13 Word Story: Internet Of Fangs
The internet of things and 3-D printing may soon combine to create a powerhouse of personal convenience. Kitchens that order groceries and cook them for their owners, printers that can print out many simple and some complex foods. It's beginning now -- pilot devices and services like instant-order buttons for staple items that work great until a kid gets hold of them or there's a glitch and a pallet of laundry detergent or flour sitting in front of your door next time you come home.

3-D printers are already printing simple candies and pasta and breakfast cereal in complex shapes and colors.

Add in a household robot and you have a kitchen that orders starch cartridges and a robot that prints pasta when you run low and cooks it for you. Very convenient -- or it may be in a few years.

There are, as I suggested above, some bugs in the process to work out.

Malware is a big one.

There has already been an internet of things ransomware incident, for example. Ransomware demands a cash payment or it will set your thermostat at 99 degrees F in 24 hours.

No reason it couldn't do the same to your 3-D printer or kitchen or household robot.

But not all malware is ransomware. Some of it is malicious for 'fun'. And occasionally it's really vicious.

There is malware that wrecks your computer -- which can set someone back some serious money, and cause less well-off households a serious crisis. If something like that hit our household PCs... well, I have no damn idea how my wife and I would do our online coursework from mobile phones, we couldn't afford to replace the PCs for a good long while, I'd have a hell of a time publishing anything here or anywhere else much less submitting short stories anywhere. And perhaps we could accomplish some of those things at a local library. I'd love to plug passwords that control my Patreon and Wordpress and Smashwords and Amazon and Google accounts into a public computer... you see my point.

Or more to the point of actually deadly danger, imagine malware disabling the brakes on your car mid-trip. (Here's a second article with a slightly different angle on it)

Or, as the internet of things becomes more pervasive, malware may affect your home in different ways, as in this thirteen word story.

With great convenience comes great peril, Peter Parker might say. Or something like that.

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S.A. Barton

creating Fiction (mostly SFF), poetry, visual art, blogs, aut-ad

S.A. Barton

creating Fiction (mostly SFF), poetry, visual art, blogs, aut-ad

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