Zombie Sex Toys

Imagine you’re a necromancer (trust me, there are boob jokes coming, I swear). Your ultimate goal is to raise a terrifying army of the undead right? But nobody can just do that straight off the bat. I mean if it were that easy we’d be swamped in apocalyptic hordes.

It stands to reason that before you can raise a terrifying horde, you need to start a little smaller… by raising an annoying army of the undead. You know, a horde of animated corpses that, instead of killing, mutilating and dismembering people, will just sort of, get in the way. You wake up in the morning and you can’t find your car keys, why? Because the annoying army of the undead have hidden them. You go through to the kitchen and they’ve used all the milk, forcing you to have dry cornflakes… you get the idea.

That’s what I thought of the first time I encountered an “Internet of Things” device. The “IoT” (as it’s referred to by utter bell-ends) is the idea of having lots and lots of objects and appliances all connected to the internet so they can talk to each other, to you and to relevant outside parties. So, your fridge spots when a zombie has slugged the last of your semi-skimmed and orders a fresh pint from the milkman (do we still have milk men? Where am I? What year is it? Who stole all my clothes?). It’s potentially a revolutionary technology. It’s also, I think it’s fair to say, utterly shit at the moment in terms of cyber security.

So when I first saw an IoT device (a light-bulb in a friend’s living room) I immediately assumed that hackers will, at some point, gain complete control over it. Which is probably fine. I mean what’s the worst they can do, turn it to a really obnoxious shade of yellow? turn it on in the middle of the night hoping to startle you as you make a late-night pee run? It’s the annoying army of the undead, but in cyber terms (do people still use the word “cyber”? What century am I living in, the twentieth?)

But this is the modern world, and the great thing about technology is that it’s only a matter of turning your back on it for a second and then BAM! somebody’s put knobs on it (and probably, boobs too). Thus, it wasn’t entirely surprising for me when the first I heard about the We-Vibe IoT vibrator was in a news report that simultaneously said it was hackable, oh, and that it was harvesting a hefty amount of data on its use to send back to its makers. The full article is here.

So the zombies have crawled into bed and are taking notes and, potentially, grabbing a quick fumble when your back’s turned. Now, I’m not saying the horrific sapient toaster apocalypse is upon us, but this could be how it all begins, not with a bang, but a whimper.

A hot, sexy breathless whimper…