Greetings, Future Tensers,
Early Friday morning, major internet destinations—including Twitter, Netflix, BuzzFeed, and more—seemed to go offline, more or less simultaneously. After some initial confusion, security researchers determined that it had been a distributed denial of service attack against a company called Dyn that provides crucial infrastructure for many sites and services. Significantly, those researchers also demonstrated that the attack was perpetrated using hacked “Internet of Things” devices. As a subsequent recall confirms, it was mostly hacked cameras and DVRs from a single Chinese manufacturer.
We still don’t know who perpetrated the attack, and it’s possible that we never will. But Josephine Wolff writes that we can still learn a great deal from it. Notably, she points out that though the Internet of Things methodology is relatively novel, the results look a lot like those we’ve seen in past cyberattacks. There’s something reassuring about this, since it suggests that we’re not heading for some apocalyptic scenario where our internet-connected toasters try to burn our houses down. By way of example, look to the case of automobile hacking, which is more likely to end in extortion than old-fashioned murder.
Speaking of cars, Henry Grabar explores how shared self-driving cars might transform urban spaces in a video and accompanying essay for our Futurography unit on the future of ownership. (Tesla’s Elon Musk also has some troubling thoughts on the topic.) In that same series, Charles Duan discusses Lexmark, a printer company with a litigious history that helped limit our control over devices we own. And Emily Tamkin tries to solve a fascinating enigma: Why do we often pay more for digital versions of a product than we do for the physical ones? This week, we held an event to discuss some of these questions. If you missed it, you can check out C-SPAN’s coverage of it here.
Here are some of the other stories we read while waiting for our phones to update:
- Climate change: Want to better understand what’s happening to the environment? Check out some fiction on the topic.
- Pediatrics: Screen time may not be terrible for young kids after all (but that doesn’t mean you should just leave them in front of an iPad, unsupervised).
- Silicon Valley: Should tech companies exile Peter Thiel from their boards for his support of Trump? Will Oremus doesn’t think so.
- Gaming: I talked to a guy who’s collected hundreds of screen shots of soda machines in video games. His project is equal parts stupid and brilliant. I love it.
Events:
- Join New America President Anne-Marie Slaughter for a screening and discussion of the 2010 film Never Let Me Go. The screening of Never Let Me Go will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 2, at Washington, D.C.’s Landmark E Street Cinema at 555 11th St. NW. For more information and to RSVP click here.
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
