The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

Sometimes leads provided a minor fact to help in the investigation.

Sometimes they were a waste of time.

And sometimes they took you straight to the perp's front door.

Mel Cooper was back in Rhyme's Central Park West parlor.

Sorry, Amelia, Rhyme thought. After the discovery of the potential new defendant, I need him more than you do. We'll argue later.

Evers Whitmore was present too.

The three men were staring into a dark portion of the room, where Juliette Archer sat in front of a computer, verbally commanding her computer to do her bidding.

"Up three lines. Right two words. Select. Cut..."

So very difficult to live life without shortcuts, Rhyme thought. Being disabled put you in a very nineteenth-century world. Everything took longer. He himself had tried eye recognition, voice recognition, a laser-emitting device attached to his ear that activated portions of the screen. He had returned to the old-fashioned way, using his hand on a joystick or touchpad. This was clumsy and slow but the technique approached normal, and Rhyme had finally mastered it. He saw that Archer needed to settle into an artificiality that was right for her.

In a few minutes she wheeled about and joined them. On the screen nearby were the fruits of her work but she began to report verbally on what she'd found, without glancing toward the notes glowing on the monitors.

"Okay. CIR Microsystems. Vinay Chaudhary's company. It's the number one manufacturer of smart controllers in the country. Revenues of two billion annually."

"My, that's helpful," the understated Whitmore said.

"The controller's basically a small computer with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection or cellular one mounted in the machine or appliance it controls. It's really pretty simple. Say it's mounted in a stove. The controller is online with the stove manufacturer's cloud server. The homeowner has an app on his smartphone to communicate with the stove from anywhere in the world. He logs into the server and can send or receive signals to and from the controller--to shut the stove off or on. The manufacturer also is online with the stove separately, to collect data from the controller: usage information, diagnostics, maintenance scheduling, breakdowns--it can even be alerted to burned-out lights in the oven."

Cooper asked, "Any problem with the DataWise Five Thousand controller in the past? Activating when it shouldn't?"

"None that I could find but I was playing Google Roulette. Give me some time and I might find something more."

"So how did it open the panel?" Rhyme mused. "A stray signal ordered the controller to open the door, something in the mall itself. Or from the cloud? Or did the DataWise just short out and sen

d the open command itself?"

Archer looked up from the computer and said, "Have something here. Take a look at this. It's from a blog about two months ago. Social Engineering Second-ly. That's 'second' as in the unit of time, I think. Updated every second. As opposed to Monthly or Weekly. Doesn't quite work."

Rhyme said, "Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good."

He and the others read:

INDULGENCE = DEATH?

THE DANGERS OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT)

Will consumer indulgence be the death of us?

From self-foaming soap to portion-controlled, calorie-specific meals delivered to consumers' homes in time for dinner, manufacturers are increasingly marketing products geared to take over people's lives. The justification is that they are helping busy professionals and families save time--and in some instances money--and make their lives easier. In reality, many of these items are simply desperate attempts to fill the pockets of companies facing markets saturated with competing products or in which brand differentiation has all but vanished.

But there's a dark side to the convenience factor.

I'm speaking of what is called the Internet of Things, or IoT.

Thousands of appliances, tools, heating and air-conditioning systems, vehicles and industrial products sport internal computer controls that allow consumers to access them remotely. These have been around for some years in the form of home security systems, in which video cameras are, in effect, mini computers connected to your Wi-Fi or cellular service. When you're away, you log onto an Internet site--supposedly secure--and make sure no burglars are prowling through your living room or to keep an eye on the babysitter.

Now the proliferation of these "embedded devices" (that is, containing computer circuitry) is increasing exponentially.

They help us save money and make our lives so much more convenient.

Now you can turn your oven on from a remote location, turn your furnace up when you're on your way home, tell your door to unlock for an hour when the plumber's expected (and watch him at work on your security camera!), start your car remotely on below-zero days... How convenient! What could be wrong with that?