| Hi, it's Mark Bergen. Early Monday morning, Joe Brown walked into his daughter's room and delivered his usual greeting, "Hey, Google, turn on the lights." He owns a Google smart speaker that lets him control the lights with his voice, and which, "when you're holding a kid with a bottle or a diaper full of crap, is usually pretty good," he said. But that morning, nothing happened. With the lights out, Brown grabbed a lantern. Cradling his daughter in one hand and his phone in the other, he tweeted: "I'm sitting here in the dark in my toddler's room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking... a lot right now." Brown was in the dark because Alphabet Inc.'s Google had suffered a widespread outage, bricking not only internet staples like Gmail and YouTube but an array of home devices that increasingly rely on the largest technology platforms. Elsewhere, a London technologist reported his alarm at being unable to use his Nest thermostat, a Google product. "It's when Google is down and you can't heat your home that you realize how scarily reliant you are on Google," he wrote. Similar outages from Amazon.com Inc. and others this year have taken out doorbells, Roomba vacuums and automatic cat feeders. Brown's tweet went viral, and has fueled dystopian worries around handing over basic utilities, including home security systems, to internet companies. Sci-fi Cassandras have long warned of a world where internet-connected lights, locks and utilities can be accidentally shutdown or hacked. It didn't help that Google's failure came the same morning as news of a sprawling cyber-attack by suspected Russian hackers. Eventually, Google clarified that its downtime came from an internal error, lasted under an hour and did not involve an attack. On Tuesday, Gmail went down again for a "significant subset" of users. Tech giants recognize the reputational, not to mention physical, costs of such problems. In February, after a long Nest outage, Kevin C. Tofel, a former Google marketer and technology writer, called on tech firms to develop "local" backup options—ways for internet-connected devices to talk to closer computer systems when cloud services fail. Google released a software solution for developers in April, but "adoption hasn't been quick or widespread," Tofel said in an email on Tuesday. For his part, Brown is no tech slouch. He spent years as a top editor at Wired before becoming editorial director of Hearst Autos. He said that only some, not all, of his lights work on voice control. And he keeps private information and a backup generator on separate networks. "We practice the best info-sec that we can for non-John le Carré novels," he said. After his dark morning, Brown still doesn't want to revert to the traditional finger-operated light switch. He'd prefer that mass-market smart lights get better. "It's time to create a system that works without the internet," he said. He's aware that for some extra time and money he could buy a version that does this, but it's a pandemic and he has a newborn. For now, "I'd rather just turn on a lantern," he said. Besides, Twitter still worked. —Mark Bergen | 
Post a Comment