From the comments, on cyberattacks

As someone who does software and hardware, I don’t think we are anywhere near the point where a mix of hardware and software in everyday things will give us anything more than sorrow. We are already seeing rather scary things with the Internet of Things: Denial of service attacks larger than anything we’ve ever seen, because networked software is often faulty, and selling it only in hardware means vulnerabilities stay forever. It’s not just that someone can take over your CCTV camera, or the system controlling your lightbulbs, but that their computing power can be used to attack any business or individual at any time.

We have seen attacks this week that were large enough to shut down any online payment processor. For instance, imagine that the set of people with the resources for launching those attacks wanted to stop Hillary from taking online donations for as long as possible: I’d not bet against them being able to do that for a couple of weeks at the least, and that’s today. Every day more devices with weak security and no updates are sold. We see records of attack strength beaten every month: Akamai has trouble handling them today. The more devices we sell, the bigger the weapon we are handing out, and we are lacking any mechanisms to increase security because incentives are all wrong.

That is from Bob.