Technology Futures

As I continue to read "A Great and Shining Road" about the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, I continue to be amazed at the number of parallels between that project and the effort to get fiber to homes and businesses today.

While the scale of the two projects is different (the railroad was going to span the continent, while fiber needs to be built within towns and cities), the *resistance* to the project is the same.

Some of the fiercest opposition to the proposed transcontinental railroad came from the incumbent railroads, who saw competition as a bad thing. The incumbents got newspapers to print mis-leading articles and they wined and dined legislators and told them there was no need for another railroad. One railroad magnate even grandly pronounced that there was no need for a transcontinental railroad because hardly anyone traveled between the East Coast and the West Coast.

Of course, there were few travelers because there was no easy way to get across the country--sailing around the tip of South America or traversing the Isthmus of Panama (death from yellow fever was common), or braving Indian attach going cross country were the only three options. Today, we have incumbent telecom providers saying the same thing: "No needs a Gig of bandwidth because no one is using a Gig of bandwidth."

Well, you can't use it if you don't have it.

Here we are, more than 150 years later, repeating history, fighting the naysayers and entrenching interests.

Of course, we know how things turned out for the "crazy" concept of a transcontinental railroad: it transformed the nation and unleashed decades of economic growth across the entire country.

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to roll along merrily, with manufacturers sticking a WiFi chip and a poorly designed single purpose Web server into anything with electricity. That is not so bad. What is bad is the complete and utter disregard for testing for security.

Wired has an article about two guys who showed the magazine that they could remotely take control of a Jeep Cherokee, while it was being driven at highway speed, and do things like honk the horn, turn the wipers on and off, or disable the transmission, among many other functions. In the demonstration, the hackers nearly caused an accident when they disabled the transmission, as the Jeep was no longer in control of the driver, who was barely able to steer it onto the side of the highway without power.

Is this unique to Jeeps? Apparently not, as the article mentions similar shortcomings with Fords and Toyotas.

With the Chinese hack of Federal personnel records (millions of them), it is not a stretch to imagine that taking control of just a few thousand automobiles in the U.S., on major highways during rush hour, could cripple the entire transportation system. But hey! Your iPhone syncs nicely with the car music system, so we got that going for us.

Nest, the thermostat people, have been busy branching out by developing (or buying) other home gadgets like smoke detectors and security cameras. The company recently announced the Nest Cam, an Internet of Things (IoT) security camera.

Home security services used to be an expensive service that required steep monthly fees and a landline (and these days, the landline probably costs more than the security service). But lately, every geek with a couple of friends is hoping to catch fire in a bottle with an Internet-based security camera.

I think there is a lot of growth in this area, largely because you can now buy a good security camera with a live Internet feed for under $100. But what caught my eye in the article linked above was at the bottom of the story. Nest is owned by Google, and Nest's user agreement specifies that Nest will share data with Google. Nice. That Internet camera that seems so cool will be sending a video feed to Google, where AI software will be analyzing everything you do so Google can better target ads for you.

And don't even get me started on the hacking implications of having third party access to devices that show you what is going on in your house. There are going to be some spectacular hacks of Internet of Things devices before most people start paying attention and asking themselves if they really want to put a bunch of Internet gadgets in their home.

If you needed still more evidence that the Internet of Things (IoT) has become silly, here is another data point: ReVault, the wearable cloud.

It is a watch thingy that you can strap to your arm and it uses Bluetooth and/or WiFi to automatically back up your smartphone and tablet. Your whole backup plan is based on something that sets off the metal detectors at the airport, so you have to take it off and risk leaving it behind at the security checkpoint.

I have a personal cloud. It is in the basement of my house, and I'm duplicating everything on a second "cloud" device at a friend's house 250 miles away. That's the way you do a personal cloud. What am I using? It's from Transporter, and it works well--no glitches or burps with more than a year of use. And I have no financial connection to the company....just a satisfied customer.