Musings/Träumereien/Devaneios

“An IoT is not a consumer society. It’s a materialized network society. It’s like Google or Facebook writ large on the landscape. Google and Facebook don’t have ‘users’ or ‘customers’. Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined with Big Data silos.”

In “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” by Bruce Sterling.

Imagine the following creepy scenario.

Picture yourself doing the number 2 on your recently bought high tech throne. Unfortunately your next door neighbour is a black-hat hacker. Do you want him to hack into your home system and flush your toilet while you're on it? With our current batch of politicians I can guarantee that's what will happen. I can't see them stepping up to the plate. We all also know that when it comes to safety, leaving self-regulation to the end-user doesn’t seem to work.  We all know what happened with credit cards; we all know what's still happening with customer data; it's clear as water it's not going to work for the IoT. What's wrong with this picture? Everyone who works in IT knows that if one wants to add security to a product, it's going to cost big money.  Making a gadget a safer product adds to the cost of it, and that just doesn’t work in this day and age. For IoT to become widespread we need cheap, but also safer products, and I don’t see that happening in my life time.

If you're into IoT and IT stuff in general, read on.