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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?
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.
I'm a long-time developer, stuck in code maintenance role hunting down other crappy coders' bugs in a software project written in the 1980s. I already see everything in a negative light. "Get off my lawn" kind of thing. And now you submit stories like this!? May as well pass the razor blades.
The LHC hasn't created a black hole that eats the planet and sucked us all into another dimension.
Perhaps, out of sheer disappointment, this is the reason they are building an even larger collider :P
At least anonymous cowards aren't getting upvoted on Slashdot.
Or they're off their medication again.
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.
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"
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.
If some bug or malware afflicted masses of planes, trains, and/or automobiles at the same time; it could clog up a large portion of the population's commute, commerce, and emergency handlers.
Table-ized A.I.
We have not seen mobile malware able to jump back and forth to desktops.
Children's' toys turn into homicidal knife wielding maniacs, all because of some hacked proprietary software code in a popular toy.
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.
No, no! First, you get the sugar. Then, you get the women!
The airport drone scares are largely a ploy to get hobbyists out of the airspace which will be used for commercial delivery drones. Today will be the next generation's "good old days", when humans could still earn slave wages by delivering crap for Uber Eats and Amazon.
Bonus round:
I don't think the concept of purchasing movies is going to be around for too much longer, either. Hollywood has been pushing for a full-on subscription/pay-per-view business model ever since Circuit City's ill-fated Divx disc format.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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!
Your CPU could be "sold" on a subscription basis, if it can't verify that you've paid your subscription your hardware won't power up.
We just don't FULLY know what already went wrong. Like new crimes by Facebook are being posted each week. I guess other companies have quite some skeletons hidden. The most scary thing is actually when AI will pwn us -- we wouldn't know. We would be too stupid to even notice...
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.
Look up the Carrington event. Realize that it's not a question of if, but of when the next X-class solar flare hits the Earth.
What about the Carrington event?
The telegraph systems survived largely unscathed .. with mostly momentary outages lasting several hours at best. This was all at a time (pre Maxwell) where the world was clueless when it came to basics of electricity. Protection circuits and grounding standards were non-existent.
It will be like an EMP, but it will last for days, not milliseconds, and it will be global. If we don't prepare for it, most electrically powered equipment will be destroyed, and in consequence most humans will die.
Saying most electrically powered equipment will be destroyed has no basis in reality. There is little danger of damage to electronic equipment from solar flares. Also if it really did happen there would be advanced notice and time to take action to limit grid damage.
The power grid itself could very well be damaged with widespread outages. Equipment necessary to replace damaged components could take years to come online. Sustained lack of access to grid may well cause humans to die in large numbers... yet this is a far cry from "most electrically powered equipment will be destroyed" which is not true.
2. ZenDesk basic plans allow user passwords to be any five characters.
WTF? From ZenDesk
Note: If an end-user or agent fails to enter their password correctly ten times in a row, they are locked out and cannot sign in again until they reset their password.
Am I missing something? I get locking an IP address out of a system if too many incorrect login attempts are tried, but locking the whole account down? Doesn't this just give, to anyone, the ability to lock anyone's account that they know the username, but not password, for?
Seems, to me, that this policy just begs for denial-of-service attacks against entire lists of usernames..
This isn't about stealing, it is about wiping out the records of everyone's numeric monetary assets just to fuck up the entire system - it's just gone. If they instead wipe out all the records of debt - well, we all should have been in debt!
The current nightmare scenario: there is a gene hack that makes photosynthesis more efficient. (BTW, a current photosynthesis wastes almost as many photons as it uses, and there is now work going on to "fix" this problem. It's happening now.) Land plants with improved yields go into mass use. Meanwhile, previously unknown virus activity moves the new energy pathways into algae and there is a world wide tropical water algae bloom. So much oxygen is consumed that a crash of all tropical ocean life occurs. Within a few years atmospheric oxygen levels drop and everything else starts to die.
The End.
Why is Snark Required?
But once it is complete, boom! One unforeseen problem and suddenly the power grid is down and now internet is down and now nothing wants to come back up because A service needs B service, which needs C service, which won't start until A service is back up, all while F service decides there is a problem and tells A service to wait to restart until Z service is restored, which depends on B...
The general gist of this is, "Dang. Stallman was right". I wonder how much more miserable technology would be making our lives without the precedent of things like the GPL. I applaud the man for having the foresight to see the dark days that were coming and trying to hold them back with something that benefits society.
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...
A large-scale intentional attack of on-the-road autonomous vehicles causing rapid acceleration to a high rate of speed, veering off the road, crashing into eachother, walls, etc, resulting in mass casualty, inability to access roadways and congestion in medical centers, etc.
High-powered and relatively cheap devices are in the pockets of most people - what they do with the sum of Human knowledge? Spend all day playing Candy Crush and sexting of course!
If the draining is going to be catastrophic i.e. system collapse, then the first thing that is going to happen to you if you show the money (or whatever else you have stashed) will be a rape and rob action by a group of muscled and armed men. If you are lucky they will enslave you instead of killing. If the draining is not related to system collapse but rather to government or organized crime (this includes finance industry) action then your stashed money may appear illegal and you may be robbed of your cash by the state first and then raped by the inmates of the prison where you are going to rot. That is if you are lucky. If you are unlucky you will end up w/o food under the bridge or on a body dump depending on sort of the government you will have at the time.
Counterpoint: We actually live in a golden age of free speech. Even a decade ago the idea that people could make a career out of shitposting on YouTube was hard to imagine, yet here we are. With social media individuals with no corporate or government backing have more ability to reach more people than ever before, and post things that they would never dare to offline.
The kind of stuff you can find on YouTube and Twitter and Facebook in seconds today would never have been broadcast or widely published 30 years ago.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No reason to believe in anything. Just recognize that Physics is incomplete and has no explanation today for consciousness and potentially for intelligence. Also, even if it is a purely physical mechanism, it may still be impossible practically to reproduce in any other way than the biological one.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Boss: "I need you to itemize all unforeseen problems. Include mitigation solutions for long term viability."
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
Let's put it this way: Some developers want DRM for their game. Some want a protected sales channel to ensure that generally speaking, a person that has their product bought it. For those developers, Steam has crafted a pretty benign system with which to do that. GOG, works, very well, but not all companies want such an open ended supply chain. Even if they can have their own DRM layer installed, why do "your own thing" when there is an excellent alternative with market acceptance? And that's before I start discussing the other features of Steam: cloud saves, workshop, DLC integration, and the social stuff. DRM isn't always a bad thing. We just have few examples of it being done well. Steam is one of those doing it well, IMO.
That's correct. If you can brute-force guess, phish, or steal usernames you can merrily start locking everyone out.
Yes, these are the scenarios I am referring to when I say "being compromised by SalesForce's own employees." Encrypted-at-rest means it prevents some extraction of your data that would involve a SalesForce employee as a part of the compromise. Charging for encryption-at-rest is profiting off of preventing the vendor from being a threat vector.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
It makes some sense for Salesforce to charge extra - because their platform is on the Oracle database. And the Oracle version that supports encryption at rest is more expensive - so they are passing along the extra cost to their customers. Don't blame Salesforce - blame Oracle !