Attaching appliances to a power socket via a smart plug containing sensors and a ZigBee transceiver allows information about the appliances' power consumption to be beamed automatically to a broadband router within the home, and thence to a web server located elsewhere.

ECONOMIST: The much-talked-of smart grid prepares to enter the home

Rarely are leaks intentional: Somebody at work might post a file on a server to download at home, a wrongly configured server might make too much of a hard drive searchable or a Web site's password-protection might be flimsy enough to be accessible to search engines.

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