It's snowing and Google is down!
Good morning, internets. I hope you’re not locked into (or out of) your house, that your lights are working, and that your school district hasn’t just cancelled classes due to Googlefail. Also that your fridge and heat work.
I’ve been looking with a jaundiced eye at the Cloud Everything movement (I use a cloud service. I also keep multiple local backups of everything that matters). Also at networked home automation, the system that my friend and colleague Cory Doctorow calls The Internet Of Things That Should Not Be On The Internet.
I even wrote a story about it for the MIT Press a couple of years ago, which you can read here.
This current situation, with “foreign government actors” (i.e., some folks in a cube farm in St. Petersburg) hacking into FireEye and the FUCKING TREASURY DEPARTMENT (where they were apparently romping about at will for months) is super scary. I am not confident it’s not linked to Google being down this morning.
(I’m not saying it IS, and I’m not a cybersecurity expert at all. What I’m saying is that the Putin Plan for keeping the US out of his hair is to feed chaos and keep us fighting each other as much as possible. I wrote something about this recently, too. )
Anyway, it does seem likely that we’ve got more of the same forthcoming.
And now excuse me, but speaking of chaos, the Butterscotch Bandit seems to have stolen a head of garlic from the kitchen counter and is chasing it around the floor, so I’m going to go deal with that.
Best,
Bear