Star Wars: Ah, Good.
Star Wars: The Girl Killed Snoke
Star Wars: Do You Have Something? A Cowl Or Someting You Could Put On?
Star Wars: Amazing. Every Word Of What You Just Said Was Wrong.
Star Wars: Five Bloody Minutes Ago!
Star Wars: Get Your Head Out Of The Cockpit
Star Wars: Finn…Naked…Leaking Bag?
Star Wars: Okay, I’ll Hold
Star Wars: I Was Cleaning My Blaster And It Went Off
Star Wars: The Sacred Texts!!!
it’s going to be star wars: (un-transcribable porg noises)
Peter Parker, part of gen z, understanding how bad this country is: god I hate America
Steve Rodgers, literally “Captain America”: god me too
steve: i punched so many nazis… i spent years punching nazis, i went around the country punching hitler and singing showtunes… how are there still nazis? i kind of died to get rid of nazis and there are still nazis!
bucky: good thing you like punching nazis
steve: it’s the only way i feel alive
peter: Big Mood
me: *worries that I’m Evil and Manipulative and tries very hard every day to be a good person*
me: oh my god
me: I’m manipulating people into thinking I’m good
Okay but he’s right and he should say it.
“Smart” and “Cloud” also mean data gathering. I need to have a tangent, so pardon me while I run with this…
Here’s the thing: I’m a nerd. I want to be able to automate things in our home and to have usable data. So I want smart electrical plugs that allow me to have rules and show me what’s hooving up a ton of energy. That’s useful to me, but that’s not the bargain that tech companies are willing to strike with me, because they want to be able to gather data and sell it.
What’s annoying as hell is that every currently supported thing that does this wants to be a cloud-based application that requires me to install an app on my phone.
I. Do. Not. Want. This.
I want my plugs on a network so I can flip open a browser on my laptop or phone or tablet and access them that way. I do not want them on or touching the goddamned internet. I do not want an information-gathering-and-data-leaking-phone-app.
The one thing that I’ve found that semi-reliably does this is no longer supported by the manufacturer. Every other goddamned option requires me to have it be app-controlled and I can’t control the data gathering from the manufacturer.
In this case, I am DEFINITELY an old-coot yelling at THE cloud.
Oh, in case I didn’t make it incredibly clear: the internet of things (IoT) is garbage and it’s tremendously insecure and it is UTTER FUCKING CRAP and I can’t explain how much I completely loathe it but here let’s try because it has been a while since I yelled about this.
[Obligatory introductory joke to explain the field: What does the S in “IoT” stand for? Security.]
1: As Grandpa Cap said, things should just work. IoT things don’t just work, they’ve gotta be joined to your network and have proper connectivity and they’re whiny little baby machines when they can’t talk to the mothership and oh yeah sometimes they completely stop working because the company that makes them goes out of business and suddenly you’ve got a hunk of technology that isn’t getting patches or updates and can suddenly get bricked with no warning. Sometimes they’re such sensitive delicate little flowers that after a power outage they go back into demo mode and spoil all your food. That’s not something that “just works.”
2: Very little user control; bad attitudes about security all around. It’s actually really hard to do shit like re-set passwords on a lot of IoT devices. Either that or people don’t realize they need to re-set passwords for their stove or their roomba or whatever. Long story short if I felt like it I could watch your family through your baby monitors or just wait until your kids fell asleep and started shrieking through the monitors to ruin everyone in the household’s sleep. That’s maybe less of a concern with something like a roomba or a smart fridge but I can also watch your IoT security cams and smart doorbells if I put some effort into it. Walk around your house naked? Maybe don’t set up a bunch of really poorly secured webcams that use your home wifi.
3: Big Data can suck my sparkly blue dick. You know these things are collecting data on you, right? Your vacuum sends out a map of your house. Your smart fridge tracks the grocery lists you keep and how often you shop and how many accounts there are in the house. I’m willing to bet that the smart doorbell that is probably managed by Amazon tracks how many deliveries you get. When you agree to bring this shit into your home you agree to share with Amazon exactly how many times you said “Alexa, play Venom (2018)” to cope with the ever encroaching threat of technology and oligarchy.
4: Do you want botnets? Because this is how you get botnets.
5: I’m going to steal your internet-enabled car OR I’m just going to rickroll you through your internet-enabled car stereo but either way I’m going to be laughing while I do it. SERIOUSLY. Next month I’m tabling at a DIY/Hands-On/Hacker con type thing; last year one of the workshops was two days of a crash-course (geddit) of open-source car hacking software. Actually for the last, like, three years every con I’ve gone to has had an IoT hacking village. It’s so prevalent now that hackers chill in between difficult contests or dull talks by fucking with smart blenders the way we fuck with locks.
6: BOUNDARIES ON THIS SHIT ARE GETTING WEIRD. Even my own beloved field of Teledildonics is getting wrapped up in insecure IoT fuckery. And it’s really creepy to think that you could be chilling with your vibrator only to have its controls suddenly taken over by someone else.
7: You’re trained not to think of your phone and computer in exactly this way but holy shit do you ever need to. Is your smartphone really shitty at making calls but really good at one-touch amazon orders? Did your phone have no native MP3 player but came preinstalled with Facebook? Look, you gotta do everything you possibly can to choke the life out of the apps you’re running, deny them everything they ask you, uninstall everything you possibly can and then still recognize that you’re carrying around a tracking device that tells every company it talks to everything about you.
Anyway the panopticon is real, everything is terrible, and while I’m by no means a primitivist I do feel like it’s beginning to be imperative to do something drastic about the erosion of privacy.
Also since I’m here being grumpy and shouty here’s some advice for any anarchists or hackers or protestors or troublemakers out there: start leaving your phone at home a couple days a week at random times. Your behavior is tracked through your daily patterns, it’s unusual and suspicious to suddenly leave your phone at home for twelve hours. So start leaving it home whenever you don’t feel like having it. Memorize two or three important numbers. You should be able to have some untracked time a couple of days a week.
Also also fucking seriously start using a passcode to unlock your phone instead of biometrics.
Okay, yelling done, the internet was a mistake, I love you all.
