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Ask Slashdot: What Could Go Wrong In Tech That Hasn't Already Gone Wrong?
dryriver writes: If you look at the last 15 years in tech, just about everything that could go wrong seemingly has gone wrong. Everything you buy and bring into your home tracks you in some way or the other. Some software can only be rented now -- no permanent licenses available to buy. PC games are tethered into cloud crap like Steam, Origin and UPlay. China is messing with unborn baby genes. Drones have managed to mess up entire airports. The Scandinavians have developed a serious hatred of cash money and are instead getting themselves chipped. CPUs have horrible security. Every day some huge customer database somewhere gets pwned by hackers. Cybercrime has gone through the roof. You cannot trust the BIOS on your PC anymore. Windows 10 just will not stop updating itself. And AI is soon going to kill us all, if a self-driving car by Uber doesn't do it first. So: What has -- so far -- not gone wrong in tech that still could go wrong, and perhaps in a surprising way?
Communist China pre crime detection comes to the free West.
The use of words, the ability to publish, comment:
SAS vans down UK streets for people who publish online using the wrong words, politics and terms?
People in the free USA having to give city and state gov their social media accounts to get their rights approved?
City and states go full Tenth Amendment to restrict all other rights in their city/states?
The EU expands its nations blasphemy laws and uses social media to find anyone questioning how faith is practiced and the history of a faith/cult.
Movie and TV series get a veto on any online review of their work. Only approved professional reviewers will get search results.
Terms like "learn to code" is not found by gov approved search engines and not allowed on social media.
NGO's, NATO, the EU put more efforts into finding people who still want the freedom to publish views about the news and link news.
PRISM gets invited into every home with an intelligent assistant at OS level. Cameras and microphones aware of every word spoken, new face, search term, voice print.
The power off on a smart phone did nothing to stop tracking and collection.
Changes to OS, ads and browsers.
Every big brand US OS ships with software to approve news and links in real time.
OS supported browsers show approved ads and block any attempt to use software to stop ads.
Creating lists to block ads will be more difficult to get into an OS, any OS approved browser.
Creating lists of ads to block is a sin. OS and browser alterations are blocked to remove any easy user level attempts to block ads and tracking.
Police and NGO charity software detects and reports back on every file downloaded and created on any big brand networked computer as part of "free" realtime AV efforts.
Every image, movie and data file gets a real time checksum on a new OS.
Governments keep all internet ISP logs for decades.
Full VPN logs show up years later to get connected to ISP IP accounts.
CC brands and payment processors block all types of payments to all political groups/businesses they don't support for political reasons.
Medical database sharing:
Past medical DNA tests get fully shared between gov/police/private sector.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That already happened and probably still happens in data centers. In the late 90's (early 2000s?), Sun Microsystems would sell you an E10k class machine (64 physical CPUs) for cheaper than a fully populated E10k and disable the CPUs you didn't pay for. When you needed more power, you'd call them up, send them a boatload of money and poof... more CPUs started working. I image this kind of thing still happens in datacenters.
Oh please. It takes so much effort just to get the bank's systems to work together and with merchants. To drain all bank accounts you would have to simultaneously infiltrate all banks systems at once, which are all horribly different, and then somehow drain them and stop them from simply reverting the systems. Remember, much of the banks are 1s and 0s now so if someone pulled that off they simply can say "revert to backup, lock system down" and figure out how they got in. Extreme yes, but it would be a better alternative to everyone losing all their money...
IBM was doing it well before that even. They would rent you a mainframe and if you paid for a faster one a guy would turn up and move a jump to enable a higher clock rate or extra CPU.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC