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THE SOTH JOURNAL

News from the connected home

Ideas, know-how, and a little inspiration for your connected home.

WORTH A CLOSER LOOK

News from the connected home

Nordic nRF71: Wi-Fi 6, Thread and Bluetooth LE on one chip for battery devices

On November 3, 2026 Nordic Semiconductor announced the nRF71 Series, its first system-on-chip that puts Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Thread and an application processor on a single die. Until now Nordic's Wi-Fi parts (the nRF70 Series) were companion chips that needed a separate host MCU. Nordic says the nRF71 uses up to 20 times less power in standby than
Nov 3, 2026
3
min read

Intelbras Wi-Fi cameras could be kept offline by anyone on the same network

Kaspersky published research on November 2, 2026 showing that several Intelbras home Wi-Fi cameras accepted firmware update requests from anyone on the local network, without a password and without checking the file. Each request rebooted the camera and took it offline for about a minute. Sent in a loop, the requests kept it offline for as long as
Nov 2, 2026
3
min read

Banana Pi BPI-M8 is a Raspberry Pi 5-sized Allwinner A733 board from $69, but there are no OS images for it yet

Banana Pi has put the BPI-M8 on sale, a credit card-sized single-board computer built around the Allwinner A733 and pitched as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5. CNX Software covered it on 2 November 2026. It comes in two versions: the BPI-M8A with 64GB of eMMC storage and the BPI-M8B with 16MB of SPI NOR flash. In the Banana Pi shop they cost $
Nov 2, 2026
3
min read

Toit 2.0 ends four years of alphas for the high-level ESP32 language, and peripheral APIs now take plain pin numbers

Toit v2.0.0 was released on 31 October 2026. Toit is an open-source, object-oriented language with its own compiler and virtual machine that runs on the ESP32, and the stable release follows more than four years of alpha builds. In the announcement, Florian Loitsch counts more than 2,000 commits, more than 500,000 changed lines and over 200 alpha r
Nov 2, 2026
3
min read

Synology warns that C3RB3R ransomware is encrypting NAS drives running DSM builds without the December 2024 fixes

Synology published a warning on 29 October 2026: attackers are exploiting a vulnerability the company patched in December 2024 to break into NAS drives running outdated versions of DSM, its operating system, then encrypt the data and demand a ransom. On 2 November BleepingComputer linked the attacks to the C3RB3R ransomware. Synology rarely issues
Nov 2, 2026
3
min read