I suspect that the mania will be tempered by the fact that it will be fairly easy to classify all sorts of projects, that you were already doing, as "IoT" if you wish to seem super cutting edge and so on without actually making any changes.

There's a vague sort of notion about what "IoT" is supposed to be, cobbled together from some mixture of analogies to SCADA and industrial control systems and science fiction; but it is broad and ill formed enough that all sorts of things that can connect to a network in some way, and any and all software associated with them, can be covered without stretching the truth too hard.

Plus, until the various squabbling factions decide how to actually make the 'things' interact usefully with each other(the current preference seems to be 'appoint either Google or Apple as Feudal Oligarch', with 'don't even bother, everything you buy will have its own terrible app!' as the runner up), the 'internet' bit is really just being used as a convenient remote access to the control panel(and for monetizing users, of course), which is much less hairy and challenging than actual interactions among things in some conveniently configurable and/or emergent-without-being-pathological way.

Any guesses about how many existing 'embedded system that connects to the internet in some fashion' projects were dubbed 'internet of things' in order to bring this new buzzphrase to prominence?

Yeah, yeah, I know, at some point the scale and pervasiveness of embedded connectivity may reach a point where it is different in kind, not just degree, from past use; but I submit that we aren't there yet by a nontrivial margin. For the moment, "IOT" seems to mean 'has a terrible smartphone app' or 'last model, you connected to the serial port to configure the system; when we revised the hardware it turned out that adding ethernet would be cheap and lots of customers wanted it, so we added it.'

And they use more burp and fart sound effects than all of Hollywood!

The part you're missing is selection. The harmful mutations either fail to reproduce altogether or they reproduce at a lower rate than the good ones. Actual experiments show that you can actually randomly mutate a program and if you have a good selection function, you can actually evolve new functionality.

The catch is that the evolution tends to 'find' really odd solutions.

I thought everyone liked the 3rd one the best of all the Prequels. I haven't seen it myself yet, but every single time I complain about the Prequels to someone and then I mention that I haven't seen the 3rd, they say that I missed the best one.

Seems like a perfectly cromulent report to me.

...A ZONE OF LAWLESSNESS!!@11!!1!11!!1!

Your move Uncle Sam.

Give up yours first, and then maybe we can talk about what Apple and Google are up to.

We are sufficiently more intelligent than microbial life, but would shit a brick if we found some.

Interesting story. One of the things I find most reassuring about the police service* in the UK is that they have long maintained, great consistency and at almost any rank, that good community relations are the heart of good policing. Officers who go out on patrol** have consistently and overwhelmingly said they do not want to routinely carry firearms, because that goes against the basic principle of policing by consent, and instead they tend to assume that the solution to local problems often starts with trying to improve those relations if they are failing. Concerns are also raised often by the police themselves about the balance between having officers patrolling in vehicles for rapid response and having officers literally walking the beat and actually making contact with the public. I get the feeling that police officers in certain other parts of the world have a very, very different attitude to their relationship with the public.

*I remember well that when the local police schools liaison officer visited us, he made a point of saying he didn't like the term "police force" because it had the wrong connotations before you even started to look at what the police did.

**It's curious how often police officers and politicians in some places refer to officers "on the front line", this being about as overt a military metaphor as I can think of (short of being "on the front line in the war against $ABSTRACT_NOUN" I suppose).

The key point from an ethical/legal point of view might be the warrant. The key safeguard from a practical point of view is that to plant those bugs someone has to actually visit the site and do something. This requires time, effort, and a risk of getting caught, which means it's potentially an option if you really do have a good reason to consider a specific individual to be a threat but it's prohibitively expensive to spy on everyone all of the time. As far as defending democracy is concerned, that is a much healthier balance than mass surveillance of the many by the few.

I argue that they don't need it. They need it the way a 5 year old will claim that chocolate deficiency is an actual medical problem.

I could use a Ferrari but the price is too high. They could use the ability to snoop into people's phones and PCs but the price is too high.

Like your DUI analogy, we tried the ignition interlock, but they hot wired it and got another DUI. Now they will have to walk (get it? LEGWORK!). Back in the before time, they brought down notorious mobsters and bank robbers by pounding the pavement. Ness didn't hack Capone's PC. Capone kept his books locked in a safe in his office The office was guarded by men with Tommy guns. Many crooks kept the real books in code.

That kind of depends on the stylesheets, pre-compiler style enforcement routines, and the fact that a shit-ton of corporate code is often improved incrementally by multiple authors.

'course, there's still the comments that you could use, but who does that?

That's what "git blame" is for...

/me ducks and runs like hell...

I agree that an update to 802.11 would be nice, unauthenticated management frames are a potentially nasty issue; but the rest of the argument is nuts.

All sorts of crimes can be committed by means of a speech act(indeed, many crimes are hard to commit without some means of communicating, fraud, extortion, ransoming hostages, etc.); but that doesn't give them constitutional protection, any more than the argument that your god demands blood sacrifice would provide protection against murder charges.

This is classic Locke stuff: a restriction aimed at restraining speech is illegitimate and illegal; but that does not imply that the mere use of speech to commit a given act necessarily covers that act under the protections given to speech. Same with religions. Restrictions targeted at a given exercise of religion are unacceptable; but this does not protect someone who breaks a law established for suitable unrelated reasons.

There's also the (only partially related) matter that 'radio interference' need not always imply "really loud white noise or other stochastic garbage at the appropriate frequency". That's often the easiest way, and for relatively primitive radio systems that have very few features to exploit it may be the best one; but if RF emissions specifically tailored to cause a radio system to fail aren't 'radio interference', what exactly is? Higher level attacks offer substantial advantages in power requirements, precision targeting, resistance to noise-mitigation mechanisms, and so on; but just because they aren't pure noise doesn't make them not interference.