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Tag Archive for Kimberly Unger

Set it and Forget it

August 8, 2015 Uncategorized Comments Off on Set it and Forget it

TeslaRecharger

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/06/for-realz/

 

Some day I will own a Tesla.  That’s a given.  Not sure how I will actually, you know, pay for it, but a gal can dream, right?

As cool as this is, though, I’m seeing only half of the equation here. Something Tesla doesn’t usually forget.  The people half.

Humans like to f*ck with stuff. I’m not speaking of our innate desire to break open the housing and see the glowy flashy bits, but rather our inability to just leave something alone.  To set it and forget it, because we know, we KNOW, deep in our brains, that the one time we don’t double-check, is the one time something will go wrong and we will burn our house down..

Imagine, if you will, pulling into your garage in your shiny shiny e-car, pulling the parking brake and walking away.  No muss, no fuss.

You can’t do it, can you.

You’re going to end up standing there, every time, just to make sure your magic snakey-charger plugs in properly.  At first, it will be because it’s just so *cool*, but then you’ll find you just don’t trust it.  What if, this time, you parked an inch too far to the left?  What if one of the connectors doesn’t seat right?  Your palms will itch with the desire to just plug the d*mn thing in YOURSELF and be done with it.  And if you *do* walk away, you’re going to come back, just to make sure, even if it’s two in the morning and you’ve woken in the middle of the night.

Because there are some things we just cannot let go of.

 

 

The Internet of Things

August 4, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on The Internet of Things

https://hacked.com/hackers-find-way-remotely-switch-smart-sniper-rifles-target/

Now, as a rule, I am all for pushing technology forward.  Building new things, breaking sh*t, changing the way that people think about pretty much everything.  Forward is good.

But incautiously forward is becoming the norm.  While there are hundreds of companies pushing forward the idea of IoT (Internet of Things), they are all, almost invariably, following the “MPB” model (minimum playable build).  The idea behind the MPB is to get your product to market first, start establishing your user base, let your consumers become your testers and thereby get them to buy in to your product.  After all, it’s their suggestions and requests that you are taking and implementing, so they now have some skin in the game.

The problem arises when security gets involved.  When you have a user base of ten or a thousand, you’re often not big enough to attract attention from any serious hackers.  So it’s easy to get lax on security for the sake of time to market.  You can fix it after the fact, right?  But as your development teams turn over and new faces replace the old, those security flaws (which you knew about but planned to fix once you were a viable product, really) get layered over.  They get forgotten, or you hope they never get noticed.

The thing about the kinds of people who hack a system, they love to know sh*t. If you get cool enough or big enough, they’re going to take a look.  They’re going to want to pop the hood to see if your programmers really did something really slick in there, or if it’s a train wreck in a shiny plastic housing.  The flaws will be found out, and if you’re lucky, you were hacked by an ethical bunch, who will be happy to take their turn deconstructing you at Black Hat and may (if paid) help you to fix those flaws before someone gets hurt.

 

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