"me.exe": Mind Hacking, the Next Tech Frontier -

"me.exe": Mind Hacking, the Next Tech Frontier

There is no doubt that brain-computer interfaces will arrive - because they're already here, in simple forms, and we'll have movie-style mind links within a decade at most. Which makes the movie idea of mind-hacking (as in Ghost In The Shell) an extremely serious problem. Never mind how you keep all your most important files up there (little things like "me.exe") - if it gets damaged, unless you're a Buddhist there's no Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

The risk comes from the combination of the very best of technologized humanity with the worst: when medical experts and mindologists are building devices to let paralyzed patients communicate with the world, they shouldn't be worrying about some scumbag hacking the system for a joke. If you don't think people would do that, welcome to the internet and don't give anyone any personal information. As the technology advances out of medicine and into mass media (as it inevitably will) it'll only get worse.

If you use the internet you know how much damage someone can do to you with just an image, and that's just visual meme injection - mental malware a whole new world of sabotage. Viruses propagate because of exploits in existing system - every copy of a program by definition suffers the same flaws, so a single exploit can spread through the entire network. Every mind is different, however, with even the most basic functions slightly differently mapped in every head so you don't have the same rapid-infection risk - but you do have a far more chance of malicious code interacting in unexpected ways and simply breaking part of your soul while it's in there, with no way to restore it.

The new neologism is "neurosecurity", an excellent addition to the language (which has only been used in infinity-billion sci-fi stories already). If nothing else, you should be terrified of a cerebral SirCam - imagine a virus pulling a random thought from your head and telling everyone you know.