The Internet of Risky Things

The Internet of Risky Things: Trusting the Devices that Surround Us by Sean Smith

I’ve been trying to beef up my IT knowledge so I can make sure all the nifty things I want to do in my novel in progress, House Ibsen, are grounded in reality. So when I saw The Internet of Risky Things at the library, I pounced.

The book is very well-written and does an amazing job of striking the balance between detailed technical information and sufficient background material. My big overall takeaway: if you care about privacy, don’t use the Internet of Things. The amount of things that can—and probably will—go wrong is staggering! Author Sean Smith describes the issues with legacy components, the current “program now, patch later” paradigm, and security. For example, many Internet of Things devices use out-of-date components because they’re cheaper. Many of these components have bugs, but can’t be patched. Even if they can be patched, eventually they become so “old” that they’re no longer supported. This leaves millions upon millions of devices wide open to hackers. Especially when these devices are used for mission critical applications, like the power grid or pacemakers, that risk is unacceptable. Yet it runs rampant throughout the Internet of Things. Gives me the heebie-jeebies, I tell you.

On the other hand, as a writer this gives me lots of ways for both my bad- and good-guy characters to exploit Internet of Things weaknesses and make things…interesting. 🙂

THE BOTTOM LINE:

If you’re interested in this field, I highly recommend reading The Internet of Risky Things.

Smith, Sean W. The internet of risky things trusting the devices that surround us. S.l.: OReilly UK Ltd, 2017.

Contemplating Death: a connection between Buddhism and Christianity

The Chick and the Dead: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors by Carla Valentine

I recently read Carla Valentine’s fascinating account The Chick and the Dead: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors.¹ Engagingly, wittily written and full of detail (for most readers this is probably not a good book to read while eating), I was entertained and informed.

This book unexpectedly connected to a conversation I’d had with a Christian friend. The friend had asked me to watch the Darren Wilson film Furious Love.² George Otis, Jr., founder and president of the Sentinel Group, “a Seattle-based Christian research, media, and training agency dedicated to helping revival-hungry communities discover the pathway to societal transformation,” speaks about demons in the film.³ To make his point about how real and dangerous demons are he brings up a Buddhist practice in which the practitioner visualizes the detailed dissection and decomposition of their body and offers their flesh in a feast for demons. This meditation practice is actually not intended to summon or feed demons. It is simply a vivid visual means of helping the practitioner internalize Buddhist principles.

The Chick and the Dead discusses similar thirteenth-century Buddhist meditations called the Cemetery Contemplations or Maranasati meditations. These meditations use art showing all the stages of human decomposition to assist in reflecting on death, impermanence, and transience. Carla Valentine connected this practice to medieval art called transis. Transis focus on humans in transition between death and complete decay. They were intended to help Christians cope with events like the plague and reflect on the Biblical teaching “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). Thus Christian practice historically has not been far removed from Buddhist practice, and in effect George Otis, Jr. was calling a Christian practice demonic.

Juicy irony.

THE BOTTOM LINE: