“We think that consumers should at least be aware that there is the possibility that someone would listen in on their robot and take over their robot and have mobile eyes and ears in their home,” said Tamara Denning a PhD student who also worked on the paper. “They’re little computers.” It seems like a question ripped from the back of a cheap sci-fi novel: What happens when the robots are turned against us? |
| time to start paying some serious attention to the question of robot security |
| Not because they think robots are about to go all Terminator on us, but because the robots can already be used to spy on us |
| In a paper published Thursday the researchers took a close look at three test robots: the Erector Spykee, and WowWee’s RoboSapien and Rovio |
| “We were shocked at how easy it was to actually compromise some of these robots,” |
| Some of today’s robots operate as wireless access points, and Kohno’s team found that a nearby attacker could connect to someone else’s robot quite easily. |
| Robots such as the Rovio can also be controlled over the Internet, meaning that if a hacker could somehow sniff the victim’s user name and password, he could turn the robot into a remote-controlled spy machine |
 ASIMO
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 KISMET
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 NEXI
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 HANSON ROBOTICS
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 ECCEROBOT
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 SHIMON
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Spaceweaver is a thinker, futurist and writer living in future tense, mostly on the web. Check out his blogs at 
