After moving to Chicago, I thought internet squirrel issues was a thing of the past. The cable lines are buried in my neighborhood.
I was wrong.
Currently, I have a cable strewn from the box at the road, along the culvert, under the driveway, across the lawn to the house awaiting burial. No conduit, no pipe, just straight Cat 6 cable with the bright orange allure soaking in 3.3 inches of pooled rain for the many hungry squirrels that canvas my yard daily.
It’s not that we can’t live without the internet, it’s just that so much of what we do now depends on it.
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the collective network of connected devices and the technology that facilitates communication between devices and the cloud, as well as between the devices themselves. (AWS)
Although you have “wireless” internet in your house, it is connected via cable from the side of your house to the utility pole or it is buried but only an inch deep. Any disruption can nick the line causing an outage or slow internet speeds only to you.
I did, however, search on how to use my phone as a hotspot and it worked great for what I needed to do.
To power and connect our Internet of Things at home, we have a router and modem sometimes called a gateway that acts as both a modem to receive internet signal and a router to deliver high-speed WiFi to your devices.
A couple of week ago, a sweeping FCC order banning foreign-made Wi-Fi routers has indirectly put an expiration date of our home internet security. As it currently stands, everyone’s foreign-made routers can only receive software updates until March 1, 2027. Although, legal experts expect the FCC to clarify the issue over time.
While software updates are overall considered a good thing, some critics have flagged the “update” as a way for Chinese companies to continue receiving data from US networks. Which prompts another question, how secure is your home network for financial and other highly private transactions?
Although your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can see what websites you visit, the data becomes unreadable once you enter the login interface where financial institutions and most companies use HTTPS (SSL/TLS) encryption (lock icon) which secures data transfer between your browser and the financial institution’s server. You can use a VPN connection or your phone which usually has biometrics security built in.
It’s also why I think passkeys are the future. I’ve set a few up since writing about this.
Another interesting thing you should know is that in recent months, website analytics were reporting a sharp spike in the number of bots visiting their platforms and websites. While the bots’ function is unclear, experts say they could be an attempt to scrape data to train AI models. In Q4 last year, bots visited websites once for every 31 human visits, which is a sharp increase from the one bot visit for every 200 human visits tracked at the beginning of the year.
A weather website manager discovered the bots were being routed through the servers of several major Chinese cloud companies like Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei. When he imposed blocks on those servers, the number of daily bot visits on his website fell from 127,000 to around 2,000. Even my lesser-known website, may have seen an uptick during this time. I’ll never know since I only track numbers.
Nothing is ever a one-time fix, it will always require staying one step ahead.
FCC’s Router Ban Quietly Places an Expiration Date on Home Internet Security | PCMag
Featured Image – Interconnected fence like interconnected internet circuits at River Road Open Space. Photographer C.N. Wauters