Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Why the Internet was created is well known: back in the Cold War era, the American military was terrified at the prospect of the USSR launching simultaneous nuclear attacks on the HQ’s of all the American military installations, thereby knocking out the ability of the US to retaliate. Thinking in the capitalists’ way, the US decided to create a network that was completely decentralized . Knocking out an entire network that was decentralized was considered impossible. At least some parts would survive the Soviet attack; and they would retaliate. Recently, a massive attack took down many popular Internet sites (Amazon, Twitter, Netflix etc) in almost the entire US . Brian Krebs writes : “(It now emerges that the attack was) launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders.” How the attack works using such network enabled devices is scary: “(It) scours the Web for IoT devices protected by littl...

When the Volkswagen emission scandal broke out last year, it brought out the dangers of more and more software being put in the good old automobile. But that was a case of deliberately writing software to fool the emission test. Then there’s Tesla, the company that made electric cars sexy, not just a car for those who care about the environment. How extensively its cars use software can be best described by these lines from Ashlee Vance’s book : “While the owner slept, Tesla’s engineers tapped into the car via the Internet connection and downloaded software updates. When the customer took the car out for a spin in the morning and found it working right, he was left feeling as if magical elves had done the work.” Or as Bruce Schneier wrote: “A modern car isn't an automobile with a computer in it. It's a computer with four wheels and an engine.” It does sound like magic, right? Until the software gets hacked, that is. Then we realize Paul Sherwood’s point on ...