Sad, sexy, or self-sufficient, your robot overlords await

This year’s CeBIT has come to a close. I don’t go anymore — I can’t justify the jet lag, and I hate lurching through a convention hall in a sleep-deprived haze or being wide awake at 4 a.m. arguing with Joachim the sullen night clerk. Instead I contact one of my European minions, members of the Cringing Corps. They’re mostly retirees with newspaper backgrounds (read: dinosaurs), but they’re cheap, they come through in a clinch, and they can drink any startup punk under the table with nary a burp.

While they were minioning about, I was trying to recover from the shock of Vice Admiral Michael Rogers, incoming NSA witch doctor and Grand Poobah, standing up in front of Congress and exclaiming that the only reform agenda he needed to worry about was better PR. So Edward Snowden was really a creative publicity campaign that went horribly awry? Whatever, it was the catalyst for an epic scotch binge that may have led to the purchase of land in middle Bali, future site of my retirement home/eight-man tent. I’m too scared to log into amex.com and find out.

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But it seems the NSA wasn’t kidding around. Only this morning, it leaked the news, as part of the now-obvious Snowden PR plot, that it’s been pirating pre-pirated zombie botnet PCs for years to further the interests of national security. This Quantum project — presumably named for the quantum leap forward it represents in not giving a crap what the rest of us think — appears to be based on the idea it’s not stealing when it’s already stolen. Best-case scenario: The NSA is Robin Hood. Worst case: Your PC has been hijacked twice, sending spam by day and parsing terrorist-related keywords in teenage Facebook posts by night. Check your electric bill — your CPU was probably smoking. But I digress.

After five days without word, my CeBIT pygmies made contact late last night from various barrooms and drunk tanks to share the wonders they’d witnessed this past week between buckets of beer and plates of currywurst, which apparently makes Mexican drinking water look healthy. Bathroom breaks aside, they managed to uncover some CeBIT trends and nuggets.

Automatons for the people

First is the topic I haven’t been able to shake for the last several months: robotics. Hannover has apparently been lousy with robots for the last week, from speech-givers with sad clown visages to independent bionic limbs all the way to disturbingly hot pole-dancing bots. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister David Cameron were at the show, oohing and aahing with feigned interest over machines that would soon wipe out their labor forces, economies, and chances at re-election. Both shook hands with a few of the automatons — ironic in Merkel’s case because I’m pretty sure she’s already been replaced by an android.

Encryption everywhere

The aforementioned Snowden campaign also loomed over Hannover, with every third vendor, visitor, and janitor displaying some kind of NSA-proof gadget or technology. Phones with drop-down menus of exotic encryption schemes; PCs that accept fingerprints, vein patterns, facial recognition, and body odor — all present and accounted for (and all true, though that last one is still in the research stages). Alas, my minions and their currywurst diets were unable to test out the body odor detectors, but there’s always next year.

The encryption schemes sound great at first blush, until you realize users must employ the same chat/email/file-sharing app at both ends and possess some understanding of encryption. Thus, you can realistically expect about 10 people in the United States to use them and, in the process, fast-track their road to a thorough waterboarding with currywurst-infused H2O imported from south of the border.

Big data and hot air

Big data made a splash not just as a technology but as a decoration, too. Apparently, the entire 54,000-square-foot convention space was surrounded by a visual surface that illustrated big data in its real-time bit- and byte-shifting glory, which was either beautiful to see or excruciatingly painful, depending on your hangover level. The minions were never able to figure out exactly what kind of big data was being represented, though one postulated it might be showing up-to-the-second changes in Zuckerberg’s comic book and action figure collections.

Maybe the most popular CeBIT conversation involved the Internet of things (iThings), a phenomenon both mysterious and pervasive, like the Force or the Kardashians. This wonderfully vague term was exactly what Merkel and Cameron needed to deliver passionate promises that ensured each country would lead the world in building connected appliances, automobiles, and preschool fuzzy toys. Naturally, promoting any responsible security measure between babbling iThings wasn’t much discussed, just all the glorious dollar-, pound-, and euro-generating possibilities you find when a stuffed dog and a Volkswagen talk to each other — fahrvergwüfen over IPv6.

By all accounts, this week in Hannover was an epic tech fest that broke new ground in debutante technologies, political fist shaking, and culinary cataclysms. I’m sorry I missed it.

This article, “Sad, sexy, or self-sufficient, your robot overlords await,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.