Thread: Twilight 2020
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Old 12-26-2018, 09:34 PM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Excellent point Paul. I think we have to consider cyberwarfare in it's "total war" potential because with the push now for the "internet of things" it won't be just your infrastructure being attacked to cause disruptions.
Hacking the internet of things means the attackers could disrupt common household appliances. It sounds laughable and while I'm not suggesting it will be like The X-Files episode where ATMs and mobile phones began displaying messages to kill people, disruptive behaviour by your fridge or washing machine is a real possibility.

For example: the fridge indicates that all your food is bad and automatically reorders more. One fridge isn't a problem but if the city has forty thousand internet connected refrigerators all ordering food at the same time from the same suppliers, you are then suffering a variation of the Denial of Service attack.
Your washing machine determines that you are using the wrong brand of clothes washing powder. No biggie really but if it refuses to work until you use the "correct" powder, you're going to be a little annoyed because not only do we generally not want to reuse dirty clothes but we definitely are not going to like being told by the washing machine what powder we can use. And also because nobody these days is going to want to handwash their clothes.

When other internet connected devices start to play up like this and people lose all those "convenience" devices from their lives, the level of frustration in the public is going to rise and fear/paranoia of technology is a potential result - in a world where we are using high-tech nearly every day, all of a sudden you have a group of people who probably cannot function because their tech is screwing with them.
That's not even taking into account those people who will let their frustrations boil over into public disobedience or rioting.
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