Let’s call it Fail Of The Day! I am just back from the the gym and here is what happened while checking out at the counter: The boss was typing with a pen on the water dispenser’s touch screen as the normal touch screen interface obviously crashed. Of cause this attracted by immediate interest and I went over to him to figure out what operating system is running on that device. And now comes the part which really hurts: IT’S WINDtOWS, W-I-N-D-O-W-S!!! Get down everybody and search for cover, we are doomed! The human race has really made it this far: We are building water dispensers driven by a too insecure, probably never receiving patches, unstable operating system.

Not that I would feel much more comfortable with any other operating systems on water dispensers, but at least you could strip down Linux so far, that nearly no services are running and use framebuffer output instead of a X-Sserver which would minimize any attack vector nearly to zero.

But hey, if that is the way we let technology take control over our lives…