Another worry

A recent NYRB included an article (snippet left) about how the world is about to be taken over by internet enabled objects. Objects which might have been thought of as mundane, objects like refrigerators, central heating systems, bicycles and overcoats, will now be wired up to the internet to facilitate their better use & management and, along the way, the collection of all kinds of data about you and I, data which you might have been used to thinking of as private & personal. So, for example, your bicycle will know when the batteries for its lights are getting low and will arrange for your telephone to vibrate when you happen to pass a shop from where you could buy it some new batteries.

One worry in the article was that all this internet connectivity, which will extend to lots of what the securocrats call critical national infrastructure, will be very easy to hack. Collectively, we do not do very well at securing corporate connectivity to the internet now, that is to say securing central installations which you might think, in this day and age, were big and easy enough to bother about. So how on earth are we going to manage when the internet is everywhere and is in everything?

I associate to a recent scare when some eastern europeans (naturally) were able to sit in their white vans around the corner from petrol stations and hack into the wireless interactions between the petrol pumps (with their credit card readers) and the control room in the shop. I don't recall what was done about it, but I hope it was something as it does not seem to be news any more.

I also associate to a worry of my own, that my Windows 8 telephone might be hackable. The story I grew up with was that telephones were not complicated enough to be hackable, that they did not include the sort of machinery which hackers need in order to do their hacking. Nothing there which was infectable. But if my telephone is now running an admittedly cut down version of Windows 8, which I pay Norton a lot of money to protect when it is on my PC at home, what then? I shall have to find a proper geek to ask about this.