Skip to main content

My Toilet Ratted Me Out

I found a story on bbc.com that struck my funny bone. Tongue and cheek aside, though, this article is very poignant about our future in the developed world. It's not entirely unlikely that your entire life will be recorded by a camera. You can't go anywhere today without being seen by a camera.

Dumb cameras don't scare me. Sure you can make them auto-track and interface with a computer that knows where you are. Okay, big deal. Maybe Tom Hanks cares about that more than me. What does concern me is the growing interest in supposed smart home devices.

The BBC article made a cheeky comment about a toilet that knows when a woman is pregnant before she knows. Harumpf you say, that's a good thing. Well, how about if you're a cocaine user and your lovely smart commode decides to check on your drug use and then rat you out to the cops.

Worst yet, let's say you do get the fancy John, and you love that it tells you that your blood sugar is too high, or that you're eating too much sodium. What if it was hacked by a nefarious dude like me, and it starts alerting those coppers to your elicit drug use even when you're not. Hmm, that sounds fun. It's another level of disinformation terrorism that is only now starting with those phoney bomb scares in the USA.

So everybody has to make water, whether in a toilet, or on a tree. In the future with nifty smart devices, you can imagine a smart storm drain that is able to do quick DNA analysis. Oh snap, huh? So much for being a criminal. The minute you make water, either the dirty rat of a commode will rat you out at Jump'n Jimmy's Truck Stop, or else the sewer drain will start calling the coppers on you. Once you're identified by your urine, the army of eyeballs will turn their attention to you, and you won't be able to get your liquid life, a.k.a. Starbucks, without being molested by some billy who's waiting for charbucks. Maybe you can bribe him with a Carmel, Non-Fat, No-Whip, Sugar Free, Soy, Half-Decaf Mocha Frappuccino. With 2 Equals.

There was a book that I read recently titled The Light of Other Days by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. You should read this fiction book because it has a good message about our future. We may not be creating worm holes today, but we are creating a video archive of history that is unprecedented. In thirty years time you will be able to call up images of "yesterday" on just about anyone and anywhere in the world from your embedded cellular search device.

Does anybody want to start a Ludite colony?

Popular posts from this blog

Clustered Foolishness

I had morning coffee with a well respected friend of mine recently. Aside from chatting about the usual wifery and family, we touched on the subject of clustered indices and SQL Server performance. A common misconception in the software industry is that a clustered index will make your database queries faster. In fact, most cases will demonstrate the polar opposite of this assumption. The reason for this misconception is a misunderstanding of how the clustered index works in any database server. A clustered index is a node clustering of records that share a common index value. When you decide on an index strategy for your data, you must consider the range of data to be indexed. Remember back to your data structures classes and what you were taught about hashtable optimizations. A hashtable, which is another way of saying a database index, is just a table of N values that organizes a set of M records in quickly accessible lists that are of order L, where L is significantly less than M. ...
Read more

Deadly Information

Remember back to 2006 when a young girl killed herself [1] , [4] after being tricked and harassed by a faux boy she found on the Web using MySpace. The trial against the faux boy, an adult woman (Lori Drew), did not result in prosecution for the death of Megan, much to the dismay of many.  Yet, today we read about another trial where someone is being accused of second degree murder because they may have mentioned something slanderous about another person who was later killed by a hit man [2] . In this case, though, the person on trial is a former FBI agent who was working deep cover to infiltrate organized crime. In both cases, someone released information to third parties that resulted in the death of another person.  Neither defendant in either of these cases actually committed the act of murder, though. In the case of the FBI agent, though, the murder charge is being taken seriously. Yet, in the MySpace slander case, the murder charge was not taken seriously. How are t...
Read more

Faster Climate Change

CNN reports that a WWF study has found that global climate change is happening faster than predicted in 2007 and that there will not be any arctic ice by 2013, or 2040. [1] Then it goes on to say that global sea level will increase by 1.08 meters by the end of the century, which is 2100, 92 years from now. Quite honestly, nobody really cares what is going to happen to the planet in 98 years. Why? Because in 98 years we (as humans) will either: (1) Obliterate ourselves because God told us to do it. (2) Eat eachother because there will no longer be any land available to grow crops and sustain living quarters for our 50 billion people. (3) Suffocate because our planet will no longer smell nice thanks to 50 billion people producing lots of solid waste in our oceans. (4) Leave the planet because there will no longer be enough fresh water to sustain our lives. Wait a minute. Consider (4) for a moment. Where can we get an abundance of fresh water TODAY? Anyone? Yeah, the arctic! It's goin...
Read more