Such situation rely on mutual trust, and only work on small scales (village, loose neighborhood). On the Internet, there are billions of people that live close by.
I think the main discrepancy is that people really do not understand either that the Internet connect them to everyone or how vast the world really is.
These are still are such days. There still are thousands of communities, even in California, where you can get away with this. The difference is not time but population density. There was probably never a time when you could leave your home unlocked and unguarded in urban cities.
There was and not so long ago (e.g. 40 years ago in Portugal or Poland. Probably many other countries). So I would change your statement:
The difference is not time but population density and specially politics/religion.
The burden and responsibility to protect my home is mine. This isn't an either/or as to who to blame, it's a both/and. So back to the link. If you have a high-value service like an electrical grid, or dam, or nuclear plant that is open to the Internet (the most crime-ridden neighbourhood on the planet), do you really honesty think the media's typical response of "hackers broke in to..." is the correct narrative?
Of course it isn't, but when did media stop at that ? Link baits and ad revenue are more tempting then integrity.
Freedom of press, monetization and responsibility - pick two.
If you go read Tektronix's instructions - their screenshots show "no authentication" selected.
This itself isn't really an issue, since the networks that we're connecting these to are isolated, inbound-only lab networks. We know that. Our lab admins know that. The network security guys know that. There are exceptions filed for the IPs of these devices.
However, if someone ever -changed- that network configuration and opened it up to the rest of the corporate network (or for some terrible reason, the internet), those scopes would be just as ripe for takedown as the stuff shown in TFA.
It just takes that small network change to enable something -else- to access the WWW (code download for security updates, anyone?) that exposes our other items on the network. In fact, I can think of several reasons why someone might expose a VNC:
1. Actual remote control -within- a facility, but probably in the deployment guide says "use a secure network"
2. Someone wrote a cool Web GUI to "modernize" something, and used VNC (undocumented and poorly-configured) to pull off what they pulled off
3. Someone exposed a subnet to the internet to enable remote access for something -else- which was probably properly-secured, but happened to -also- expose the thing hosting the VNC server.
[1] http://www.tek.com/support/faqs/how-do-you-set-vnc-dpo7000-d...
Meanwhile, in my tiny town in the States bike theft was basically the single most common form of crime, and I know of one house I would walk by every week that would openly have as many as half-a-dozen stolen bikes displayed for sale in their front yard.
[0] http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/10...
A few years ago I watched a junky go from bike to bike in a bike rack testing each lock to see if it would open easily. Right in plain view of everybody. When I confronted him he launched into some long and carefully rehearsed sob story about how his friend told him to come and get his bike but didn't know which one it was.
I don't think that it's population density as much as the shared culture of the place you live. I would have totally blamed myself if my bike wasn't there today, and I think it would be stupid to blame anyone else.
"Hi everyone, my bike is stolen last week. If you see it anywhere please text me! Thanks !"
That must have been an extremely long time ago: http://www.ancientresource.com/lots/roman/romankeys_locks.ht...
Well of course you don't; the robbers die while still crossing the perilous deserts and/or trying to avoid lethal wildlife.
Nope. I can tell there are still people alive these days who remember that this was still the case in most places of Western Europe.
when you have nothing worth stealing, it is not worth investing in security
From the attacker's perspective something like a connected smart TV has extremely high value as a mechanism for further penetrating a network. Black boxes that no one can login to under normal circumstances are the perfect secret strongholds to maintain a persistent presence on any given network.
Now comes the Internet. It's a huge giga-city. Expect robbery, larceny, hacking, and more.
No, there were days when people did not even lock their cars and their houses (but maybe you are too young to have known that time where you live) because it was not expected that anyone would actually rob anything. Especially in communities where everyone knew everyone else. And if a robbery happened, the blame would still have been put on the thief, not the owner.