(05-29-2016, 05:46 PM)eseedhouse Wrote: For the life of me I don't know what bad things can happen to me just from people seeing my APAP data.
Everyone in the USA has a fundamental right to privacy, and medical privacy is included in that fundamental right.
In addition, "meta data" is powerful stuff, which is never only used in isolation, but which is always used in conjuction with other data.
While I can EASILY see how to use the sleep apnea meta data for nefarious purposes in perhaps a dozen different ways, I, myself, am not about to try to break into someone eles's data.
However, it's trivial to see how the sleep apnea can be used for nefarious purposes that I will only mention a couple of ways.
1. If a bugler wants to know if you're asleep, the breathing patterns will tell her that information.
2. If a wife wants to know if her husband is at her best friend's house instead of on a week-long business trip, the IP address on the connection will tell her where he is.
3. If I can tap into the machine to change the settings, I can also install firmware to do anything I want it to do (think of what happened to the Siemens centrifuge controllers in the Iran nuclear facility, for example).
etc.
It would be easy to come up with a dozen nefarious purposes, but I'm not saying that they're actually happening. I'm just saying if you paid me to find a score of ways to compromise someone from a net connection to a sleep apnea machine, I could and would do that easily.
Since it's so easy to do (conceptually anyway), "I" don't want "my" sleep apnea machine on the net. YMMV.
(05-29-2016, 05:46 PM)eseedhouse Wrote: If you ever use or used a credit card on the net (and I do it all the time) you are in *far* more danger from that than from someone knowing the data in your APAP machine.
You don't know that I call up the credit card companies about once a year and report mine lost (asynchronously so that I have a working card), just so that they destroy the old numbers.
And I rarely buy anything on the net if I don't have to (e.g., my mobile devices have NEVER had a credit card in them).
(05-29-2016, 05:46 PM)eseedhouse Wrote: As for "privacy", that battle has been lost so long as you live anywhere near a place with electricity and have *any* kind of computer. "Big brother" can already find out anything he wants to know about you whenever he wants to. And if he *really* wants you even hiding in a hole deep in the woods won't stop him.
I know what you mean. If you paid me to take everything off my neighbor's computer, it would be an easy job, from cracking WEP to using rainbow tables on WPA2/PSK. I would sniff where they are using WiFi wardriving software and pick out their packets using Kismet (which my friend, Marius Milner wrote).
If you want to know where anyone is at the moment, I'd just plug in their SSID (or MAC address) even if they used "_nomap" at the end of their SSID, and I'd supply a fictitious signal strength in decibels, along with the SSID of the place where you think they are, and Google's public API will TELL ME if they're next to each other.
If I wanted to (and if you paid me), I could listen in on any calls and look at any non-encrypted text message simply by tapping into the highly insecure SS7 system, from any GSM tower connection in the world.
If I had the resources that the FBI has, I'd be flying "my" Cessna, instead of them flying theirs, overhead right now collecting all your meta data, and certainly I'd be tapping all the information you are sending to Google and Apple from your cellphone, which would tell me a lot about your life.
That I don't feel like doing "any" of that simply means nobody is paying me to do it; but I know enough to know that it's foolish to have my sleep apnea machine connected to the net if there is no benefit to me.
However, I fully recognize that many people have already given up on protecting their privacy, like a kid who allows the punks to bully him about; and I can't say that it's the wrong thing to do. It's just the wrong thing for "me" to do.
The only thing I ask for is a way to say "Don't tell me again" when the machine nags that Airplane mode is on.