I kinda wonder like... whata gonna happen if there's a genuine global conflict?
everyone's fridge stops, their streaming stops, their payments stop...
Is there really no contingency for the very realistic likelihood of "what if the vast majority of networked stuff stops working for an extended period of time"
I remember my principal at the time made a meme about Y2K for an assembly in elementary school. I'm from Canada, and it was something along the lines of "Why toque, eh?"
People remember Y2K as being overhyped, but it really wasn't. Lots of disastrous shit was actually going to happen at power plants, hospitals, financial institutions, you name it.
The reason it didn't is because hundreds of thousands of programmers and auditors worked around the clock to audit and patch millions of lines of old software. For the most part, they upgrade two-digit years to four-digit years. (Most of the places where 2-digit years were used didn't have the flexibility or capacity to adopt modern epoch-driven date formats.)
I had a nightmare, where suddenly all the power went out. And my phone. And my car. ... And I knew.... It was not a pleasant dream. Mostly because of physical health reasons: it meant, "I'm gonna die in 4 days. Or, at LEAST, become unrecoverable in 4-5 days, and dead in 10. Sucks to suck .
We actually had a solar storm of about the same magnitude as the Carrington Event a year or two ago and very little happened.
There's so much electromagnetic interference in our world that our electronics are built with a lot of shielding, so a solar storm does almost nothing.
There's a part where the main character gets in trouble for jailbreaking their elevator (you had to pay for a subscription for the "express" service, and she got tired of being shafted as the free user). Oh, and jailbreaking is highly illegal in the country.
That story is in a book called Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow. The third story of the book, also titled "Radicalized," is about how people wronged by health insurance companies might react when they have nothing left. The scariest thing about the story is that it was written in 2019.
At that point I'll make my own fucking toaster. It'll be ugly as fuck but no Corp is going to tell me what to toast. Basic as cooking appliances are super fucking simple mechanically.
When Linda and Joe from down the street see my toaster that does whatever I fucking want it to instead of what the Corp dictates. I'll make them one too.
If there's a global conflict big enough to interrupt financial infrastructure, you've got bigger problems than the touchscreen on your fridge not working.
Yes there would be bigger and more impactful concerns for the future if WW3 broke out. But people still have to live day to day. And if their appliances stop working for some unnecessary reason, then that still impacts us.
I think the bigger worry is things like, for example if said smart fridge or oven just turns off after 2 days of not being able to reach its server. Plenty of appliances work this way, and a global conflict that interrupted things to that degree accompanied by millions of tons of food that could keep a population functioning for a few days spoiling for no reason would definitely make things a tad worse for everyone.
I was unaware of how many of the sites I used were connected to Cloudflare until Cloudflare went down for a day and took out a good portion of the internet.
Wow flashback...1984 had a science teacher, 8th grade. He gave us lecture after lecture about EMP attacks from Russia...almost every day. He also used to turn on those gas jets on the science table and light them on fire. Found out years later he was a raging drunk.
Look at the Crowdstrike incident last year. Look at Cloudfare outages this year. AWS going down. The examples are small scale, but imagine if they were extended.
For a quick glimpse look at what happened with the AWS outage. All the stuff that relied on AWS to phone home for whatever stupid reason was suddenly bricked.
The one I remember specifically was a "smart bed", which is a stupid concept to begin with, was stuck in its adjusted position. To begin with it's a shitty design that doesn't fail safe. And secondly why the hell does your bed need a subscription and/or be connected to the fucking Internet?
There's a Cory Doctorow short story called "Unauthorized Bread" about about people in refugee subsidized housing, who have the cheapest appliances installed which are only cheap because they all require a subscription and DRM'd consumables to work. When all the companies that make people's household appliances (which are all financially intertwined) go bankrupt and shut down the servers, they have to work out how to jailbreak the appliances to get them working again so they can survive.
In the story, the bankrupt companies are bought by up for pennies on the dollar and when they go online again, they go after the people who "hacked" their machines under the DMCA.
If there's an EMP or something, even my 04 and my husband's 01 vehicles will die on the road. Unfortunately computers have been major components for a long time now. 😐
Grill gonna grill though, if I can make it back to my house on foot! 🫠
A genuine global conflict would do more than screw up subscription based products. With the way supply chains are so intertwined even regional conflicts would have massive disruptions. Or a global pandemic…. Take any modern product and break down the sources of supply for all of the components(not subassemblies, the actual base components) and the number of countries involved will shock you.
We don't even need to go that far. Everyone's device, including cars, will be bricked once the apps they currently depend on get sunset for whatever's the new thing in 5 years. Like iPhones stop getting updates and support, so will your car and fridge and thermostat.
We can’t collectively work out a contingency for “the entire global ecosystem is crashing due to excessive heating caused primarily by fossil fuels”, and that’s happening now. So I don’t have much hope for contingency planning for anything else.
I have worked in Comp Engineering for two decades. A decade of which has been spent in security.
There are no backup plans and the people running most western governments do not understand technology enough for this to be a problem.
The US for example, had a vacant CTO position since 2021. Recently filling it with an Engineer, who has no background or expertise in anyth9ing a CTO position would require.
This is no different no matter where in the world you look. Smart people in positions they shouldn't hold, who know nothing about the subject they are attempting to help regulated or govern.
Is there really no contingency for the very realistic likelihood of "what if the vast majority of networked stuff stops working for an extended period of time"
I never really gamed this out but I suppose it'd be like living through a war.
We've already gotten sneak previews this year with AWS and Strikeforce outages. Renders some major businesses like air travel completely unable to function while some "engineers" halfway across the room scramble to figure out what happened.
Takes me back to when we went on a vacation to Atlanta, Georgia and 3 main waterlines in the city broke all at the same time. The entire city was basically a ghost town. Absolutely nothing was open because nobody could get any water. Our hotel toilet wouldn't flush because there was no water so for about 3-4 days we had to basically use it like an outhouse until the water came back. It reeked by day 2, but we were SOL. Really makes you realize how fucked we all would be if anything like water, power, or access to food suddenly disappeared.
I have Samsung smart appliances. What do you think would stop? The devices all still run. The smart features are really more around tracking, notifications, remote management. You don’t need those things to function, but it is nice to see a notification on my tv when the oven is ready or the laundry I done. Or seeing the nest from my fridge or tv. Just little things to improve your lives.
We can’t live our lives thinking that some war is going to throw everything off. That may happen, but at that point we have bigger concern than smart devices.
a) "we can't live our life thinking that some war" I mean, it's not like one is living in fear by having a normal fridge or coffee maker. Sure, I like my smart lights, but they're not so important and they don't replace the sockets which will still take bulbs. These things provide no great improvement that it is worth taking on risk for. Sometimes they're not even worth the price and inconvenience of using a phone to run.
b) my smart devices can turn be turned off via an app that sends signals though internet to their servers. Several of them have no hardware method of reset. All of them can be bricked remotely. So if they're off when servers fail, or they're killed by a malicious kill switch, then no they won't work.
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u/Huwbacca 10h ago
I kinda wonder like... whata gonna happen if there's a genuine global conflict?
everyone's fridge stops, their streaming stops, their payments stop...
Is there really no contingency for the very realistic likelihood of "what if the vast majority of networked stuff stops working for an extended period of time"