Who decides when your smart devices die?

The actual topic of this week's episode is the devices that are connected to the Internet or to your computer, to your network that have firmware in them that needs to be kept updated to stop them becoming buggy and insecure.

And often manufacturers don't do this updating enough.

And in some cases, they even abandon these devices.

They decide that they're no longer going to continue with that line of products or the manufacturer gets sold and the company that buys them doesn't want to do that hard work.

Or simply, they want you to buy a new product.

So they stop updating the old one in the hope that you'll get annoyed enough to buy a new one.

Obviously, this has an environmental aspect to it as well, because a lot of these devices end up in the trash.

And hopefully you're throwing away your old electronics in the e-waste, so some of the materials can be recovered and recycled.

But a lot of old electronics don't get thrown out that way.

You end up with toxic chemicals leaching into the ground, which is a bad thing.

And obviously, there is also the environmental impact of manufacturing new things.

So there's that aspect to it as well.

as the impact on your wallet.

So I'm going to talk about a couple of incoming laws that may improve this situation.

But first, I read a really interesting blog post a few days ago by an Amazon security engineer named Chas Schlapp.

And he has been using AI, specifically Anthropix Claude, I think the Opus version of that AI.

to reverse engineer peripherals that he attaches to his computer.

And he's been discovering that this is scarily, very scarily easy to do.

Now, we're not talking about a situation where anybody can go to an AI and say, here's this model of webcam or monitor or whatever, hack it for me, show me how to attack somebody else.

We're not there yet.

Although, maybe soon.

This guy is a security professional, and he gave it a series of prompts as it went through the process, but nonetheless, as he explains in his blog post, which I'm linking to in the description, by the way, as I always do, as he explains, this is the sort of capability that you previously would have associated with some kind of state-aligned hacker.

You know, serious professional stuff.

And it is much, much easier to do now than it was before.

And that means a lot of these peripherals and devices are becoming incredibly insecure.