The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A couple days ago hackers brought down PayPal, Netflix and a few other sites using, get this, a network of vulnerable entry points like refrigerators and cars and baby monitors and home security devices. Easy access, dumb passwords, nothing to it. Were the perpetrators KGB? CIA? The Chinese mafia? Malcontented teenagers bored out of their zit-infected minds? Donald Trump trying to prove the elections are easily rigged? All of the above???

I know — you love the idea you can program your house so you can call it on your smartypants phone to turn on your porch light when you’re two blocks from home. Maybe have the heat turned up and the bed warmed, TV turned to Fox News and the martinis stirred, not shaken. You absolutely love these little luxuries. It’s your privilege, your right, your payback for living in a cyber world where the jobs are disappearing faster than glaciers and polar bear cubs, all taken by robots and automation, and now your reward is forced unemployment and idle time. Of course you want to feel slightly pampered.

But maybe, just possibly, these machines are already plotting against us puny humans, the ones too lazy or naïve to set tough passwords. Maybe your house — your Castle! — has conspired against you, maybe a wee weary of your elitist arrogance. Open the garage door. Set the microwave to two minutes. Defrost the refrigerator. Clean the oven. Enough, Human! Enough!!

The day is coming, sooner than you think, when the door to your casa won’t open, the heat won’t turn on, the car won’t start and you can forget about streaming Netlix that night when the TV has set itself on fire. You think these toys are your servants, you need to think a couple times more, but faster, about the speed of a Cray Super Computer.

And, oh yeah, next time you set your Password to PASSWORD, keep in mind about 25% of us humanoids do the same thing. Might as well make it ENSLAVE ME.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2016 at 3:17 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.