Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

In August 2016 I wrote Self-driving Tech Not Ready for Primetime and a month later Tesla was hacked. But, as you’ll find out tomorrow, hacking isn’t the only problem — humans are actually way higher on the problem scale. While it’s not easy, hacking dangers can be minimized, but fixing humans is impossible.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I’ve been writing (ranting?) about the security dangers of IoT and the connected world in general.

Security seems to be an afterthought— mostly after a public debacle, as Chrysler showed when Jeep was hacked.

GM took nearly five years to fully protect its vehicles from the hacking technique, which the researchers privately disclosed to the auto giant and to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the spring of 2010.

Pity the half million at-risk OnStar owners.

A few days ago Tesla was hacked by Chinese white hat Keen Team.

“With several months of in-depth research on Tesla Cars, we have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities and successfully implemented remote control on Tesla Model S in both Parking and Driving Mode.”

They hacked the firmware and could activate the brakes, unlock the doors and hide the rear view mirrors.

Tesla is the darling of the Silicon Valley tech set and Elon Musk is one of the Valley gods, but it still got hacked. And the excuse of being new to connected tech just doesn’t fly.

And if connected car security is full of holes, imagine the hacking opportunities with self-driving cars.

The possibilities are endless. I can easily see hackers, or bored kids, taking over a couple of cars to play chicken on the freeway at rush hour.

Nice girls don’t say, ‘I told you so’, but I’m not nice, so — I told you so.

Image credit: mariordo59

As we saw yesterday, staying highly skeptical of all cyber-information, from friends/followers through speeches and videos is a necessity these days.

But the question arises,

Where did we get the idea that tech meant progress and that it’s inevitable.

Neither are true, especially the inevitable part.

The tech world loves to claim that technology is like evolution, therefore inevitable.

Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (…)  Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.

What a crock, but people have bought into the mindset.

You can see it playing out in all the smart (hackable) products.

People claim they want the convenience, but that so-called convenience is killing creativity.

Humans make choices.

Tech bosses are human.

And it’s us humans who will pay the price for the supposed inevitability of tech evolution.

Image credit: Charles LeBlanc

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Good, bad or silly, ideas for products are generated in response to a problem or need. It doesn’t matter if the problem/need only exists in the entrepreneur’s mind (think Jucerio), it’s still the driving force behind creating whatever. So what happens when there are no perceived problems? When the current whatever is treated as THE solution?  Innovation takes a nosedive and monopolies thrive.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry when I see ads for stuff that responds to voice command, especially when it’s for stuff like changing the TV channel. I guess that using the remote takes either too much energy or too much intelligence to work it.

Everything today is about convenience, a trend I’ve been suspicious of, although I wasn’t sure why.

However, after reading an op-ed piece by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads,” called The Tyranny of Convenience I’m starting to understand what about it makes me itch.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.

Granted I’m known as a digital dinosaur, but there are some conveniences — washing machines, telephones, cars, email, and Skype chat, among them — I’m all for — although I see no reason they need to be smart .

However, I have no cell phone, avoid any app, service, etc., provided by Google, clean my own house, wash my own clothes, shop for my own food, and do my own cooking just as I’ve done since I was 18.

I search using startpage.com, no ads, no tracking and my life functions just fine without always being connected. I’m not on social media and don’t suffer from FOMA; I meet friends for meals and fun and we talk on the phone in-between.

I suppose that all sounds very inconvenient these days, but I’m never bored and enjoy the feelings of accomplishment that come with doing stuff yourself, as well as figuring out better ways to do it — it’s called ingenuity.

I’ve seen many “convenient” items come to market years after I came up with a similar approach to use for myself.

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows (emphasis mine).

Professor WU (or someone) needs to do a follow-up article entitled, “How Convenience Killed Creativity and Strangled Entrepreneurship.

Image credit: jim212jim

As promised yesterday, I’m updating the “don’t trust them, they lie” list (in mostly alphabetical order) with new links to the nefarious doings of your favorite “can’t live without ‘em” companies.

First up: Amazon. Anyone who has bought from Amazon is aware of how it uses your buying data to suggest additional purchases, as do all ecommerce sites. And there have been multiple stories about Alexa listening and responding even when it’s supposedly not on. But did you know that those supposedly anonymous recordings are discussed for amusement in Amazon employee chatrooms?

On a far more serious note, Ring, the video doorbell company Amazon acquired, is teaming up with police departments to offer free or discounted smart doorbells. And although it supposedly goes against Ring’s own policy, some of those PDs are adding to the terms of service the right to look at the saved video footage sans subpoena.

Sadly, Apple is on the nefarious list, in spite of it’s famous “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” philosophy. But, as with other companies, the facts are more complicated — the thieves are in the apps.

More tomorrow.

Image credit: MySign AG

Do you invite strangers into your home and let them to listen to your most personal conversations or view your most intimate moments?

Would you leave them alone with your kids to say what they pleased using unquotable language?

Would you stand by while they rummaged through your files copying what they pleased, leaving chaos behind and demanding payment so you could clean up the mess?

No?

Chances are you already do.

You invite them in with every connected device you buy.

Even vaunted Apple isn’t immune.

Security hasn’t been a high priority for companies around the globe, especially those running startups.

Consider the saga of a doll called Cayla from Genesis Toys; banned in Germany and under investigation in the US.

Cayla and a similar toy, i-Que, made by the same company are Internet-connected and talk and interact with children by recording their conversations.

CloudPets are stuffed animals made by Spiral Toys, which didn’t even bother to secure their database.

In addition to storing the customer databases in a publicly accessible location, Spiral Toys also used an Amazon-hosted service with no authorization required to store the recordings, customer profile pictures, children’s names, and their relationships to parents, relatives, and friends.

Samsung’s smart refrigerator was hacked yielding up G-mail logins, which, in turn, can yield up your whole on-line life.

Besides the fridge, the hackers also found 25 vulnerabilities in 14 allegedly smart devices, including scales, coffee makers, wireless cameras, locks, home automation hubs, and fingerprint readers.  

Pretty lame, considering that in January 2014 security was ranked as the top spending priority for CIOs and 75% said it would increase in 2015.

Makes you wonder what it was spent on.

European countries, such as Germany and Denmark, have strong privacy laws and simply ban these products, but I doubt our government will do more than hold hearings and wring their hands.

So it’s up to you.

Your major protection is very simple.

1. Don‘t buy connected devices unless you really can’t live without them.

For those you do buy don’t expect anything from the manufacturer.

2. Learn how to reset the passwords and choose strong ones.
3. Don’t use all-purpose logins, such as those from Facebook or Google — no matter how convenient they are.

It’s called “personal responsibility.”

If you’re not familiar with the idea ask your parents — or, more likely, your grandparents.

Image credit: cea +

I’ve been writing (ranting?) about the security dangers of IoT and the connected world in general.

Security seems to be an afterthought— mostly after a public debacle, as Chrysler showed when Jeep was hacked.

GM took nearly five years to fully protect its vehicles from the hacking technique, which the researchers privately disclosed to the auto giant and to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the spring of 2010.

Pity the half million at-risk OnStar owners.

A few days ago Tesla was hacked by Chinese white hat Keen Team.

“With several months of in-depth research on Tesla Cars, we have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities and successfully implemented remote control on Tesla Model S in both Parking and Driving Mode.”

They hacked the firmware and could activate the brakes, unlock the doors and hide the rear view mirrors.

Tesla is the darling of the Silicon Valley tech set and Elon Musk is one of the Valley gods, but it still got hacked. And the excuse of being new to connected tech just doesn’t fly.

And if connected car security is full of holes, imagine the hacking opportunities with self-driving cars.

The possibilities are endless. I can easily see hackers, or bored kids, taking over a couple of cars to play chicken on the freeway at rush hour.

Nice girls don’t say, ‘I told you so’, but I’m not nice, so — I told you so.

Image credit: mariordo59