2010 Top Scary Trends In Tech

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2010 Top Scary Trends In Tech

October 17th, 2010 ipadoholic Leave a comment Go to comments

Yes, it’s Halloween period of 2010, and the “fearless” editors have asked on the ZDNet contributors to advance up with “Scary Tech”, the technologies that are so frightening, they’ll make you leave from multi-part “interfaces”.

Yes, it’s time once again for Scary Tech Trends. Last year, the monsters were such horrible ghouls, ghosts and goblins as Unreliable Clouds, IT Consolidation, Virtual Workplaces, The Never-Ending Workday and Cyber Bullies from Hell. This year, I’ve got a garland of new ones for you, so let’s fissure open a uninformed bucket of cold gorilla smarts and obtain the B-movie rolling.

You’ve seen these poor, routine beings everywhere. People – if you can still call them that – with pallid, prosaic faces, staring down at tiny screens whilst they walkdirection-less down the street, entirely unknowingly of their surroundings. Yet these bad souls obviously think they are more “connected” to the outward world and more people than ever.

Sometimes they lapse to actual life, and have actual interactions with living human beings, but then this horrible titillate kicks in that compells them to lift out their iPhone, their Android, their BlackBerry. Their PRECIOUS .

They’ll lift it out in the center of a business discussion whilst someone else is talking, and they’ll fiddle with it in the lavatory case at work (or, great heavens, take calls on it and sign deals whilst on the can). They’ll lift it out in the center of cooking with family. They’ll muddle with it whilst everybody is cuddling on the couch, examination TV. And even after gratifying the many simple of human requirements, it still won’t go away. “Oh was it great for you, honey? Great, you nap, I’m gonna fool around Angry Birds.” What happened to smoking acigarette?

If they can think of any inappropriate, ungainly time to glance at their little shade and daub on their little itty, bitty keys, they will. Because their PRECIOUS compelsthem.

And the longer they have the smartphone incited off or not being used, the larger the titillate is to lift it out and use it, as if it has a few immorality spell throw on them. They must Tweet. They must Status Update. They must Check In. They must Text. They must check for emails. They must. MUST!!!!! EVERY. SINGLE. MINUTE.

They’ve turn the 21st-century homogeneous of Smeagol. Once, they were human beings. But right away they’re Smartphone Zombies. They may think they’re related to more and more people and data than ever, but for these bad creatures, life is only an illusion.

Now forgive me whilst we check my Twitter feed on my Droid. MY PRECIOUS!

Apple’s suing HTC and Nokia, and Microsoft is suing Apple and Motorola. Motorola is moreover suing Apple and Motorola is being sued by RIM, and Oracle is suing Google. And that’s the simple chronicle .

What’s it all about? Patent transgression and coercion in the mobile industry. Not only is this restraining up the authorised network and basically only creation blood-sucking attorneys and law firms richer, but it’s moreover negligence the growth of the technology attention and spiteful consumers.

All of that will go on for years and years. What is it great for? Absolutely nothing. The large fish wish to manoeuvre for location since they see their competitors encroaching on their territory. So in lieu of creation more convincing products and vouchsafing the marketplace decide, they use the authorised network as a arms instead.

Where’s Dr. Van Helsing when you need him?

I’m not certain what’s scarier, people who are totally oblivious that their lives have been fully take in by their smartphones, or that these same people are peaceful divulge their locale at every chance since they think that it’s “hip” or “cool” to “Check In”.

Check-in for, WHAT, exactly? To earn “Points” and excellence badges? What is this, the frickin’ Boy Scouts?

For what role do you need tobroadcastyour locale to every singular one of your FaceBook contacts or the whole Internet on your Twitter river in actual time? Because you have so ample self-centredness that your actual location being precise inside of mins is so critical to your friends and family? Do they must be know that you purchase a bear talon and a large crater of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts at 8:24am every morning? That you only walked in to the Planned Parenting clinic? You think it’s a few type of astounding success that you only became Mayor of the Route 4 McDonalds in Paramus?

What’s intimidating here is that these self-centredness location-aware services similar to FourSquare and right away FaceBook are harvesting thousands of time hammered location datapoints per year for every singular one of these users that frankly and frequently use these services.

What’s worse is the future future for data-mining that could allow, say, a in isolation examiner or a future employer or a financial services firm or insurance conduit or any person else with a vested fascination in how you outlay your time could sometime use this data against you. Never thoughts stalkers who wish to obviously do you and your family earthy harm. “Oh you checked in to McDonalds and Dunkin’ Donuts 84 times from 2009 to 2010? Oh I’m remorseful Mr. Smith, we’re going to have to elevate your life insurance premium, eating all that crap can’t presumably be great for you.”

But do not attend to me, I’m alarmist. Keep checking in. Really.

Location wakeful services are intimidating when people are peaceful to share this data with others, but even scarier is the amount of data that gets common and distributed that you DON’T wan’t others to see. Social Media services similar to FaceBook encourages its users to “Like” all since the symbol is right away apropos rampant and integrated in to every singular web site.

The more you “Like”, the more datapoints that obtain built up and stored that FaceBook can use to monetize to advertisers and other third parties. As with the future hazards of location-aware services similar to Foursquare, there is a verbatim goldmine of profiling of “Like” data that gets stored for each and every FaceBook user that could sometime advance back and punch you.

“Like” data isn’t the only data on FaceBook you must be fret about. The service seems to change its personal privacy defaults on a annual basement and if you leave things as they are, chances are there is data inside of your form that is being common out to the world that you do not wish via FaceBook’s Graph API . This data that you do not wish common can even be pulled from what appear similar to submissive games and applications.

If you haven’t completed so, examine my 20 Minute FaceBook Lockdown Videos and secure you and your family members’ profiles right away.

Botnets used to be the domain of Script Kiddies on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for going after financial and personal data on large targeted groups of particular end-user PCs, but right away they’ve turn the elite cyber-attack apparatus of antagonistic governments and their authorized and unaccepted cyber-warfare agents to endeavor to rob data and repudiate service of large end-user services such as Twitter, Yahoo, Google and FaceBook, together with corporate and supervision extranets.

Botnets require a great treat of of coordination and infrastructure on the segment of the cybercriminals to run, that is why they are giving way to more sophisticated, self-replicating assault mechanisms such as Stuxnet , that is a intricate P.C. pathogen that has been especially written to assault industrial infrastructure, such as power plants.

Unlike Botnets that have to be concurrent and assault web sites and systems externally, self-replicating worms such as Stuxnet may be injected in to the targetenvironmentby simply inserting an putrescent USB key in to a Windows Personal Computer and using Zero-Day exploits to negotiate large networks.

So far, worms similar to Stuxnet have primarily pounded and shop-worn infrastructure in countries similar to China and Iran, and the US has mostly transient being compromised by this new form of worm so far. However, we apprehension that we may really well be seeking at a future where critical aspects of the national infrastructure running on Windows are brought to a hindrance by intricate worms combined by antagonistic governments or militant groups on an persisting basis.

Or will we pick up from the mistakes by migrating the mission-critical systems to tougher or stronger Mainframe, UNIX and Linux-based systems in preference of their exposed Microsoftcounterparts?

What other intimidating trends in tech have you encountered this year? Talk Back and Let Me Know.