Comments
clrmoney
5/29/2017 10:59:34 AM
User Rank Platinum
IOT threatens Smart Cities
I understand with hackers can get into the system and do things so can do havoc on smart cities as well. So they would need to come up with a solution to stop or maintain this.
elizabethv
5/30/2017 4:58:57 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: IOT threatens Smart Cities
@clrmoney - I think that's the most interesting part, a limited concern for security because it isn't profitable. I would think it would help with profit as a ride-along. But then maybe in general customers assume the security is built in, even when it really isn't.
afwriter
5/30/2017 11:56:11 PM
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Re: IOT threatens Smart Cities
Security is so important for the future of smart cities. It really should be the top priority and it scares me that it's not.
elizabethv
5/31/2017 5:47:10 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: IOT threatens Smart Cities
@afwriter - I completely agree! Why security isn't being seen as the top issue is extremely disconcerting. You're right when you say the bugs could cripple a city. I would hope there would be a plan in place to deal with such an event. But reading that security isn't a top priority makes me wonder if even that is being over-looked.
JohnBarnes
5/30/2017 8:18:05 AM
User Rank Platinum
Great piece
Carl Piva shows a lot of disciplined imagination and a sense of tradeoff -- he's not one of the many who think that we just need to throw more tech at the problem and it will be solved well enough, he gets that the exact things that make community-wide IoT attractive and induce us to hurry to get there are the things that will make it vulnerable to security breaches. Terrific interview, at least in part because you interviewed a terrific interviewee. More like this, please!
JohnBarnes
5/30/2017 8:25:26 AM
User Rank Platinum
Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
... the power of contemporary data science is indeed a big part of the security threat, and it's good to see it get some coverage. Modern espionage, which began around WW2 and was brought to fruition during the Cold War, is not so much about stealing secrets as about constructing them from secondary evidence -- a change of strategy being signaled by transfers of officers, relocation of a spare parts depot, addition of weather stations, repaving and improving a highway that hadn't seen an increase in traffic, cancelled leaves for sailors at one port and lights being on (or pizzas being ordered, if you're spying on the US) late at night at a secure facility. When computing power was scarce and rare, and software wasn't up to noticing and interpreting that sort of thing, it had to be reserved for spying on major military powers and literal matters of life and death.
With powerful machine learning packages running on desktops these days (I've got an experiment running right now that's much more data- and computation-intensive than military and intelligence computers could have handled in 1960), you can spy on Fred and Mary Consumer to see if you can switch their brand of shampoo.
Like it or not it's still a competitive weapon.
dcawrey
5/30/2017 12:55:51 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
The threat definitely comes from these devices being harnessed for a botnet.
That's what scares me the most. One compromised machine can really only do so much...
JohnBarnes
5/30/2017 2:18:33 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
The botnet problem is actually a whole other threat in its own right. It would be harder but by no means impossible to do penetration of privacy with only sporadic access to a few devices (i.e. analysis without the botnet) and a botnet could be used for many purposes besides gathering intel (e.g. coordinated sabotage of an evacuation). So that's three big things to worry about that wouldn't necessarily make good movies.
dmendyk
5/30/2017 2:31:22 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
I wonder how the concept of privacy will evolve over the next couple of generations.
elizabethv
5/30/2017 4:53:14 PM
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Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@dmendyk - I would imagine with more and more technology, people will start to let their guards down, where privacy is concerned. We're already so comfortable sharing details of our every meals with what could potentially be complete strangers. Over time, I doubt people will worry so much about privacy. I think convenience will trump privacy.
dmendyk
5/30/2017 4:57:41 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
Taken to a logical conclusion, the case can be made that "personal privacy" will cease to exist at some point. It's part of the dehumanizing effect of the digital age. I don't think most people will mind all that much. Individuality and independent thinking are hard.
afwriter
5/31/2017 12:11:38 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
We already share so much of our personal lives, and a lot of the kids these days have never lived in a time where their entire lives were laid out on social media. We are ok with our activity and locations being tracked as long as we get deals out of it. As long as we continue to use the internet privacy is a thing of the past.
dmendyk
5/31/2017 9:23:12 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
What's funny -- not in a hahaha kind of way -- is that it wasn't too long ago (like, 10 years ago?) that local newspapers were catching parental heat for publishing names and photos of kids doing kid things like posing for group spelling-bee pictures. The fear was that predators would use this information to target the young ones. We went from that to Honey Boo-Boo pretty quickly.
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@dmendyk: Today it's basically "Don't violate my family's privacy -- unless I get paid...or I look really good in this outfit."
Michelle
5/31/2017 7:01:14 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
Interesting observation -- you're right too. Schools once sent home media release forms for parents to sign. These forms are still available, but say it is near impossible to keep children out of all possible photos taken at events.
elizabethv
5/31/2017 11:51:25 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@Michelle - That makes sense. When there's a large event and a bunch of kids standing around, it's hard to for one person to pick out all of them, especially if it's a larger school where no one can know everyone. But then I would think you could potentially use a blur tool to make some of them less obvious too.
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@elizabeth: Blur tools don't do everything, and a lot of people routine miss stuff that could be used to identify them.
Michelle
6/3/2017 10:19:09 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@elizabeth The blur tool could be an option, but schools probably wouldn't have the staff to edit photos like that. Students will have phones themselves...
dlr5288
6/30/2017 3:23:51 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
Exactly and hear days it feels like every kid by the age of 7 had a smart phone..
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@Michelle: I'm reminded of a teacher I know who got in significant trouble for sharing a video of a student event on Facebook--even though it was in a friends-only post. Parents take this stuff seriously -- as do administrators.
Michelle
6/30/2017 8:14:39 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@Joe Wow, I wondered if that had happened yet. I was almost positive something like that would have happened by now.
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@afwriter: A big part of that is that the USA -- where a lot of this tech and innovation is coming from -- has never, as a country, dealt en masse with some sort of oppressive totalitarian regimen that spied on its citizens. Despite cynical commentaries on the modern era (and whether or not they are true), our nation has always been a democratic republic. Nations in Europe have much longer and much more tumultuous histories -- and there are people old enough there to remember secret police.
So whereas Americans take personal privacy for granted, European nations have seen firsthand just how important personal privacy is -- and what it can mean when personal privacy goes by the wayside.
afwriter
5/31/2017 12:03:21 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@Joe excellent commentary, thanks for the perspective.
elizabethv
5/31/2017 5:51:25 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@Joe - personally, I'm starting to wonder if even those in Europe who have experienced being spied on, have the ability to bring such warnings about its potential problems to the forefront anymore. Even in Europe. I think as a whole a lot of people are becoming complacent with potential problems our society is facing right now. We're just so far removed from the problems of the past anymore, they aren't real for too many people.
JohnBarnes
5/30/2017 9:56:08 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
Dmendyk,
Right out of existence, I suspect. Humanity got along without it for a very long time, and it's a costly luxury in many ways.
elizabethv
5/30/2017 4:57:02 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@JohnBarnes - I guess where shampoo is concerned, I'm not too worried about companies piecing information about me together to target those kinds of ads. The possibility of having my insurance premiums sky-rocket however, that would really bother me. Make me pay extra in insurance because I visit sites for some random other brand, that would really upset me. In fact I'm sure I'd go insurance hunting at that point. I don't even like the idea of insurnace companies putting a little monitor in my car to potentially lower my rates (or raise them is the untold side of that story.) I'm not concerned about my driving, but I just don't like that much governance.
JohnBarnes
5/30/2017 9:59:46 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
ElizabethV,
To further fuel your paranoia, there do seem to be such things as unhealthy attitudes on life, i.e. patterns of communication with others that are moderately good predictors that you will be sick more often and/or age faster. And deducing such attitudes is an almost tailor-made job for predictive machine intelligence.
So your insurance rates might go up because a machine decides, based on your purchases, social media vocabulary, and choices of entertainment, that you are too grim, glum, or grumpy.
elizabethv
5/31/2017 5:44:45 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
@JohnBarnes - I never thought about it like that. But you're exactly right. Cue grimace. Some random Facebook "game" that's floating around predicted I am 23 years old and live in Hawaii. The Hawaii part sounds nice but it's off by more than 10 years. Cue grimace. It made me wonder if my posts make me sound young somehow. Maybe fairly frequent quotes by my 2 and 4 year olds brought down my average quite a bit. Hopefully whatever algorithms they use, should it come to that, will be better than the random program I came across on Facebook.
JohnBarnes
6/6/2017 10:18:18 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Picking up a thread dear to my heart ...
ElizabethV,
Well, it might work out to your advantage -- perhaps it will miss any of your age-related ailments and just assume you have colic, or are teething!
elizabethv
5/30/2017 4:51:45 PM
User Rank Platinum
Technology
I think technology as a whole has always just gotten better with time. Part of the issue, I believe, in being able to find the "bugs" early on with any device or program, is a lack of real world application. If someone isn't using it in the real world, there are bound to be areas where the technology is lacking. But with time, and use, those "bugs" are found, and can then be worked out.
afwriter
5/31/2017 12:15:34 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Technology
The only issue here is that one of those bugs could cripple a city. Smart cities continue to be such an interesting topic because they have so many benefits, but almost as many problems if they fall into the wrong hands.
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