Care to elaborate on which parallels you mean, pipship?

Are you pointing to a second generation warning, i.e. Unabomber=Foundation’s Hari Seldon, This and second gen=Wanda+The Mule…

Or are you suggesting Gaia, the overmind of Foundation’s Edge, by way of the internet of things?

The generational shift we’ve made between analog and digital is not like the shift between manual and electric equipment. Manual to electric meant a reduction in physical labor; the equipment increases the efficiency of energy applied. Electric-analog to electronic-digital means a reduction in intellectual inputs, an efficiency in the instructions applied.

Should the electric equipment fail in an emergency, the user must apply more energy directly. But should the digital fail, the user cannot simply apply more intelligence; they must regress not one but two generations, and they may lack the know-how to do so.

As a kid I spent some of my early summer vacations in the Upper Peninsula with my mom. Electricity was still pretty unpredictable even in the late 1960s; even hot water heaters whether electric or natural gas were infrequent. To do laundry my mother would fire up my grandfather’s wood stove, heating galvanized buckets of water before pouring them into a wringer washer. My job consisted of putting clothes through the mangle’s rollers to squeeze out excess rinse water before hanging them on the line. When power was out, we had to twist the clothes by hand before hanging them. It was far more time- and labor-consuming to wring by hand, and nowhere near as effective as the scary finger-chewing mangle.

But at no time was there a threat that the wringer washer or mangle would fall under the control of another person not there with us. The equipment might break, but it could be fixed with simple parts — no processors, motherboards, software updates, or planned obsolescence, only simple nuts, screws, rubber washers required. That same washer still works today when plugged in.

A washer today may be absolutely useless if the electronics in them die, if the software they use is corrupted or hacked, or if the equipment is hijacked by another outside entity. Pick any other electronic device — they are subject to the same exposures.

Worse, today’s young adults have absolutely no clue how to fall back two generations in technology, let alone go manual. They don’t know what it is to have to wash clothes by hand, hanging them to dry. They would have to look up the how-to guide on the internet; they can’t rely on a library nearby let alone that library having adequate how-to books.

But this example assumes a catastrophic failure, like a devastating hurricane, a massive solar storm-generated outage, an EMP or hacker-attack on the power grid or equipment itself. The other problem with this shift to internet-mediated equipment is a kind of enslavement.

A wireless device connected to the internet, operated by software written not by the user but by corporations, can make demands of its users without their explicit permission. It can take information about the users and report it, withhold action until more information is shared. The quid pro quo is assumed to be better service in exchange for a tacit release of limited information, but the average person cannot police this agreement. They unwittingly shed valuable private information without express consent, farmed for their data like happy cows fed alfalfa before they are milked as they chew their cud.

And if the washer breaks down, they get on their little cellphones and shed more meta data in order to get a repair person to rescue them from soiled clothes they know not how to wash. The users are harvested, and perhaps not only by multiple corporations, but by their government and others who inveigle their way into data. Nothing at all like the shift from manual to analog technologies whatsoever.

There are multiple layers of encryption in computing and networking, in addition to that used in communications. With regard to attacks on “internet of things” devices, it is the same encryption layer attacked or subverted by Stuxnet that is compromised — this is NOT the same as the communications layer.

See this blog post regarding NIST-standard encryption’s likely compromise by the NSA.

See this video by security expert Ralph Langner to understand how the attack on hardware’s encryption works (the dropper) to deliver a payload. Will the dropper look different on smaller “internet of things” devices? Yes — but they may also be much simpler.

Further, I suggest a free MOOC course on encryption when available; there’s at least one offered by a high-profile university. You can hunt it down.

I’m going to point out that the use of ricecookers, teapots, and refrigerators was partly tongue-in-cheek. I’d hoped EW readers would be more discerning about the scale and nature of the problem. As MIT’s Prof. Green notes in his blog post linked above, “If your goal is mass surveillance, you need to build insecurity in from the start. That means working with vendors to add backdoors.” LG does not manufacture all of their own chips, though they are beginning to manufacture more of them. Either of these manufacturing points is an opportunity.

If the chips go into LG devices only, that’s one thing, and it’s bad enough when they may affect automobile use or HVAC/building management. But if chips from vendors are distributed more widely and they are compromise, who knows the scale of the exposure to these insecurities?

And with regard to air-gapping, see this article. Security experts are following this, at least one says it’s plausible.

I’m done here with this line of discussion.