One of my coworkers is really into home automation. He showed me how his entire house is controllable through the web. It even keeps logs of all the activity. A lot of geeks are worried about the uptime of their servers. His house has a whole list of uptimes such as "Living Room Lamp 1, In the OFF state for 1 day, 13 hours, 5 minutes and 36 seconds". He can tell when the garage door is open, who has called and how long they talked, the temperature of each room, etc etc. He uses HomeSeer software and a lot of products from smarthome.com. You know those damned X10 pop-under ads? Well, it turns out that X10 is actually a protocol for home automation and that no one that does home automation really buys from the official X10 company.
Back to that "entire house is controllable through the web" bit: Combine an always-on DSL connection and a weak password, and someone can hack your house. Tip: don't use your first name as your username with a single repeating character as your password.
Back to that "entire house is controllable through the web" bit: Combine an always-on DSL connection and a weak password, and someone can hack your house. Tip: don't use your first name as your username with a single repeating character as your password.