Don't Sell Your Apple Stock Just Yet...

[Anderton]

Interesting article about Apple's next paradigm, which UBS thinks will shift from mobile to "ambient," similarly to how Apple shifted from desktop to mobile (with the iPod being a transitional product between the two). Not sure where that leaves music and video programs, but you never know...

[Phil O'Keefe]

If that's really their plan (and they actually have a plan), then that makes sense. I prefer to think of it as ubiquitous computing as opposed to ambient though. YMMV.

[nat whilk II]

I'm not looking forward to the coming day when my hvac won't come on because it's software is incompatible with the latest Internet-Of-Everything operating system.

 

nat whilk ii

 

[Anderton]

But think of all the wonderful implications of having everything hooked up to the internet...

 

• Unemployment amongst mafioso will soar, because they'll only need one hacker to make cars crash into trees, instead of having bunches of people going out and cutting brake lines.
  
• Forget your house keys? Just find any teenager with any kind of phone, and they'll be able to hack into your electronic lock in minutes.
  
• When the net goes down, an international holiday will be declared because no one will be able to get anything done.
  
• Thousands of new excuses! "Sorry I was late, I forgot to update my clock to iOS 87" and "Well face recognition isn't perfect, it just looked like I was kissing your best friend."
  
• New forms of employment - like "PasswordPal LLC," where you hire someone to remember the passwords to all those pesky things that require a user name and password.
  
• "Uber Wars," where Uber drivers race to find customers first during huge Uber surges - only to find out Lyft hacked into the Uber app to make it seem like there was surge pricing, and you got a great deal from your Lyft driver.
  
• Personalized shopping experiences. Because every retailer knows everything there is to know about you, as soon as you walk into a store, a voice tells which aisle to hit to get what you need, and maps out the optimum time-saving route. Well, except when they want the route to go past today's Blue Light Special.
  

 

It'll be wonderful! Don't sell your Apple stock yet.

 

 

[MikeRivers]

Speaking of remembering passwords, there's a newly-named psychosis called "Security fatigue." It's when you have to change your password and the system tells you to use a stronger one, no, you need to use at least two upper case letters, six lower case letters, and three symbols. People just give up and stop using that account.

 

I have a friend who uses a password generator program and has about a 30 character quite random password for his WiFi router (because he rarely uses it and doesn't want anyone else to). Once when I was at his house, we wanted to connect my phone to it to go to a web site that he didn't want to expose his system to, and we tried three or four times to type it in without success, so we gave up. The combination of the complex password and unreliable typing on a touch screen did us in.

[Phil O'Keefe]

[techristian]

Not to mention power grid , banking and other services going down because of hacking.

 

Dan