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Tag Archive for cyber

Little Nibbles

June 28, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Little Nibbles

http://spectrum.ieee.org/video/robotics/medical-robots/video-miniature-robots-perform-surgery

Progress is being made on all fronts with regards to microscopic medical devices.  It’s not taking the form we might have imagined once upon a time, no self-replicating nano-bots, no magic chemical elixirs to restore youth and vigor.  But you know, the future never does.  You can see the roots of many technologies in the kids of things futurists and science friction writers come up with, but the ultimate result, the practical application is often very different.

Most of the time, IMHO, it’s somehow even cooler, these future technologies come to life.  When you read about them, when you try to envision them, your ideas are almost always incomplete.  You’re working with the gestalt, the overall concept, rather than the specifics.  But when you see those specifics operating IRL, when you see the bits turn and bend, when you see the shadows they cast and the way they hang in solution, they suddenly become the kind of real that your imagination can’t quite compare to.

Mind the Gap

March 26, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Mind the Gap

http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/blog/bitwhisper-heat-air-gap

I am always looking for clever ways to hack stuff.  Most of what I write falls into the science fiction genre with an eye towards future tech, but one of the things I find, over and over again in my day job as a game developer is that you can’t ever ignore your legacy.  Every system, no matter how sophisticated, went through a development process.  It started out based on the preconceptions and experiences of the original designers and unless that system was burned to the ground and started from scratch at some point, those legacies are going to be there, informing everything from the color choices down to the arrangement of microprocessors on a board.  As the staff at a company turns over and the original engineers move onto new things, the reasons for those legacies are often forgotten.  People know the system handles things one way, but over time, they *why* is left behind.

Ken Liu brought the above article to my attention (via a FB post) and I think this is a great example of a legacy hack that goes deeper than a system’s initial design.  You’re hacking one of the fundamental characteristics of a computing system itself, the heat that plagues everyone who has ever held a laptop on their lap for too long, or who has tried to play Minecraft in a sweltering 100 degree apartment.  What was a vexing problem before now has become a potential security risk.