I cannot wait for some type of top-down pressure to force IoT developers to take security seriously. The movement has been pushed into overdrive thanks to insane levels of competition where you either crush your R&D into the smallest breakneck period or you live to see your creation being sold for half of what your budget can allow by other firms lifting your efforts while you're still at the workbench.[1]
I've been getting cozy with Shenzhen-based hardware accelerators for the past year as part of a personal side-venture and I have not seen a group so pressured to deliver a product as fast as possible with security being a casual afterthought. To get a decent taste of what it's like, I wholeheartedly recommend WIRED's Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen and the companies that dwell there.[2] Their struggles for ephemeral market-share are endemic of the entire community that's taken over embedded hardware for the past few years.
The saddest aspect of it all is that this market competition isn't benefiting the consumer. IoT devices are coming out of the factories poorly engineered, badly maintained for far too short of a time, and as we've learned from this attack, being used as vectors for network intrusion and distributed censorship. Even arduino founder Massimo Banzi's widely-lauded IoT Manifesto[3] fails to approach any comprehensive statement regarding a dev's responsibility to build in some level of security to their devices.
It just isn't part of the fast-and-loose culture that has been bred by trend-setting companies with unlimited budgets making bad decisions from the very start.[4] In addition, the if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em attitude the West has taken towards churning out hardware devices as fast as they can before jumping to the next IoT piece of junk before the ripoffs can hurt them is really disappointing as it prevents any considerable effort from going into a device pre-and-post release.
All in all, the IoT community is not going to change their priorities unless someone very powerful forces them to and it can't happen soon enough.
Dynamic fabric is something I'd love to see more artists working with.
So far the most impressive example I've seen is ZEITGUISED's geist.xyz: https://vimeo.com/150824660 Undulating impossible fabrics with photo-realistic shaders (and a soundtrack that makes my head hurt).
It's definitely an experimental art film but it feels more like an impressive tech demo for what they've been able to accomplish with textile simulation. Sadly like most art pieces, there's very little in the way of technical on how they pulled off such interesting stuff.
I've been getting cozy with Shenzhen-based hardware accelerators for the past year as part of a personal side-venture and I have not seen a group so pressured to deliver a product as fast as possible with security being a casual afterthought. To get a decent taste of what it's like, I wholeheartedly recommend WIRED's Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen and the companies that dwell there.[2] Their struggles for ephemeral market-share are endemic of the entire community that's taken over embedded hardware for the past few years.
The saddest aspect of it all is that this market competition isn't benefiting the consumer. IoT devices are coming out of the factories poorly engineered, badly maintained for far too short of a time, and as we've learned from this attack, being used as vectors for network intrusion and distributed censorship. Even arduino founder Massimo Banzi's widely-lauded IoT Manifesto[3] fails to approach any comprehensive statement regarding a dev's responsibility to build in some level of security to their devices.
It just isn't part of the fast-and-loose culture that has been bred by trend-setting companies with unlimited budgets making bad decisions from the very start.[4] In addition, the if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em attitude the West has taken towards churning out hardware devices as fast as they can before jumping to the next IoT piece of junk before the ripoffs can hurt them is really disappointing as it prevents any considerable effort from going into a device pre-and-post release.
All in all, the IoT community is not going to change their priorities unless someone very powerful forces them to and it can't happen soon enough.
[1] http://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-p...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY (This is over an hour long but very worth it)
[3] https://create.arduino.cc/iot/manifesto/
[4] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/06/nest-4-0-firmware-battery-... & again in 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-gl... I'm not going to even touch the dropcam and IoT smoke detector.