It's a scary world by A. Nonymus

It's a scary world out there. For ordinary folks to criminals wanting to create mischief, the revelations that everything we do is being reported, tracked, scanned, digitally tracked via CCTV, and stored, is eye opening, but do we really have to be careful of the microwave, the dishwasher, refrigerator, and coffee maker?

An article in Yahoo Finance on 9 Household Items That Can Track You by Adam Levin details how ordinary items in your home can be used to track and record data about you. Not only can they track you but "bad guys" can even affect medical implants like pace makers and insulin pumps which are all run by micro chips and can be hi-jacked using the same techniques used by the NSA.

If you want to take control of an area, country, state, city, town, street or home, all you need to do is to cut off the electricity, which cuts off the electronic toys and everyone is helpless. This information is used more by criminals or corporations with less than pure intent, but it can be used to apply pressure or threat of serious disruption to services from nearly any corner of the world.

What's happened to us?

And what is happening to all this data that is being gathered by governments and corporations?

Yottabyte: a descriptor of electronic storage capability.

I recently heard this word "yottabyte" and I looked it up. A yottabyte is a really big number equal to a bunch of "zettabytes" - basically it's a trillion terabytes!

The NSA super computer farms described by Robert Gelber in 2012 and more prominently in recent news, can hold multiple yottabytes of data. There are about a half dozen or more of these computer farms - all just happily mining everything! They also pick up all the information from your in-home devices since everything that travels electronically is swept up too. What time you make your coffee, times you use the microwave, when you wash the dishes, how often you do laundry - and what exact settings you use or prefer ... I mean ... where does it end?

One yottabyte can hold ALL the knowledge, books, communications, and all information and data ever created since the dawn of man.

'They' are serious about storing this information and I do mean ALL information.

Who thinks this stuff up?

I used to joke that we 'paranoids' can 'never be too sure', but I never conceived, even in my worst moments of paranoia, of anything on this scale! Even now I can barely grasp the concept, and it literally is breathtaking.

So, just give the microwave a knowing sly grin next time you nuke the java, or run the delicate cycle on your washing machine!


From Wikipedia Yottabyte:

"1 YB = 1000000000000000000000000bytes = 10008bytes = 1024bytes = 1000zettabytes = 1 trillion terabytes.;

"To store a yottabyte on terabyte sized hard drives would require a million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island.[1] If 64 GB microSDXC cards (the most compact data storage medium available to public as of early 2013) were used instead, the total volume would be approximately 2500000 cubic meters, or the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza."

[Editor's note: This story written by by A. Nonymus]