Digital Assistant: Being Over Paranoid?

by Dale Meredith | May 30, 2018 | Smart Home

There is a lot of concerns about your digital assistant at home listening to you, either Alexa or Google.

I had a friend of mine sell me his Google digital assistant for cheap that he won at work because he was worried that the government was listening in to his conversations.

So my question is that the people who are so worried about their digital assistants at home listening in, but what about your cell phone. Most cell phones have their own digital assistants such as Google or Siri and we all carry around our phones most of the day. So if you were really concerned about it wouldn’t you stop using or disable the ones on your phones?

Sometimes we are being OVER paranoid in this aspect of digital assistants, I am sure the government has better things to do than to listen to me asking my Google for a recipe.

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Vegas Casino breached through an IoT (Internet of Things) thermostat?

by Dale Meredith | Apr 15, 2018 | Smart Home

Vegas Casino breached through an IoT (Internet of Things) thermostat?

Yes, I said a hacker accessed a Vegas Casino database thru a thermostat!

How is that possible?

This thermostat is one of those IoT (Internet of Things) devices such as Nest. They had it hooked up to the same network as the production environment. The attackers were able to access a list of their high rollers, names, addresses, all their information. And had that list send back thru the thermostat.

That is crazy but it leads me to talk about security. Segmentation. Segment our doorbells, our thermostats and other IoT separate from our production or database environments. 

A lot of companies do this already but for the home, there aren’t any amazing solves yet. If you can think of anything please let me know by dropping a comment below.

For continued advice and learnings on how to help your family stay safe and smart with the technology you use, follow

Dale Dumbs IT Down on Instagram
Dale Dumbs IT Down on Youtube

Learn more about the why behind my journey of helping families stay safe and smart with the technology they use at https://www.daledumbsitdown.com/