Beam is a lightbulb replacement that screws into any light-socket and turns it into a remote-controlled LCD projector.
The idea is fascinating: imagine a string of backyard bulbs converted to projectors, or the pot-lights in a long corridor! But there’s some problems. The Beam was kickstarted and came out in retail with a $500 price-point, which is a hard number for an impulse purchase to rise to.
Then there’s the IoT shitshow issue: without knowing a single thing about this project’s designers or QA process, I can still confidently predict that its information security model will contain imperfections (because security is a process and not a product). Having these things — which can theoretically reach out beyond your home network to talk to the wider internet — on your local area network with all your other stuff, from your thermostat to your printer to your nannycam to your laptops and phones, means that any vulnerabilities in this thing could be leveraged to attack much higher-value targets.
Headless, low-UI devices just don’t get patched as often as things whose UIs you interact with all the time (your phone’s update reminder is a lot harder to ignore than the reminder you’ll see when you remember to look at the app to control your fancy lightbulb) (and even so, phone updating numbers are dismally low).
But the idea still fascinates me. It’s the kind of thing that will be amazing, assuming it lasts long enough to develop a robust security model and to hit the kinds of volume/manufacturing points that drop the retail to $25.
Beam, the Smart Projector that Fits in Any Light Socket [Beam]
(via Red Ferret)
