Expanding Vulnerability of the Net

Rei asks: "The recent article by Jane's left me contemplative. The recent commercial trend seems to be to put everything online - from cellular phones to refrigerators to toasters. These devices have their software typically non-upgradable. An increased number of systems in a particular location, with increasingly diverse operating systems, with real-world effects, places an increased danger from crackers in the future. Imagine the effects of a script kiddie finding a way to extinguish a pilot light in a heater, or to cause a fire in a device like a toaster or coffee maker. And do sysadmins really have the time to do a firmware upgrade in all the air conditioners or elevators in a building, let alone virtually every mechanical device which industry sees fit to give an IP? Before the greatest physical damage that could be done was to flash a BIOS so the machine wouldn't boot. But now we have oncoming the capacity for much, much more. How will the world deal with it?" This has worried me for a while. More often than not, the drive to commercialize a new tecnology always comes before we've accurately predicted how it will effect us. So how will millions of potential network security holes affect us in future when everything is networked?