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

The Trip Home

  My wife and I recently returned from a trip to New York to visit my son and his wife. What follows is an excerpt of my notes from that trip. Departure day. So we and the kids (adult kids) leave by 5:30 AM. These “kids” are night owls. They rarely wake before 10:00 if they don’t have to, so we appreciate the sacrifice. Daughter-in-Law (DIL) drove us the 30 minutes to the train station. Hugs and good-byes for her (we love DIL. DIL is an irresistible force). Son navigates us a route to the platform with fewer stairs than the way we came. We get a ticket and get on the train headed for the big city and Grand Central Station. I soon realize that this train is not an express train like the one we took coming out. Instead of taking a little over an hour like we did before, this one would take a little over an hour and a half. We stop at places with names like Cold Springs and Peekskill (on this trip we saw a lot of place names that ended in “kill” including Kaatskill, i.e. Catskill, and
2 comments
Read more

That 70's Decade

  Can a decade become a caricature? My teen years were in the 1970’s and none of us who lived through the 70’s thought our decade was going to be a figure of fun. When you are a part of it, you don’t realize what people are going to make fun of later. I think there are two reasons why people snicker when the 70’s are mentioned: clothing styles and Disco. Both things could be called extensions of trends that started in the 60’s. When the hippy styles of the 60’s became more formalized for the dance floor, the result was (in hindsight) rather bizarre. They did not seem bizarre at the time. People following present fashion trends never understand that they are wearing something that will be laughed at in ten years. Yes, I did have a pair of bell-bottom blue jeans (are they making a comeback?) The mere mention of the 1970’s conjures up someone in a ridiculous pose wearing a disco suit. We who lived through the 70’s just went about our normal life. There were quite a lot of things that ha
Post a Comment
Read more

Tyranny of the Masses

  I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority. The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect representatives at the federal and local level t
Post a Comment
Read more