Skip to main content

IOT




IOT stands for the Internet Of Things. This is an expanded view of the internet that doesn’t just connect computers or even phones. Never mind smart phones, now you can have smart houses, smart cars, and smart traffic lights. And it includes things like artificial intelligence and remote sensing. On the one hand it is kind of cool. It’s the stuff of science fiction. It is the world of George Jetson. Vending machine companies can get automated alerts that machines need restocking or their drinks aren’t being kept cold enough. Implanted medical devices can report the patient’s or the device’s condition. Industrial systems, factories and power plants can be monitored and controlled remotely. You can tell your house to turn the lights on and preheat the oven before you get home. Farmers can monitor temperature humidity, and soil moisture. With the advent of more cameras hooked into the system, police, fire, and ambulance people can see what is going on before they arrive on scene. These can be good things. But then . . .

I have to say that I don’t think we are ready for the Internet Of Things. Yes, I grew up in the pre-internet days, so I might just be viewed as a grumbling old fogey (OMG I made a George Jetson reference above. That’s really telling my age). But I do have some reasons why I don’t think we are ready. It becomes painfully obvious that we are far from being able to prevent hackers from breaking into places they shouldn’t be (If we will ever be able to prevent that). If banks and insurance companies, with all their vast resources, can get hacked, then how is anybody safe. Banks in particular, you would think, would have an insanely high motivation to do whatever it takes to keep from being hacked. Other big companies have been hacked: Adobe and Yahoo. If anybody should know how not to get hacked, you would think would be tech savvy Adobe and Yahoo, but Adobe suffered maybe the worst data breach ever (so far) that exposed user information from maybe 150 million customers. Equifax is the one that really gets me. Equifax maintains sensitive credit data for . . . well, just about everybody. ‘Whatever it takes’ wasn’t enough. I personally thought after the data breach, Equifax should be banned, prohibited from ever doing business again. But this just goes to show you how hard it is to keep hackers out. It is even more difficult when a whole nation state decides to hack you. Cyber warfare is a very real thing. Do you really want your power grid controlled over the internet if we get into a scrape with Russia, China, or North Korea?

And then there is privacy. With more and more cameras everywhere, do we really want the state to be able to access all those cameras to be able to see what you are doing whenever you step out of the house? And when you are in the house . . . shh. (I have to say this very quietly or Alexa will hear me). You have to be careful what you say.

Legislators have written some rules, but do you really trust politicians to understand this stuff? Does anybody? We have already gone partway down this road where there is no turning back, but before we go any farther, maybe we should wait until we can really make it secure, safe, and protect privacy. Science fiction gives us many cautionary tales about how this can all go wrong, and while it is true that it’s just fiction, you had best not forget Murphy’s Law.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Link to Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Second Wind

  You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running.   In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...
1 comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...
1 comment
Read more

A Child of the . . .

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...
Post a Comment
Read more