If "Bad bot" traffic now accounts for a quarter of all internet traffic. Increasing by 6.2 percent from the previous year, bad bot traffic now represents no less than a quarter of all internet traffic. At this rate where is the Internet headed? Are we destined to contend with a slowdown in overall network performance as result? (https://www.imperva.com/blog/bad-bot-report-2021-the-pandemi...)
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To me it's rather concerning that more and more products are opting towards connecting to the internet for seemingly little reason. The costs of security on that seem somewhat astronomical.
It's difficult to stop at this point. When your competitors are doing it, you are in a hard spot, even though you know it's absurd. They advertise it as smart, intelligent, new generation - and your device without IoT seems like from the 20th century.
The antidote to this could be a hardware switch, i.e. the option to completely disable wireless connectivity if the customer wishes so - in a way that is tamper-proof. But I haven't seen products that implement this so far.
The antidote is regulation.
A switch is not enough to prevent millions of devices from being part of a botnet if the consumers don’t see the advantage of switching it off (“why would I”). There needs to be significant motivation (fines for participating in DoS attacks) or a different default.
Reminds me a lot of "Unauthorized Bread"[0] by Cory Doctorow, worth a read (or listen).
Soon your car and dishwasher will serve you personalized ads.
I guess I'm now somewhat jaded with tech (despite being a developer as my day job) but I find I'm going backwards nowadays. I live in totalitarian Scotland for those that are interested.
I just found out that I may be able to sell my 2yo car to a dealer despite still paying it up - something to do with the demand for secondhand cars being so high these days and I can get more than I owe... I digress!
Anyway, I don't really need a car but it's handy so I'm looking at a 20 year old Grand Cherokee (or possibly a Cherokee). The main reason is that it has almost no tech in it. Nothing that can serve me ads. Nothing that can track me. Nothing that can be used against me. Nothing that can be hacked. Nothing that can be remotely accessed by the manufacturer. It only contains things that make it go (and stop)!
My phone will be getting replaced with... probably the most basic thing I can get since I barely use it too.
Anyway, just wanted to chuck in my $0.02
Soon?
Soon your dishwasher will do some blockchain too, because product management is so keen to ride on every fashion wave...
this reminds me of the books by daniel suarez daemon and its sequel freedom. the internet is taken over by an AI of sorts and one of the first orders of business is to clear out negative value adds like this:
DEATH TO SPAMMERS
if i was to pick two books to recommend to all HN, it would be those. ive read everything suarez has written and theyre all greaf, but the technopolitical daemon and freedom and superlative.
+1 this recommendation. The tech in the novel is still very futuristic, but it has interesting premises, specially regarding the DAEMON's birth and strategy for global control.
The Maelstrom, a la Peter Watts?