WARNING: your Coffeemaker is infected! Quarantine?

(The original was written on May 12, 2006. Part of an online exam was to write something about the future of the Internet from one’s perspective. This one has been slightly edited.)

I imagine everything to be connected to the Internet in the near future. And i mean everything. Not just your typical PDAs, or those ultra-expensive, yet ultra-cool all-in-one cellphones. I mean common household things like a coffeemaker, a refrigerator, or even your Nike cross-trainers. Soon, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone from her office is browsing and managing the contents of her refrigerator (the contents of which are being represented in 3D in a dazzling array of colorful icons reminiscent of the traditional Windows desktop) as if that refrigerator were a GMail account. 12 kilobytes of pizza and a “folder full of Coke.” That would be the day.

But then again let’s face it – I don’t want some “hacker” to know that I haven’t cleaned my shoes for over 2 years. Imagine your embarrassment when suddenly Google, complete with your full name and photo, points to your shoes’ “MAC address” as one of the smelliest and dirtiest in the planet. Yes, for it to be able to connect to the Net and download Service Pack 11.3b, your shoes must log on to identify itself. Obviously, for it to be able to do that it would need its owner’s identity and credit info so you’ll have to provide an authentic one – no aliases – as paper money by then would be synonymous to dinosaurs. Everything will be through credit cards or electronic money watchamacallits! Not much privacy, huh? With the likely advent of such things, privacy would certainly be a problem. Even now, viruses and worms are so prevalent, I don’t think these problems would be contained by that time. Then you would also need an anti-virus software before you could brew a pot of coffee. Ha!

Things are crazy now on the Internet. It would even be crazier once everything is connected. I just hope that half of these things will be running on an Open-source platform like Linux. At least Bill Gates won’t have to own the world’s coffeemakers.