Charles C. Mann on the security hazards of the Internet of things
This is a good piece on how Internet-connected devices like pacemakers, smart meters, and coffee machines are designed without much thought given to security. This is true and articles like this one thankfully sound the alarm. But what to make of this:
The same thing was true of computer-software companies, he pointed out. Not until credit-card numbers by the millions began to be stolen did they begin to pay attention. “We live in a reactive society,” McClure went on, “and something bad has to happen before we take problems seriously. Only when these embedded computers start to kill a few people—one death won’t do it—will we take it seriously.”
Is this a lament? I for one wouldn’t like to live in a ‘proactive’ society where innovation took a back seat to security and we had to be sure something was safe before it was allowed. Yeah, some harm is going to have to happen (not just speculated) before the market reacts, and that’s a feature, not a bug.
