Many of these pacemaker/defrib devices have been implanted into bodies whose brains are degenerating at an exponential rate. Visit any Alzheimer’s care unit and you will see people who are essentially only alive because of these devices.  Families do not have the ability to turn OFF these devices. 

If you want to get a real feel for what a zombie really looks like; visit any long-term care facility filled with people who have severe Alzheimers.  Alive, only because of the steady shock to their hearts provided by that machine.

These facilities charge anywhere from 5k to 12k per MONTH for the care provided; now it’s an economic issue.

As an aside, I’ve heard the rumor that passing a very strong magnet over the chest of someone with this kind of device will booger it up enough to render inoperable.

Their experience of malware is that it is mysterious and unstoppable AND a universal constant.

Telling the person who’s got three unwanted toolbars and who’s World of Warcraft account keeps getting hacked that the same asshats that do that sort of thing to their desktop could do that to their grandfather’s heart is very believable.

Will armies of people tear into the code?  Probably not.  Will a few security folks and nerds with giant batteries attached to their heart take an interest?  Probably.

If nothing else, it encourages non-shitty coding practices.  It is one thing to write bad code and hide it.  It is another thing to write bad code for a life critical device and then have everyone be able to look at it.

If the one person you want to kill is the president of a rival country, or CEO of a rival company, it could get very movie-plot plausible (which is to say, not usually plausible, but occasionally freakily prescient).

I’m not sure if I back Lanier’s attitude that the tech angle “supports an illusion of ethics,” but the contrast he draws (which is probably a problematic analogy in ways that don’t occur to me right now) seems to illustrate a certain amount of paranoia we have toward the digital that we don’t have toward, say, the mechanical. Like, why aren’t blog posts going up about the remote, but real, possibility of people poisoning the machines at your local laundromat, but they are going up about the remote, but real, possibility of someone flashing a virus to your pacemaker?

Governments, corporations, and bigots.

One of the biggest myths that people seem to have about open source software is that there are thousands of qualified people out there reading through it for no other reason than because they think it’s an interesting way to spend their evenings. This is not the case.

That said, I am not all that terrified.  Body hacks are scary in theory, but in practice, it is about as scary as some dude wandering around poisoning people.  You need a combination of sadism,technical capability, and lack of fear of consequences that is just so damned rare it isn’t worth worrying your pretty little head over so long as there is cancer, heart attacks, and cars driven by your fellow humans.  

A smart sadistic human with no fear of consequences could do far worse than whack a few pace markers.  With access to just the chemicals I have at work I can think up at least a couple of ways to murder a pile of people in very terrible ways that would be very hard to trace to me.  Lone killers are just not worth the bother of worrying about. Hell, I think DHS should be tossed in the trashcan because organized terrorist are not worth worrying about either. What can I say though, I am a crazy fellow who only thinks you should worry about things that stand at least a slim chance in hell of killing you.  Fear cancer, heart attacks, and cars.

…but who wants to kill a bunch of old people they don’t know?

Well, you clearly don’t live in Palm Springs or Fort Lauderdale.

Sounds like the next caper movie to me!

But still.  Yeeagh.