An Internet of spiky things
An odd idea from an earlier conversation: what has become called 'the internet of things' by a set of tedious marketing departments has already turned into a nasty balkanized set of demographic-slurping ad platforms.
We've already seen/read the stories about 'internet' tellies having cameras and microphones and c0de that grasses you up to $manufacturer, and yesterday or the day before we learn that VTech (purveyors of 'child' 'friendly' devices to the chattering classes) have/had server s/w so old and shite that none of my hyperbole or simile is up to the job of describing its hatefulness.
Follow those things to their twitterlogical conclusion and reality quickly turns into Brass Eye.
I have no idea what the Tivo box is telling Virgin. If I had a Nest rig, I would have no idea what data was being archived.
(Your data will be collected. I work for a small web/publishing shop and we graph the shit out of every metric we can squeeze out of the kit. Everyone does now. Well, everyone with any sense anyway.)
So I would be jolly interested in instrumenting my abode and fondling the data to see what tumesced. I would also be jolly interested in making damn sure I (or machinery under my control) was in charge of the data that travelled in and out of said abode. It would also be really jolly nice if kit that didn't want to play well with the other children (over-clever tellies, etc) was given a bloody hard time by that machinery.
I have no idea what form this device might take, but I envisage it as some sort of anti-cuddly object. the antithesis of Nabaztag, IPV4-Barney or network-Barbie. Harry the network bastard, who nmaps everything it finds, fuzzes the shit out of open ports, and sits on your default route so it can transparently and maliciously fuck about with the traffic it does not like.
We've already seen/read the stories about 'internet' tellies having cameras and microphones and c0de that grasses you up to $manufacturer, and yesterday or the day before we learn that VTech (purveyors of 'child' 'friendly' devices to the chattering classes) have/had server s/w so old and shite that none of my hyperbole or simile is up to the job of describing its hatefulness.
Follow those things to their twitterlogical conclusion and reality quickly turns into Brass Eye.
I have no idea what the Tivo box is telling Virgin. If I had a Nest rig, I would have no idea what data was being archived.
(Your data will be collected. I work for a small web/publishing shop and we graph the shit out of every metric we can squeeze out of the kit. Everyone does now. Well, everyone with any sense anyway.)
So I would be jolly interested in instrumenting my abode and fondling the data to see what tumesced. I would also be jolly interested in making damn sure I (or machinery under my control) was in charge of the data that travelled in and out of said abode. It would also be really jolly nice if kit that didn't want to play well with the other children (over-clever tellies, etc) was given a bloody hard time by that machinery.
I have no idea what form this device might take, but I envisage it as some sort of anti-cuddly object. the antithesis of Nabaztag, IPV4-Barney or network-Barbie. Harry the network bastard, who nmaps everything it finds, fuzzes the shit out of open ports, and sits on your default route so it can transparently and maliciously fuck about with the traffic it does not like.