The SWON water-saving gadget for showers – an internet of things device. Photograph: SWON
M y eye was caught by a Kickstarter campaign for a gizmo called a SWON, described as “a connected conservation device for your shower”. You unscrew the shower head, screw on the SWON and then screw the head back on to it. From then on, water goes through the SWON before it reaches you. The Kickstarter campaign needs $50,000 to be pledged before the product can be made. Last time I checked, it had 75 backers and had raised pledges of $4,798.
Before consigning it to the “leading-edge uselessness” bin, I clicked on the link. This triggered a video spiel in which four twentysomething hipsters straight out of central casting (male, baseball caps, black T-shirts – you know the rigmarole) explain why the gizmo is such a good idea. Apparently, every minute a hipster spends in the shower uses 2.5 gallons of water. “This is why,” says the lead geek, “I created SWON, an IoT device that installs in under one minute.” It will save its users “hundreds of dollars” in utility costs, and between 4,000 and 10,000 gallons of water a year, which in drought-stricken Silicon Valley is obviously quite a big deal.
Impressive, eh? But wait a minute – did he say “an IoT device”? As in internet of things? Yep, he did. There’s a smartphone app that tells a hipster how long he’s spent in the cubicle and how much each shower costs in utility bills. He can set his desired shower time so that the gizmo beeps when his time is up. He can even specify the ideal water temperature so he knows when to step into the shower. “And lastly,” says the pitch man, “this is an IoT device, which means that it connects to your home’s Wi-Fi network and can connect with other connected devices.”
You do wonder, when you encounter this kind of thing, what these people have been smoking. In their eagerness to clamber on to the internet of things bandwagon, they appear to have checked their brains at the door. They have forgotten that there is no such thing as a totally secure networked device, with the result that our homes, offices and, increasingly, our streets are being equipped with networked devices that are chronically insecure, ie vulnerable to hacking.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the colossal DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that had driven Brian Krebs, one of the world’s foremost anti-cybercrime investigators, offline. “What was new about the Krebs attack,” wrote Bruce Schneier, a leading cybersecurity expert, “was both the massive scale and the particular devices the attackers recruited. Instead of using traditional computers for their botnet, they used CCTV cameras, digital video recorders, home routers and other embedded computers attached to the internet as part of the internet of things.”
What this attack demonstrates, Schneier says, is that the economics of the IoT mean that it will remain insecure unless government steps in to fix the problem. “This is a market failure,” he writes, “that can’t get fixed on its own.”
He’s right. Computer companies such as Apple and Microsoft go to great pains to try and ensure that the desktop and laptop computers they sell are protected from malware and that vulnerabilities are patched as soon as possible after they are discovered. But none of that happens with IoT devices, which are sold at razor-thin profit margins and are usually built by smallish Chinese and Taiwanese companies that don’t possess the expertise (or the incentive) to make them secure. What makes it even worse, though, is that most of the IoT devices currently installed in homes cannot be patched. As Schneier says: “The only way for you to update the firmware in your home router is to throw it away and buy a new one.”
So here we have a market failure on a global scale: billions of insecure, vulnerable networked devices whose owners or manufacturers have no incentive to fix. There’s only one institution that could deal with this – it’s called government, but at the moment no government seems to be interested in it.
Which brings us back to SWON. One doesn’t doubt the sincerity or idealism of the guys behind it. Showering is indeed an incredibly wasteful habit. Even in the UK it’s a problem. In 2011, for example, a Unilever survey showed that the average British shower lasts eight minutes and uses almost as much water and energy as the average bath. (For power showers you can double those numbers.)
Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem and it doesn’t involve installing a networked vulnerability in your home. Just spend less time in the shower. As Bill Clinton’s campaign managers used to say: it’s the economy, stoopid.
M y eye was caught by a Kickstarter campaign for a gizmo called a SWON, described as “a connected conservation device for your shower”. You unscrew the shower head, screw on the SWON and then screw the head back on to it. From then on, water goes through the SWON before it reaches you. The Kickstarter campaign needs $50,000 to be pledged before the product can be made. Last time I checked, it had 75 backers and had raised pledges of $4,798.
Before consigning it to the “leading-edge uselessness” bin, I clicked on the link. This triggered a video spiel in which four twentysomething hipsters straight out of central casting (male, baseball caps, black T-shirts – you know the rigmarole) explain why the gizmo is such a good idea. Apparently, every minute a hipster spends in the shower uses 2.5 gallons of water. “This is why,” says the lead geek, “I created SWON, an IoT device that installs in under one minute.” It will save its users “hundreds of dollars” in utility costs, and between 4,000 and 10,000 gallons of water a year, which in drought-stricken Silicon Valley is obviously quite a big deal.
Impressive, eh? But wait a minute – did he say “an IoT device”? As in internet of things? Yep, he did. There’s a smartphone app that tells a hipster how long he’s spent in the cubicle and how much each shower costs in utility bills. He can set his desired shower time so that the gizmo beeps when his time is up. He can even specify the ideal water temperature so he knows when to step into the shower. “And lastly,” says the pitch man, “this is an IoT device, which means that it connects to your home’s Wi-Fi network and can connect with other connected devices.”
You do wonder, when you encounter this kind of thing, what these people have been smoking. In their eagerness to clamber on to the internet of things bandwagon, they appear to have checked their brains at the door. They have forgotten that there is no such thing as a totally secure networked device, with the result that our homes, offices and, increasingly, our streets are being equipped with networked devices that are chronically insecure, ie vulnerable to hacking.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the colossal DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that had driven Brian Krebs, one of the world’s foremost anti-cybercrime investigators, offline. “What was new about the Krebs attack,” wrote Bruce Schneier, a leading cybersecurity expert, “was both the massive scale and the particular devices the attackers recruited. Instead of using traditional computers for their botnet, they used CCTV cameras, digital video recorders, home routers and other embedded computers attached to the internet as part of the internet of things.”
What this attack demonstrates, Schneier says, is that the economics of the IoT mean that it will remain insecure unless government steps in to fix the problem. “This is a market failure,” he writes, “that can’t get fixed on its own.”
He’s right. Computer companies such as Apple and Microsoft go to great pains to try and ensure that the desktop and laptop computers they sell are protected from malware and that vulnerabilities are patched as soon as possible after they are discovered. But none of that happens with IoT devices, which are sold at razor-thin profit margins and are usually built by smallish Chinese and Taiwanese companies that don’t possess the expertise (or the incentive) to make them secure. What makes it even worse, though, is that most of the IoT devices currently installed in homes cannot be patched. As Schneier says: “The only way for you to update the firmware in your home router is to throw it away and buy a new one.”
So here we have a market failure on a global scale: billions of insecure, vulnerable networked devices whose owners or manufacturers have no incentive to fix. There’s only one institution that could deal with this – it’s called government, but at the moment no government seems to be interested in it.
Which brings us back to SWON. One doesn’t doubt the sincerity or idealism of the guys behind it. Showering is indeed an incredibly wasteful habit. Even in the UK it’s a problem. In 2011, for example, a Unilever survey showed that the average British shower lasts eight minutes and uses almost as much water and energy as the average bath. (For power showers you can double those numbers.)
Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem and it doesn’t involve installing a networked vulnerability in your home. Just spend less time in the shower. As Bill Clinton’s campaign managers used to say: it’s the economy, stoopid.
