 2019 00:43
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Andrew S. Tanenbaum (the creator of Minix)
wrote an open letter to Intel about their silent use of his micro-OS.
Its pretty good.
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
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#9 Reply
Posted by
rstofer
on 09 Jan, 2019 03:01
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None of this happens if you a) don't buy the junk or b) don't connect it to your WiFi router. I have yet to see an open WiFi connection in a residential area. There would be a big problem in connected urban centers like San Francisco, I suppose. Free WiFi everywhere...
I was reading about a refrigerator that would reorder beer and that seemed pretty useful. I can order paper towels by myself. Of course, the refrigerator manufacturer now knows how much beer I drink!
I really dislike GM's OnStar. It keeps track of my every movement and the only way to defeat it is to physically disassemble the dashboard and yank out the transmitter. Of course I also lose automatic reporting of accidents. Still thinking about it...
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#10 Reply
Posted by
rrinker
on 09 Jan, 2019 15:43
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There's free wifi EVERYWHERE. Anywhere Comcast is, they default to turning on a free open wifi connection on their cable modems. You the consumer can disable it on yours, but you can;t turn off your neighbor's. And periodically it will be turned back on, and you have to log in to your account and disable it again. There's no indication that it's on or not on the device. Just just have to see if the SSID is being broadcast. Easiest permanent fix is to stop renting their modem and buy your own, one WITHOUT built in wifi.
And OnStar - of course one of the first uses they always promoted was getting locked out of your car. Instead of a simple redesign of the locks so that it would be hard to actually lock the door while leaving your keys in the vehicle, like most other car brands, GM came up with this whole complex subscription system to get you out of the situation. In the meantime, it tracks you everywhere you go. No worries for me, been a long time since GM made a car I would buy anyway.
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Comcast Wifi doesn't actually work unless you have Comcast internet. IDK why it's even on or connectable, but connecting to it is pointless.
Also, two solutions, cut power to the GPS module, unless you need that then cut the data line to the OnStar module (it may be integrated with other stuff, so keep power). Your car will throw an error on OBD either way though. SMA channel would know about this stuff.
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#12 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 09 Jan, 2019 16:09
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Do any new cars sold today successfully avoid all that intrusive stuff?
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#13 Reply
Posted by
MrW0lf
on 09 Jan, 2019 16:53
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#14 Reply
Posted by
rrinker
on 09 Jan, 2019 18:43
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Comcast Wifi doesn't actually work unless you have Comcast internet. IDK why it's even on or connectable, but connecting to it is pointless.
Also, two solutions, cut power to the GPS module, unless you need that then cut the data line to the OnStar module (it may be integrated with other stuff, so keep power). Your car will throw an error on OBD either way though. SMA channel would know about this stuff.
Has always worked for me, with no login or anything to prove I am a Comcast customer. Out business service at work actually broadcasts two different SSIDs. One is named xfinitywifi, which is what my home one also broadcast until I bought my own modem and returned the Comcast one. That one is open, no security, and no landing page to authenticate. Then there is one called XFINITY, that one requires a Comcast account to log in (and is WAY faster than the xfinitywifi one - I get better speed off that than I do our corporate wifi, so I use it all the time).
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#15 Reply
Posted by
paulca
on 11 Mar, 2019 09:09
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It used to be that there simply wasn't the human bandwidth to analyse all this information. I mean the actual data that could be gathered was far too massive for anyone to filter through and work spot trends and patterns of individuals. Sure you could filter for identifying information and track a specific individual, but usually for that to be required something would have made "them" suspicious of you in the first place.
Then came "Big Data" and machine learning. So, sometimes very large, clusters of computers can trawl through very large datasets looking for patterns which may lead to individual identification and then look for patters and trends in activity. This currently happens at the likes of Facebook and Google and is used to push targeted advertising which makes them huge amounts of money.
However, expanding this data capture out to every Wifi or RF communication you make in your daily life far exceeds would abilities today. From when I get up in the morning to when I leave the house I probably generate several million events on my digital footprint. By the time I come home and get to bed that will have become billions of events. I am just one person in a nation that has about 1.8 million people. "Big Data" does not even have the capacity to receive that amount of data in current infrastructure let alone store it or process it in any meaningful way.
Consider that a network of size X is used to provide service to these devices. Then a network of size X*2 as a minimum would be needed to record the full log of events on that network.
So we are back to, "It needs to be targeted tracking." to be of any use. That still requires tracking and analysis to identify individuals and then filter for the individual events or individual people you want to track. == HUGELY expensive.
Given the expense there needs to be a revenue stream to support it. Currently the only one I know of is advertising, this already happens.
Governments do not have the capacity to do this, while NSA might have impressive computers, I gather that those owned by facebook and google are orders of magnitude more powerful. All they want to do is make money selling your data on how likely you are to spend your money on buying product X or product Y. Scanning the data for other purposes makes no money as nobody else is willing to pay for it or could afford it.
I am NOT in anyway a supporter of the premise "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but ... flipping that argument around a bit does lead to, "Who the hell do you think cares about what you do, day to day?". People think they are far more interesting than they really are.
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#16 Reply
Posted by
apis
on 11 Mar, 2019 10:04
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I am NOT in anyway a supporter of the premise "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but ... flipping that argument around a bit does lead to, "Who the hell do you think cares about what you do, day to day?". People think they are far more interesting than they really are.
Tell that to all the people who have lived under a paranoid authoritarian regime. I'm mostly worried about the potential for abuse; no one knows what will happen politically in 30 years time, but the surveillance apparatus will still be in place.
I don't think 5G is particularly problematic. What is needed is laws that prevent snooping and not constructing a large mass-surveillance infrastructure just because we can.
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#17 Reply
Posted by
paulca
on 11 Mar, 2019 10:23
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I am NOT in anyway a supporter of the premise "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but ... flipping that argument around a bit does lead to, "Who the hell do you think cares about what you do, day to day?". People think they are far more interesting than they really are.
Tell that to all the people who have lived under a paranoid authoritarian regime. I'm mostly worried about the potential for abuse; no one knows what will happen politically in 30 years time, but the surveillance apparatus will still be in place.
I don't think 5G is particularly problematic. What is needed is laws that prevent snooping and not constructing a large mass-surveillance infrastructure just because we can.
There already is a movement which has gained a massive amount of traction by users using end to end encryption when communicating over the Internet. Of course encrypting the data you send to a particular service does not then prevent that service from sharing it on to places you rather it didn't go or to send it on or store it unencrypted. However this limits the scope significantly in most cases to the contract between individuals and the companies they use services from. More transparency and regulation here is needed, but appears to be coming in drips and drabs at least.
Where work needs done is in balancing the privacy of innocent individuals with the ability for law enforcement to actually track and monitor suspect criminals.
This is very difficult topic, of course.
On the user (and device manufacturer) end, proper end to end encryption means that no central body has the ability to decrypt messages without access to the end device's keys.
On the government end, mass data collection without warrant has caused the public to be very wary. More worrying is their lack of understanding on the technologies and requests such as the UK governments request to have a "back door" into technologies such as SSL and HTTPS encryption which is frankly... retarded.
Part of me does lean towards device manufacturers providing a law enforcement back door to unlock individual phones, but not remotely, only in physical contact and ONLY with a warrant.
It's still a dicey subject though.
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#18 Reply
Posted by
paulca
on 11 Mar, 2019 10:39
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Also... asides abuse there is "contextual failures" and complex "false positives". Already scientists are making noises about a crisis caused by "Big Data" and "Machine Learning" due to non-repeatable experiments and a flood of papers generated from these mechanisms.
The mechanisms used to analyse very large datasets often includes complex self forming neural networks. These "grow" almost exponentially and often become so complex that humans cannot possibly understand them. So when these analysis engines spit out results nobody really knows how exactly "the machine" came to get those results.
In the case of science the data is published and the findings along with them. Other researches run the data with different analytical engines and come up with different or conflicting results. This is the crisis they are referring to. Unfortunately a lot of highly aclaimed journals will not publish direct refutal papers. So the problem just gets worse.
On false positives a prime example were the family whose house was raided and turned upside down because one family member had been browsing online shopping for a pressure cooker at roughly the same time another family member had ordered nitrate fertilizer for the garden.... this happened within a time frame before the Boston bombing.
