Slashdot Mirror
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?
It's going to happen on a massive scale at some point. THen what?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Eventually you will not be allowed to connect to the Internet unless you are using a closed "approved" hardware device using "approved" software that has been registered with your real name. It is coming.
Is dryriver vying to be the new Bennet Hasselton? His submissions are about as dumb.
Has Slashdot become this guy's personal blog?
Google releases Fuchsia or some other OS like it, replacing Linux with it everywhere interesting - Android, Chromebooks, and with time, even servers. Eventually, Google decides to relicence Fuchsia with a non-open licence but offer it for free (Microsoft drops Windows to $0 soon after). Open source forks of last free version do not manage to come close to competing with Google's vast resources and the special support it gives to its version of Fuchsia in GCP.
All of this makes Linux marketshare drop precipitately, hardware vendors don't even bother helping with drivers and soon all Free OSs become niche products barely working on current hardware.
** Note that I don't believe Fuchsia is bad in itself. The question is what Google will do with it if it controls the project.
Cars are completely replace by self-driving vehicles. Unfortunately, that did not mean an improvement in security practices. One day, some variety of jihadists finds a security hole that allows them to take control remotely. The result is a massive worldwide terror attack that makes 9/11 look trivial. Few non-sdv cars are available so the nation is paralysed. Politically, the nation goes haywire in ways that will make people longingly miss the Patriot Act.
We have not seen mobile malware able to jump back and forth to desktops.
Well, 3d-printed ghost guns haven't become a major problem, particularly in countries where gun ownership is heavily restricted. 3d printing hasn't really led to any major problems I've heard of.
Space tech has never had a disaster worse than a launchpad explosion killing a bunch of people at the launch site, and that was several decades ago. Worse as in, say, a rocket crashing into a city. We haven't hopelessly contaminated every body in the solar system with Earth microbes. We haven't had a major Kessler Syndrome incident that wiped out a large portion of satellites in orbit. We haven't had an Andromeda Strain-type incident.
We haven't had a large-scale Luddite backlash against technology, if that counts.
We haven't had a Jurassic Park-style disaster where revived/genetically-modified animals go on a rampage. Where's the GM bioweapons selectively wiping out certain ethnic groups or only active at certain latitudes? GM food causing (proven) mass sickness or poisoning to populations. GM babies leading to prejudice against them (or against unmodified people) a la Gattaca.
Nuclear terrorism has yet to happen. Large-scale nuclear exchange has never happened. Physics tech has yet to create bombs more powerful than thermonuclear. Directed energy weapons aren't superior enough to lead to an arms race. Hypersonic missiles have yet to lead to significant political/military conflicts. Space weapons have remained in the realm of rumor and innuendo (and a couple failed projects). Killbots 'exist' but are mostly remote-controlled waldoes, no AI has used poor judgment to decide to intentionally kill someone without a human in the loop (AFAIK).
Cloud seeding hasn't evolved to weather control that destabilized the planet's climate.
There are an infinite number of ways that humans can err and things can fail, so it's impossible we'll ever approach the infinite. However: "If something can go wrong, it eventually will." - Tom Clancy, Rainbow Six
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Steam is actually the model for quality DRM too. It is there, sure, which sucks, but I understand the need for it. Steam DRM just WORKS. Simple as that. One of my all time pissed off purchases was the special edition of Unreal Tournament 2004. Back then, the game came on a massive bundle of CDs (normal edition), or on a single DVD for people who had a DVD drive (special edition, with tons of extra shit like headphones). The CD version worked just fine for everyone, but the DRM failed for the special edition DVD. So those of us that paid MORE money for what was seen as a premium product got fucked. A friend brought over a pirated copy just so I could play the game.
Two examples:
1. SalesForce charges a premium to enable encrypted-at-rest for your data. This means the company is charging to protect your data from possibly being compromised by SalesForce's own employees.
2. ZenDesk basic plans allow user passwords to be any five characters. No policy can be applied requiring more digits or types of characters (alpha, case, numbers, punctuation, etc.) unless your organization subscribes to the "Professional" or "Enterprise" level. Zendesk is using the threat of end-users having their accounts compromised to encourage customers to pay extra for the ability to enforce safe password policies.
It seems that some public cloud proprietors intend to mimic real-world ghettos. If customers want the cheapest rent for their cloud service, then thugs and criminals may break in and steal your data. Pay higher rent and you get protection.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
What I'm waiting for is some disgruntled employee, l337 haxor or "axis power" to push a "security" update ... think windows 10... with a time bomb that destroys hundreds of millions of computers simultaneously.
Would wipe all data then destroy the operating system. It could try and brick/corrupt any hardware containing field upgradable firmware (disk drives, NICs, GPUs, mgmt engines, keyboards, system firmwares...etc)
The current system in my view is simply too dangerous. It costs too little to fix programming mistakes and normalizing constant perpetual updates as if this is a normal and healthy exercise is an exceedingly dangerous local optima to fall into.
Likewise there is nothing wrong with field firmware updates so long as they are distributed upon boot and physically unable to persist after reboot. Current practices are simply too dangerous.
That's the biggest threat we know for sure exists, i.e. is already out there.
Antbiotics in livestock and CISPR are bound to someday breed a global killer that measurably reduces the global population. I'd expect something like this to perhaps cost 50 to 100 million lives before it can be stopped.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Some virus or a targeted attack makes self driving cars run through shopping malls or drive off bridges.
This could even happen if there is a GPS glitch making all maps offset by 100m to the east and the selfdriving software being buggy and assuming the GPS is right and the camera is wrong.
On one DrWho episode (or was it Torchwood?) there is an automated car system which is tricked into killing it's drivers on purpose.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.