Friday, May 31, 2019

Fear Your Toaster | The Russell Kirk Center

Fear Your Toaster | The Russell Kirk Center
Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier--Reviewed by Michael J. Ard
What happens when everything is a computer, connected to everything else? 
How then can we keep the internet, the greatest benefit of the global communications revolution, from spying on us, or even from harming us? 
...In his brisk and urgent book, Schneier points out that in the “Internet of Things” (IoT)—the growing trend to connect everything to a computer network—vulnerabilities are increasing and becoming more serious. 
IoT now approaches 20 billion devices. 
Everything is a computer, including our cars, our dishwashers, our toasters. 
...As Schneier memorably puts it, a technology that can give you anything you want, can take away everything you have.
Schneier sees two aspects to the problem. 

  • The first is that our personal data is out our control and subject to surveillance or misuse by corporations, the government, or criminals.
  • The second problem is perhaps more worrisome: all our devices are too easy to compromise. For example, if everything is a computer or connected to one, then everything can be hacked. And if everything can be hacked, then everything can, in theory, be turned into a weapon against us. Each computer can be repurposed into something potentially harmful, which we now see with “botnets”—computers taken over by hackers to penetrate or crash networks..."

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