The Snarchitect

As the Internet of Things gains acceptance and scale, the security risks increase. Keep an eye on your refrigerator, it could be spamming you.

Over the period stretching from Dec. 23, 2013 to Jan. 6, 2014, a group of hackers used malware installed on over 100,000 devices to send out 750,000 virus-bearing spam emails. Botnets like this are nothing new. What raised eyebrows was that many of the devices in question weren’t computers or even smartphones. The culprits were things that most people didn’t think were even capable of getting infected—televisions, home entertainment centers, and even a refrigerator.
When cybersecurity firm Proofpoint revealed evidence of the attack early last year, it served as a serious wake-up call. Virtually anything connected to the Internet has the potential of being hacked, no matter how unlikely.

“Fog” computing is so 2014. Welcome to mist computing.

Cisco’s differentiator is that the analytics tools won’t just be located in the core or edge of a network. Cisco will be pushing analytics all the way out to the extreme edge of a network by having the tools built into its network devices. If the core can be thought of as the cloud and the edge considered the fog, one could think of the extreme edge as being “mist” computing – a more dispersed version of the fog, which is a dispersed version of the cloud.
Cisco’s thesis, which I believe is correct, is that analytics is best done as close to the data as possible. Take for example a retail environment. If the store collects information on a customer and wants to analyze the data and take action, why should that data be backhauled all the way to a cloud resource thousands of miles away, or a fog resource hundreds of miles away? Even tens of miles is too far. Instead, the analytics should be done in the store. This means decisions can be made in seconds instead of hours or even days.

The times and distances for space travel are not very compatible with human lifetimes. So, it kind of makes sense that the intelligent life forms that we may encounter in the universe will be digital.
If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.
Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds,” written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

From: motherboard.vice.com