Disclaimer: Due to a lack of originality over at Google, it’s difficult to anthropomorphize Google Assistant, so our story will be limited to Siri, Alexa and Cortana.

Secondary Disclaimer: The horror begins now!

As we hit Halloween, I couldn’t help but think about monsters and. Luckily, I have  Greg Hyland and Glenn Kay’s magnificent Monster Atlas sitting next to me to read through. Leatherface, Chucky, Candyman, Jason and Freddy. Wendigo, Yeti, Jersey Devil, Audrey II, Blair Witch and The Thing. Michael Myers, Victor Crawley, Cthulhu, Toxic Avenger and Gremlins.

Whether you’re talking myth, cryptid or literary and movie monsters, we know most of these names. They appear in stories that we tell around campfires, movies that appear in cinema and on TV and stories we read under the covers by flashlight. One of my personal favorite appearances is Cryptozoic Man, the comic series from Comic Book Men stars Bryan Johnson and Walt Flanagan.

I’ve also spent a lot of timing thinking about cyber security, particularly IoT security. It was the topic of a talk I gave recently at SecTor in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Security isn’t a subject that people outside of tech take seriously. Even within tech fields, startups, like those found on Kickstarter, fail to properly invest in security. This leaves us with what should be an inability to trust IoT devices.

Instead, we freely install listening and recording devices in our homes and provide criminals, the government and others with a nearly open path to watch or monitor us. Earlier this year, Craig Young pointed out how flaws in even the largest companies’ products can be used against us with the disclosure of flaws in Google Home and Chromecast that can leak a user’s location.

If you take these two topics and the mind of a crazy (Read more...)