With Wires in the Walls, the Cyberhome

WHEN my husband, Rob Krupicka, and I built a house last year, we dreamed of modern conveniences minus modern-day headaches. We wanted music everywhere, Internet access that extended to the front porch and news at the touch of a button. We didn’t want to face another nest of tangled cables or to see speaker wires snaking beneath the rugs. We wanted to watch a DVD without having to remember that the white remote is for surround sound, the long remote goes on before the short one and the one with the yellow buttons might be on the blink. Some of our dreams were based on new realities. In our home near Washington, where we are busy raising a toddler, anxiety is a given: the threat of terrorism feels close. Keeping up with the world’s news can be stressful enough without having to fight with technology, too. Other families have their own ways of coping — they want to be assured, at least, that their houses are impregnable. It’s not that families imagine terrorists lurking by the mailbox. “People just want to feel safe in their homes,” said Rocco Rutigliano, general manager of All Time Detection, a security company in Port Chester, N.Y., whose sales of security systems have jumped 50 percent since 9/11. Full Story