Ask Slashdot: What Could Go Wrong In Tech That Hasn't Already Gone Wrong? 367
dryriver writes: If you look at the last 15 years in tech, just about everything that could go wrong seemingly has gone wrong. Everything you buy and bring into your home tracks you in some way or the other. Some software can only be rented now -- no permanent licenses available to buy. PC games are tethered into cloud crap like Steam, Origin and UPlay. China is messing with unborn baby genes. Drones have managed to mess up entire airports. The Scandinavians have developed a serious hatred of cash money and are instead getting themselves chipped. CPUs have horrible security. Every day some huge customer database somewhere gets pwned by hackers. Cybercrime has gone through the roof. You cannot trust the BIOS on your PC anymore. Windows 10 just will not stop updating itself. And AI is soon going to kill us all, if a self-driving car by Uber doesn't do it first. So: What has -- so far -- not gone wrong in tech that still could go wrong, and perhaps in a surprising way?
System wide draining of all bank accounts (Score:2, Interesting)
It's going to happen on a massive scale at some point. THen what?
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No, no! First, you get the sugar. Then, you get the women!
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I came out slashdot retirement for this
I presume that is supposed to be one of those things that have gone wrong?
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just go for fractions of a penny or do an fight club and wipe it all out.
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Criminal act and some advanced nations gov will "guarantee" the lost 1's and 0's back into some types of "gov backed" and approved banking accounts.
Not an approved banking service, not a citizen and the gov will do nothing
Re:System wide draining of all bank accounts (Score:4, Informative)
Oh please. It takes so much effort just to get the bank's systems to work together and with merchants. To drain all bank accounts you would have to simultaneously infiltrate all banks systems at once, which are all horribly different, and then somehow drain them and stop them from simply reverting the systems. Remember, much of the banks are 1s and 0s now so if someone pulled that off they simply can say "revert to backup, lock system down" and figure out how they got in. Extreme yes, but it would be a better alternative to everyone losing all their money...
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It doesn't matter if FDIC can't insure it all, the point still stands. To truly "steal" the money, you have to get it out of the system before they noticed it and get it into your control in a form that can't be clawed back. For tens of thousands of dollars, that's fairly easy. For a millions of dollars, that starts getting a bit difficult. For a hundred million, that's going to be extremely difficult. As of a few years ago, the FDIC fund stood at $72.6 billion.
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remind me where all the money stolen from the SWIFT system was clawed back from?
What will go wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Trusting VPN crypto would be at the users risk.
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While I agree that the authoritarian scum that is getting into power (again) want this desperately, I doubt it is possible.
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Eventually you will not be allowed to connect to the Internet unless you are using a closed "approved" hardware device using "approved" software that has been registered with your real name. It is coming.
Sounds like we'll have an internet for sheep who will sacrifice everything for convenience and a darknet for everyone else.
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If it did get to that point I feel like it would spark a revolution. Repression on that level has collapsed many a government in history and this would be no different. We've already heard about rogue actors in some of the more unstable nations circumventing internet deactivation with homebrew software and devices, this would be no different. It would require a lot more up front implementation to do something on that scale.
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It is not considered repression if only a minority finds it troublesome. And if most people aren't being denied internet, nobody will care if the application requires you to jump through so many hoops.
Look at this thing called "visa". The world without it was before WW1, a meager 100 years ago.
Jeez... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a long-time developer, stuck in code maintenance role hunting down other crappy coders' bugs in a software project written in the 1980s. I already see everything in a negative light. "Get off my lawn" kind of thing. And now you submit stories like this!? May as well pass the razor blades.
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I've got some bad news. We're all out of razor blades.
I doubt we can predict it (Score:2)
If we knew about it ahead of time, we’d probably be able to prevent - or at least ameliorate - it.
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We would also be able to write the novel instead of just giving the author a solid idea.
I'm not writing your book for you numbnuts.
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Boss: "I need you to itemize all unforeseen problems. Include mitigation solutions for long term viability."
Well, lessee (Score:5, Funny)
The LHC hasn't created a black hole that eats the planet and sucked us all into another dimension.
Perhaps, out of sheer disappointment, this is the reason they are building an even larger collider :P
It isn't all that bad (Score:5, Funny)
At least anonymous cowards aren't getting upvoted on Slashdot.
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Well played.
Someone's tinfoil hathas come off again (Score:4, Insightful)
Or they're off their medication again.
Get a blog, dude. (Score:4, Interesting)
Is dryriver vying to be the new Bennet Hasselton? His submissions are about as dumb.
Has Slashdot become this guy's personal blog?
Re: Get a blog, dude. (Score:2)
Fuchsia (Score:2, Interesting)
Google releases Fuchsia or some other OS like it, replacing Linux with it everywhere interesting - Android, Chromebooks, and with time, even servers. Eventually, Google decides to relicence Fuchsia with a non-open licence but offer it for free (Microsoft drops Windows to $0 soon after). Open source forks of last free version do not manage to come close to competing with Google's vast resources and the special support it gives to its version of Fuchsia in GCP.
All of this makes Linux marketshare drop precipi
Every database meets full gov political tracking (Score:4, Informative)
The use of words, the ability to publish, comment:
SAS vans down UK streets for people who publish online using the wrong words, politics and terms?
People in the free USA having to give city and state gov their social media accounts to get their rights approved?
City and states go full Tenth Amendment to restrict all other rights in their city/states?
The EU expands its nations blasphemy laws and uses social media to find anyone questioning how faith is practiced and the history of a faith/cult.
Movie and TV series get a veto on any online review of their work. Only approved professional reviewers will get search results.
Terms like "learn to code" is not found by gov approved search engines and not allowed on social media.
NGO's, NATO, the EU put more efforts into finding people who still want the freedom to publish views about the news and link news.
PRISM gets invited into every home with an intelligent assistant at OS level. Cameras and microphones aware of every word spoken, new face, search term, voice print.
The power off on a smart phone did nothing to stop tracking and collection.
Changes to OS, ads and browsers.
Every big brand US OS ships with software to approve news and links in real time.
OS supported browsers show approved ads and block any attempt to use software to stop ads.
Creating lists to block ads will be more difficult to get into an OS, any OS approved browser.
Creating lists of ads to block is a sin. OS and browser alterations are blocked to remove any easy user level attempts to block ads and tracking.
Police and NGO charity software detects and reports back on every file downloaded and created on any big brand networked computer as part of "free" realtime AV efforts.
Every image, movie and data file gets a real time checksum on a new OS.
Governments keep all internet ISP logs for decades.
Full VPN logs show up years later to get connected to ISP IP accounts.
CC brands and payment processors block all types of payments to all political groups/businesses they don't support for political reasons.
Medical database sharing:
Past medical DNA tests get fully shared between gov/police/private sector.
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Counterpoint: We actually live in a golden age of free speech. Even a decade ago the idea that people could make a career out of shitposting on YouTube was hard to imagine, yet here we are. With social media individuals with no corporate or government backing have more ability to reach more people than ever before, and post things that they would never dare to offline.
The kind of stuff you can find on YouTube and Twitter and Facebook in seconds today would never have been broadcast or widely published 30 ye
The Self-Driving car apocalypse (Score:2, Interesting)
Cars are completely replace by self-driving vehicles. Unfortunately, that did not mean an improvement in security practices. One day, some variety of jihadists finds a security hole that allows them to take control remotely. The result is a massive worldwide terror attack that makes 9/11 look trivial. Few non-sdv cars are available so the nation is paralysed. Politically, the nation goes haywire in ways that will make people longingly miss the Patriot Act.
Mass infrastructure jam (Score:5, Insightful)
If some bug or malware afflicted masses of planes, trains, and/or automobiles at the same time; it could clog up a large portion of the population's commute, commerce, and emergency handlers.
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Being in Turin now, i could assure you that I hope that Benny Hill uploaded a 9 track tape on the mainframe controlling the traffic light, because the traffic here is becoming crazy....
Re:Mass infrastructure jam (Score:5, Insightful)
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
The ILOVEYOU virus included the authors handle, email address, and city as a comment at the top of the file because he was so used to doing that for school projects. It was intended to be an attack on a few friends. It went worldwide, shut down email for a day, damage estimates range from $5.5B to $8.7B USD.
If there is a giant digital chaos switch, eventually somebody is just going to hit it by accident.
Shall we play a game? (Score:2)
The soviet doomsday switch hasn't ever accidentally launched a retaliatory strike by itself (yet)...
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That was the early warning system, not the perimeter.
Mobile malwares (Score:4, Interesting)
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One super complex code effort to work on most of the different smart phones and OS?
4 different funny files in a series each one with a different set of malware?
What's more work? The exact code to spread different malware from one file/click?
Getting a user to click 4 times and expect the OS to be infected by one of the files?
Have the ad detect the OS used and send down the correct malware
Be careful what you ask for... (Score:2)
...you may just find out what else could go wrong...
Permanent martial law hasn't been declared. (Score:2)
Real Life Chucky Dolls (Score:2)
The failure of Mozilla (Score:2)
The end of the world (Score:2)
You can say these things about anything, whether it's tech, cars, steam engines, things go wrong, things blow up, things kill people. What hasn't gone wrong is the entire industry being supplanted by another.
To Infinite Failure and Beyond (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, 3d-printed ghost guns haven't become a major problem, particularly in countries where gun ownership is heavily restricted. 3d printing hasn't really led to any major problems I've heard of.
Space tech has never had a disaster worse than a launchpad explosion killing a bunch of people at the launch site, and that was several decades ago. Worse as in, say, a rocket crashing into a city. We haven't hopelessly contaminated every body in the solar system with Earth microbes. We haven't had a major Kessler Syndrome incident that wiped out a large portion of satellites in orbit. We haven't had an Andromeda Strain-type incident.
We haven't had a large-scale Luddite backlash against technology, if that counts.
We haven't had a Jurassic Park-style disaster where revived/genetically-modified animals go on a rampage. Where's the GM bioweapons selectively wiping out certain ethnic groups or only active at certain latitudes? GM food causing (proven) mass sickness or poisoning to populations. GM babies leading to prejudice against them (or against unmodified people) a la Gattaca.
Nuclear terrorism has yet to happen. Large-scale nuclear exchange has never happened. Physics tech has yet to create bombs more powerful than thermonuclear. Directed energy weapons aren't superior enough to lead to an arms race. Hypersonic missiles have yet to lead to significant political/military conflicts. Space weapons have remained in the realm of rumor and innuendo (and a couple failed projects). Killbots 'exist' but are mostly remote-controlled waldoes, no AI has used poor judgment to decide to intentionally kill someone without a human in the loop (AFAIK).
Cloud seeding hasn't evolved to weather control that destabilized the planet's climate.
There are an infinite number of ways that humans can err and things can fail, so it's impossible we'll ever approach the infinite. However: "If something can go wrong, it eventually will." - Tom Clancy, Rainbow Six
Dystopian and Post Apocalyptic Reading List? (Score:2)
Seriously? There are entire genres of literature devoted to answering this question, quite creatively. Here's my favorite anthology:
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse [amazon.com]
Take a look at "Dystopian" and "Post Apocalyptic" literature. Those two terms will help anyone interested. There are probably subgenres I'm not exactly aware of, but those broad classifications are a good starting point.
If anyone actually believes that everything that could possibly go wrong, has gone wrong, they are not very creative in the
Computers aren't normally killing people... yet (Score:2)
Sure, today's software is buggy and crash prone as hell, but at least the bugs do not usually kill people.
Something tells me that will change once we start getting mass produced self driving cars, and more computer controlled and network connected medical devices. The "release early, release often, fix the bugs and security holes later" mantra of modern software development combined with those products is going to be a fatal combination.
My privacy getting violated (Score:2)
Even more job losses (Score:4, Insightful)
The airport drone scares are largely a ploy to get hobbyists out of the airspace which will be used for commercial delivery drones. Today will be the next generation's "good old days", when humans could still earn slave wages by delivering crap for Uber Eats and Amazon.
Bonus round:
I don't think the concept of purchasing movies is going to be around for too much longer, either. Hollywood has been pushing for a full-on subscription/pay-per-view business model ever since Circuit City's ill-fated Divx disc format.
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Wait a goddamn second...You pay...For movies?
I'm skeptical, next thing you'll try and tell me you pay for music.
basic security becomes an up-sell feature in cloud (Score:5, Interesting)
1. SalesForce charges a premium [salesforce.com] to enable encrypted-at-rest for your data. This means the company is charging to protect your data from possibly being compromised by SalesForce's own employees.
2. ZenDesk basic plans allow user passwords to be any five characters [zendesk.com]. No policy can be applied requiring more digits or types of characters (alpha, case, numbers, punctuation, etc.) unless your organization subscribes to the "Professional" or "Enterprise" level. Zendesk is using the threat of end-users having their accounts compromised to encourage customers to pay extra for the ability to enforce safe password policies.
It seems that some public cloud proprietors intend to mimic real-world ghettos. If customers want the cheapest rent for their cloud service, then thugs and criminals may break in and steal your data. Pay higher rent and you get protection.
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Yes, these are the scenarios I am referring to when I say "being compromised by SalesForce's own employees." Encrypted-at-rest means it prevents some extraction of your data that would involve a SalesForce employee as a part of the compromise. Charging for encryption-at-rest is profiting off of preventing the vendor from being a threat vector.
The CPU... (Score:3)
Your CPU could be "sold" on a subscription basis, if it can't verify that you've paid your subscription your hardware won't power up.
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Subscriptions for hardware don't really work because as soon as someone figures out how to break your DRM you are losing huge sums of money giving away free/subsidized stuff. With software at least piracy doesn't have direct costs in most cases.
Take oscilloscopes as an example. Most of them have optional licences to enable features. If the DRM worked they could have a subscription model and use that to subsidize the cost of the hardware, but it was cracked almost immediately and they had to keep the price o
Re:The CPU... (Score:5, Informative)
That already happened and probably still happens in data centers. In the late 90's (early 2000s?), Sun Microsystems would sell you an E10k class machine (64 physical CPUs) for cheaper than a fully populated E10k and disable the CPUs you didn't pay for. When you needed more power, you'd call them up, send them a boatload of money and poof... more CPUs started working. I image this kind of thing still happens in datacenters.
Re:The CPU... (Score:4, Informative)
IBM was doing it well before that even. They would rent you a mainframe and if you paid for a faster one a guy would turn up and move a jump to enable a higher clock rate or extra CPU.
The unknown (Score:2)
How about grey goo? (Score:2)
Solar flare (Score:2)
Easy one, a solar flare takes us all back to zero.
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Easy one, a solar flare takes us all back to zero.
No, for those interested:
http://www.oecd.org/governance... [oecd.org]
There is a worst case reality based assessment starting around page 24.
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and for a real world example (from 1859) just look up the carrington event.
The reality is... (Score:2)
... technology dystopia can't be avoided under a private ownership model. You can't hold tech and software companies accountable when they are 100's of miles away.
The reason why the world is corrupt as fuck and why human culture is being destroyed and corporations rule the world, is because people are politically and historically illiterate. If one looks objectively at the facts. We live in a lawless oligarchy and have for 200 years if intellectual property law is anything to go by. So no, until people
Large scale update failure (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'm waiting for is some disgruntled employee, l337 haxor or "axis power" to push a "security" update ... think windows 10... with a time bomb that destroys hundreds of millions of computers simultaneously.
Would wipe all data then destroy the operating system. It could try and brick/corrupt any hardware containing field upgradable firmware (disk drives, NICs, GPUs, mgmt engines, keyboards, system firmwares...etc)
The current system in my view is simply too dangerous. It costs too little to fix programming mistakes and normalizing constant perpetual updates as if this is a normal and healthy exercise is an exceedingly dangerous local optima to fall into.
Likewise there is nothing wrong with field firmware updates so long as they are distributed upon boot and physically unable to persist after reboot. Current practices are simply too dangerous.
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This will happen to an Internet of Shit device first. One day some company's update server will be compromised and everyone's smart lightbulbs will start flashing at a frequency calibrated to cause trigger epilepsy.
Actually I'm surprised this hasn't happened with some ad server and flashing GIFs yet, but maybe they are just waiting for the right moment to trigger it.
Nuclear Extinction (Score:2)
If the climate doesn't get its act together soon, we may have to just take it upon ourselves and launch all of the nukes.
Nope! (Score:2)
Better not post any idea, or people will certainly use em.
Power of Nightmares (Score:2)
Those with the worst nightmares get the most power/influence in disaster planning.
Weaponized Psychology:
App addictions to distract, control, and misinform the masses -- and customize techniques towards having a personal psychologist messing you up. We've only a hint of the start of this.
Cult-like control freaks AS AN APP. Isolation from friends/family/community replaced with hollow additions... Faster and more capable than a talented cult leader. Tech is already incidentally isolating people ironically in
Getting better all the time (Score:2)
I'd say things are pretty good.
Cheer up!
GMOs Seem OK So Far... (Score:2)
Despite the fears from the kale-munching, OMG-I-can't-deal-with-artifice crowd, I for one have yet to hear of any actual widespread problems from the dissemination of GMO crops on humanity.
Sure, business practices of e.g. Monsanto may not be great for farmers, but the actual products themselves don't seem to be problematic AFAICT.
Change my mind ;-)
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The current nightmare scenario: there is a gene hack that makes photosynthesis more efficient. (BTW, a current photosynthesis wastes almost as many photons as it uses, and there is now work going on to "fix" this problem. It's happening now.) Land plants with improved yields go into mass use. Meanwhile, previously unknown virus activity moves the new energy pathways into algae and there is a world wide tro
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That would be an effect of pesticides, not GMO. In fact, if your scenario occurred we might want to GMO milkweed to make it grow in more places.
Are we in the Matrix yet? (Score:2)
List off top of my head: (Score:2)
- PC policing with immediate fines like in "Demolition Man"
- A Super Bug that spreads faster (antibiotics fail.)
- Lacking net neutrality, those nightmares begin to grow.
- ISPs join a privatized legal system to punish/fine for ToS violations involving other industries. (such as loss of internet if you don't pay for hearing a song.)
- Quantum Computing actually works. Encryption dies.
- GMO designed disease; mad scientist or gov leak or mutation.
- Self-driving cars are exempt from liability... or like cars bec
Bitcoin defeated (Score:2)
When Bitcoin was introduced, I would've bet a fair amount of money that it would be hacked into inoperability within months if not weeks -- if only because there was so much monetary incentive for doing so, and any new, non-trivial software always contains bugs if you look hard enough. Non-trivial massively-multiuser software running on untrusted hardware should've been easy pickings... and yet, it soldiers on -- not taking over the world, exactly, but without any cataclysmic failure yet, either.
The house of cards is still under construction. (Score:3)
RSA, singularities and other movie plots. (Score:2)
Robot apocalypse (Score:2)
I just read on The Verge that iRobot, makers of the Roomba, have created a lawnmower version. I'm wondering if someone's pet is going to be ground to a pulp by that ilttle murderous lawnmower robot.
https://www.theverge.com/circu... [theverge.com]
RMS (Score:5, Insightful)
The general gist of this is, "Dang. Stallman was right". I wonder how much more miserable technology would be making our lives without the precedent of things like the GPL. I applaud the man for having the foresight to see the dark days that were coming and trying to hold them back with something that benefits society.
Tech hasn't gone wrong... (Score:2)
It's human that have gone wrong with their use of tech. The blame should never be laid on a piece of technology just because some magnate decided he could use it to oppress his fellow human beings a little more.
Around every silver lining is a cloud (Score:2)
Geez, do you think there's a day so sunny that this guy won't be able complain about the clouds? Sure, there are some problems with tech, but let's reformulate this just a bit:
If you look at the last 15 years in tech, it's just amazing! Everything you buy contains more processing power than an
supercomputer. You don't have to keep buying and re-buying software - it comes as a subscription that you use just as long you want.
With services like Steam, games "just work" - no more installation problems and driver
Terrorist attack on autonomous vehicles (Score:2)
Mobile devices (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't waste my time with that shit, my phone is mainly used to post on Slashdot.
Everything. (Score:2)
Superbug / Supervirus (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the biggest threat we know for sure exists, i.e. is already out there.
Antbiotics in livestock and CISPR are bound to someday breed a global killer that measurably reduces the global population. I'd expect something like this to perhaps cost 50 to 100 million lives before it can be stopped.
Global. Thermonuclear. War. (Score:2)
We have thousands of nukes out there. [wikipedia.org] How about that gov't shutdown? Do the nuke herders count as essential staff?
Self driving car terror act (Score:5, Interesting)
Some virus or a targeted attack makes self driving cars run through shopping malls or drive off bridges.
This could even happen if there is a GPS glitch making all maps offset by 100m to the east and the selfdriving software being buggy and assuming the GPS is right and the camera is wrong.
On one DrWho episode (or was it Torchwood?) there is an automated car system which is tricked into killing it's drivers on purpose.
Indeed, the IT industry is a disaster (Score:2)
"Smart Home" Rebellion (Score:2)
Your smart locks opening for all the wrong people, and staying locked for you.
Appliances not working or changing settings to "recommended" ones without asking, ruining your food.
Environment controls (heat and A/C) reverting to outside defined settings, possibly cooking or freezing people.
Digital Assistants trying to counsel you, based on input, or even alerting the Police (or other authorities).
The IoT being hacked on a much wider basis.
Still, a great case for "Certified Dumb Device" (TM)
Re:indie games wouldn't survive without Steam (Score:5, Interesting)
Steam is actually the model for quality DRM too. It is there, sure, which sucks, but I understand the need for it. Steam DRM just WORKS. Simple as that. One of my all time pissed off purchases was the special edition of Unreal Tournament 2004. Back then, the game came on a massive bundle of CDs (normal edition), or on a single DVD for people who had a DVD drive (special edition, with tons of extra shit like headphones). The CD version worked just fine for everyone, but the DRM failed for the special edition DVD. So those of us that paid MORE money for what was seen as a premium product got fucked. A friend brought over a pirated copy just so I could play the game.
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The Dumb is hard at work to get us the capability back to sterilize the planet by accident.
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Don't think this is possible, hence not something that can go wrong. However, if it is possible, it will probably be the biggest mess ever.
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Don't think this is possible, hence not something that can go wrong.
At our current level of tech and knowledge, I agree. But I wouldn't outright say it isn't possible. Unless you believe in some spiritual essence being responsible for intelligence, it would seam to reason that all of the physical attributes that make a brain work can eventually be figured out and duplicated.
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Sure, but then the problem may be that no-one actually fully understands how such AI works. See scenarios based on 'growing' an AI in a similar manner to how biological intelligences work, including raising from a child-like state.
Then there are the ethical implications, including the consequences of switching off a true AI.
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No reason to believe in anything. Just recognize that Physics is incomplete and has no explanation today for consciousness and potentially for intelligence. Also, even if it is a purely physical mechanism, it may still be impossible practically to reproduce in any other way than the biological one.
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Look up the Carrington event. Realize that it's not a question of if, but of when the next X-class solar flare hits the Earth.
What about the Carrington event?
The telegraph systems survived largely unscathed .. with mostly momentary outages lasting several hours at best. This was all at a time (pre Maxwell) where the world was clueless when it came to basics of electricity. Protection circuits and grounding standards were non-existent.
It will be like an EMP, but it will last for days, not milliseconds, and it will be global. If we don't prepare for it, most electrically powered equipment will be destroyed, and in consequence most humans will die.
Saying most electrically powered equipment will be destroyed has no basis in reality. There is little danger of damage to electronic equipment from solar flares. Also if it really did happen there