Heather Brooke
What the Refrigerator Saw
Future Crimes: A Journey to the Dark Side of Technology – and How to Survive It
By Marc Goodman
Bantam Press 452pp £20
It’s his editor I feel sorry for. ‘She worked weekends and nights, and even missed family gatherings in the cause of this book,’ says Marc Goodman. However, despite her overtime, Future Crimes remains a testament to turgid prose. The title is promising enough and there are some interesting and intriguing ideas about the way crime will morph as it adapts to the digital age. But a tougher editor would have pared this book down by half.
Most future crimes, according to Goodman, will involve hacking – hacking GPS, hacking software and hardware, hacking the systems that computers use to connect to other devices and the internet, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, radio-frequency identification and near-field communication. As we computerise cars, they’ll be hacked. Implantable medical devices will be hacked through insecure communications systems.
The most informative and thoughtful part of Future Crimes discusses our race towards the Internet of Things. Numerous devices, from thermostats to fridges, will soon be connected, insecurely, to the internet. This presents new dangers: ‘While connecting everything to a global Internet of Things may indeed have tremendous value, connecting everything insecurely does not. Before we add billions of hackable things and communicate with hackable data transmission protocols, important questions
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk