Just about everything you can imagine is going to be Internet-capable soon, from your toaster to your car to the equipment your hospital uses.

And you know what's amazing? Nobody, and I do mean nobody, takes security seriously. You think Flash is bad on security? How about a car that lets the radio tune in to the Internet--and allows an attacker on the Internet who knows the radio's IP address to control the car's brakes? How about drug pumps that listen on FTP ports and allow remote commands with nary even a password? Or maybe tea kettles that can be loaded with malware?

First, the hospital drug pump. My girlfriend was attached to one of these when she went in for surgery two years ago. It's network enabled, can be accessed directly from anywhere in the hospital's network, and has no security at all.

And the car? A design flaw in new Jeeps means if you know the vehicle's entertainment system IP address, you can remotely take over the car's engine and brake controls through the Uconnect network. I have no idea why someone thought it would be a good idea to connect the computer that runs the engine and brakes directly to the computer that runs the entertainment system. It must've seemed reasonable at the time.

I love the idea of the Internet of Things. I weep for humanity's inability to learn from security mistakes of the past.

I think too many things get implemented without anyone asking the "What if…..?" question enough times….if they ask it at all.

Design flaw??? How is it a design flaw when security was never a consideration, much less requirement in the design?

I could say a lot more about that, but I don't want to bore everyone else while I climb up on my soapbox.

There is a generally held misconception that is too expensive to do. In truth the opposite is the real truth, but until organizations and management have tried it they steadfastly refuse to believe it. As a result the economic incentives are heavily rigged against asking those questions.

You've previously pointed out that "design flaws" necessitate paid upgrades.

Definitely and for too many managers consider that to be desirable goal. But the rewards system is skewed all along the line. For example software developers are far too often rewarded for their heroic efforts to quickly patch out a defect that should have been designed out long before the first line of code was written. The heroes get the bonuses and promotions while the developers who worked normal job hours and delivered code free of design or any other flaws are in danger of being laid off because they were not seen making a heroic effort!

To quote the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz, "If I were king of the jungle…" My consolation is, in my role as an instructor in industry and university settings, I may have planted some seeds in the minds of my students that hopefully took root and will bloom in the future.

I would consider the "design flaw" to be not the lack of security (that's an implementation flaw), but the fact that the radio can even talk to the engine control and ABS computers at all!

OK, the elephant in the room has been decloaked.
Now ... what can the consumer do about 'foiling' the intrusions? Only practical/practicable solutions should be proffered.
• How do I get my refrigerator off-line?
• How do I prevent my toaster from immolating me?
• How do I guarantee that my drug pump won't be hacked by an evil-doer?
• How do I block interference with my motor vehicle's drive-by-wire system(s)?
(And "Go off the grid" and "Live in a cave" aren't viable options.)

I wonder if separating the systems meant there would be some small incremental cost. If so, it would be like a digital version of the Pinto gas tank. It might have been done differently but, when the cost per vehicle was multiplied with the expected number of sales, the decision leaned toward protecting the bottom line.

I have to assume that the moment someone said "We're going to connect the radio to the brakes", even the person in the organization with the least automobile or computer literacy would be moved to incredulity.

That is a marketing feature! How else can the car send periodic emails to the vehicle owner advising them that needed service intervals have been reached, miles driven, fuel consumption, download firmware updates to the various systems, etc? Owners pay extra for the feature and monthly subscription costs for the service.

Some owners be dumb as stumps. You can tell by the way they drive too.

I think a lot of it starts with a "we'll worry about that later" or "it's harmless (in its present application)". Then time passes, and no one worries about it later because "surely they addressed basic security in vers 1.0?", or the project gets moved to a new group and then another, and at that point it suddenly becomes an internet-facing app that you suddenly really don't want anyone outside your little circle to have access to.

Call it lazy, call it cheap, call it efficient, call it uncoordinated, call it inconsistent, call it discontinuity, call it anything you like, stick any label on it you like. It's not going away because there's no accountability at the source.

….which would tempt me to call it bad management. However, I'm quite sure the management would hide behind: "We made a bottom line decision because that's what our shareholders demand."

I'm sure that's the case at least some of the time, but again at least some of the time it's not.

You might be able to trace that meningitis outbreak two weeks back to a driveway koolaid stand in the burbs, but at the time it was neither a consideration nor a concern, preventative steps were completely nonexistent, and it certainly wasn't intentional. And even if you could go back in time two weeks, could you really make any reasonable and acceptable policy changes that would have done anything to prevent it? "OK kids pack it up. We don't want to risk you creating a meningitis epidemic!" "You WHAT???"

Hindsight is 20-20. Whenever you're going to scrutinize actions taken in the past, it's essential to consider that they didn't know then what you know now. Anything you propose has to be with the understanding that it needs to be a reasonable and acceptable change, given the information that was available at the time. Otherwise you can't justify the change now for the future, let alone criticize the actions of the past.

Buy old stuff. Seems like a whole lot of Constitutional privacy is gone.

I first had concerns about this when I found out cops could stop a stolen car by slowing it down with some kind of built in device in new cars.

Think about someone hacking into an airplane's navigation systems rather than your car radio.

OwnStar

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/08/...s-virtual-keys/

VJ Day anniversary has come and gone, and I'm still waiting for suggestions, re the items in Post #35333 above.

Technology marches onward. I recall many years ago the bad guys had receivers that read the transmitted code when people locked car doors. Then, while the folks were away, the crooks opened the cars and rifled them. But now….yikes!

As a person who keeps things as long as they work well, it will be a while before I have a vehicle exposed to this new mischief (beyond door control). Meanwhile, and hopefully, technology will have solved the issue.

1. Assuming the use of modern devices and going for the highest level of certainty of protection…
   1. Disconnect all WiFi modems, routers, or other devices that can create a WiFi network and connect you computer to the internet using a wired ethernet connection
   2. To keep out signals from neighbor's or malefactor's WiFi devices, create a "Faraday" cage of your residence by lining the floors, ceiling, walls and covering the doors and windows with heavy gauge metal foil (copper is best but ruinously expensive and heavy gauge aluminum can work). Welding the strips of foil together to create an unbroken electrical shield and then connecting the shield to an earth ground.
   3. To protect from signals coming in though the electrical wiring, install a motor/generator system to provide power inside your shielded area. (That is an electric motor powered by the public power source driving a shielded generator that provides the power used inside the shielded area. There is no electrical connection between the motor and the generator.
   4. Install military grade filters on any telephone, cable, or internet connections penetrating the Faraday shield (NOTE: You will need wired phones because cell phones will not work inside the shielded area)
2. The Old School Method (probably the only alternative for your motor vehicle)…
   1. discard any device that was made in the last 10 years (make that 15 or 20 years for your motor vehicle because fuel system have been computer controlled for a long time) and replace them with older devices manufactured prior to the thrust to computerize everything and connect them to the network.
   2. forego the use of portable phones (smart or otherwise)
   3. Disconnect all WiFi modems, routers, or other devices that can create a WiFi network and connect you computer to the internet using a wired ethernet connection being sure to turn off all WiFi in any computer devices you use.
3. What most are doing…
   1. Take reasonable precautions (After a surge knocked out some systems in our house, I installed a "whole house" power filter to reduce the risk of power surges but it also filters out RF in the incoming power.)
   2. Keep all devices, operating systems,and software scrupulously up to date (that means no more hanging on to older versions of OS X)
   3. Learn to live with a tolerable level of risk.

Maybe a way to 'cloak' household appliances that don't need access via the router.

A pet peeve of mine is mixed metaphors, and I apologize if I am wrong; Isn't it the 800 pound gorilla in the room that people pretend doesn't exist and the white elephant that is rare but not necessarily valuable? I hope I don't catch flack over this...

Not a mixed metaphor. I wanted something larger than a gorilla. And what "white" elephant?!

Put them in a small Faraday cage and connect them to an isolated, filtered, and grounded power supply.

No matter how hard you try to ignore the presence of the 800 pound gorilla in the room, it is impossible to do. Especially in a small room!
Close but not quite. White Elephants are not necessarily rare, just unwanted and tough to get rid of. See the definition and derivation of White Elephant here.

So the white elephant, once given, is hard to get rid of. The gorilla, on the other hand, I've heard used as a big problem you are ignoring, although I just looked that one up too. Derivation is strong-arming by government or other entity larger than you. The problem is a kind of combination, I guess.

Grelber did not say 'white,' I stand corrected.

So on a practical level ...
• Pull the GPS fuse in the car. Any others to foil the trackers/hackers?
• Unplug the toaster after each use. (A good idea anyway, especially if you have a pet that likes to counter graze.)
• Refuse Internet-enabled drug pumps.

Still no idea how to foil fridge trackers/hackers.

Cool your beer in a bucket of ice.

No beer. Only wine (at basement temp) ... so no need there.

But I'd still like to know if there's any way to foil the fridge trackers/hackers.
In places like mid-Florida where nasty weather events present major problems for sensitive components and heavy-duty surge suppressors and the like are necessary to protect the investment, the capability of the product to be hacked just adds insult to injury.

It's the perverbial ghost in the machine.
Don't they make cheap, 'analog' refrigerators anymore?

http://www.rt.com/usa/hack-refrigerator-home-appliances-747/

Because there are devices that can effect any computer device in a car whether or not the device is internet enabled, and some communications/tracking devices such as OnStar are carefully designed so that they cannot be disconnected you would have to disconnect the battery instead. Of course that would make the motor vehicle inoperative, but it would be safe from tracking and computer exploits.

Instead of a toaster you could use a long fork and a charcoal grill.

I just spent a few days in the hospital and I guarantee everything there was directly or indirectly — mostly directly — computer controlled. When the computer system crashed, for several hours they were unable to dispense or administer any medication, monitor heart and other critical care patients, take vital signs, admit or discharge patients, feed patients, accept or access Doctor's orders for patient care, perform laboratory work, read radiology studies, etc. The Emergency Department began running out of ready supplies and began taking steps to divert ER patients to other hospitals when the computers finally got back up. It took another several hours to clear the backlog that built up during the computer outage. The lesson here would be if you want to avoid the possibility of someone hacking into your medical system, move to a third world nation.

As for the fridge trackers/hackers buy your next computer from the junkyard and be sure it was built in the previous century.

Oh yes, be sure and turn off your HVAC, telephones, cable or satellite TV, burglar alarm system, lawn sprinkler system, home automation systems, etc., etc., etc.

And they said life would be easier. They forgot to mention scarier.
Going off the grid is looking better and better.

Security updates for refrigerators?

Joemikeb, how was your hospital stay any different than one in a third world country?

The 800-pound gorilla is the strongest, or largest, person or group or company or whatever in a particular niche. Amazin is the 800-pound gorilla of online retailing.

An elephant in the room is a large thing that nobody is acknowledging or talking about.

A white elephant is a gift (or, in more general use, a project) whose upkeep is ruinously expensive; being given a white elephant means being given a gift that will destroy you in the maintenance. (There is a tale that the Kings of Siam would give a white elephant as a gift to people he did not like, in order to ruin them--it was expensive to maintain them, but would show disrespect to the king if they tried to pass it on to someone else.)

For one thing my hospital stay here was probably many times more expensive than it would have been in most third world hospitals. All the rooms in the hospital here are private rooms each with its own bathroom and cable television while in third world countries the norm is a ward.

I was continuously monitored through a wireless connection to the central monitoring station no matter where I was on the campus, while third world monitoring norm is more likely limited to a stethoscope around the neck of the attending nurse or physician. Very few third world hospitals could afford the CT scanner, Nuclear scanner, cardiac sonography, and gadgetry, I was tested with nor would they likely have been equipped to do the nuclear stress test of the heart. (I have never been fond of treadmill stress testing but chemical stress testing is a bit scary.) That is not to say that such equipment is unknown in the third world, but it is not the standard of practice as it is here. (Truth be known it may not be the "standard of practice" in some small town hospitals less than 100 miles from here.)

As far as the qualifications of the physicians in attendance of the approximately two dozen hospitalists on staff all but four or five of them are of East Asian, Pakistani, and Sikh background and I presume training. My personal physician is from India, and the attending cardiologist from Eastern Europe. The ER doctor is from Austin, Texas (and Austin is sometimes weird enough to be like another country ) . So they would be equally qualified whether they were practicing here, in India, Thailand, or wherever. The nurses I came in contact with were all trained either at Tarrant County Community College or Texas Women's University (one of the finest nursing schools in the country). They were uniformly great but I have no standard of comparison between them and nurses in third world situations although in some countries nursing care would have been the duty of my family and not a professional nurse.

Whether the treatment was better or worse than a third world country would provide is arguable. It was definitely more comfortable and probably resulted in a more definitive diagnosis. In my case it turns out the heart was definitely not the cause of the shortness of breath and chest pains. As it is my condition is currently classified as a "mystery" so my odds for full recovery would have been the same in either realm - unless a doctor going solely on the presenting symptoms had decided to perform a needless surgery.

Did they revert to blood-letting?

Glad you're ok. Was just stunned that the system at the hospital was so fragile that there was no delivery of medical care possible when it failed.

I'm having trouble believing that there was a 100% lack of redundancy!

They could have had a building full of flat-liners and not known for hours.

This sounds eerily similar to my own situation. For over a decade I've been experiencing exertional/exercise dyspnea (shortness of breath) with concomitant retrosternal chest pain. All manner of stress testing and other diagnostic modalities effectively ruled out cardiovascular and pulmonary causes. So I carried on without definitive diagnosis.
Whatever is going on remains a "mystery". It'd be nice to know how many are in a similar diagnostic limbo. At least it might provide perspective to resolve the issue(s).

I have reason to believe they did have physical redundancy. The problem resulted from the hospital's use of a very sophisticated integrated patient management system that ties everything together. As with any properly designed database system any given piece of information occurs once and only once in the entire system. So if, for example, the patient database subsystem crashes the patients cease to exist in the system so medication cannot be ordered or approved for non-existent patients, heart monitors would know someone somewhere in the hospital was in trouble, but who and where would be a mystery so the staff would have had to sprint from room to room to locate the patient in trouble. The biggest problem in this case was the inability to provide or administer the proper medications. The efforts to prevent incorrect patient medication (an all too frequent problem in hospitals) created a huge problem in this case.

I suspect the failure in this case was the result of a failed upgrade and it was deemed moore expedient to back out the change rather than bring a parallel system on line. It would probably be possible to mitigate the risk through system design changes, but the cost would be enormous and not justifiable on a cost/benefit analysis.

Well at least we know we are not alone in this.

My wife has shortness of breath. One specialist diagnosed asthma and another one CPOD. This was determined by x-ray. I'm surprised no-one mentioned these quite common ailments. The treatment consists of advair, atrovent and ventrolin at various times of the day. Theses are puffers as you know. jaybass

Not mentioned because ruled out.

thanks for the thought, but my recent episode was more typical of a pulmonary embolism and I have a history of DVTs and the resulting PEs.

All my life I have been treated for allergies with little success but recently, on an impulse, I started seeing a classically trained acupuncturist who specializes in allergies. His diagnostic methods seem like voodoo to my western sensibilities and I cannot explain why needles stuck in my ankles, arm, and occasionally scalp relieve allergic symptoms — but they seem to be working and I have been able to throw away my puffers. I do not claim to be cured, but my wife assures me I am remarkably improved.

Of course this is not covered by insurance but your wife might want to consider it as an alternative. My acupuncturist says you should know within one or two treatments if acupuncture is going to help you.

Note: MDs, DOs, and Chiropractors can be licensed to perform acupuncture with only 100 hours of training. When I say a "classically trained" acupuncturist that involves 9 years or more of acupuncture school and residency (about the same as required for an MD or DO).

Its like the PCI bus in a computer. Who compartmentalizes things there? It's just one piece of internal equipment communicating on a commom bus with another piece of equipment, in the same self-contained area.

Then some yutz decides to add a way to remotely get on that network for diagnostics, Onstar, or whatever. The consequences of this combination aren't taken into account.

It's no different than Windows for Workgroups meets "your office just got on the internet". Wait, what? Now the world can access all of our computers now?" yes, they can. Maybe you ought to think that through and add some security before you plumb that line in from the world?

The problem is the guy that designed the brakes didn't consider the possibility the communication channel he was going to use to talk with the car's computer would be on a wide area network, and the people that connected up the wide area network didn't consider that the brakes would be using it too. Too many people, too many departments, too much compartmentalization, insufficient communication, insufficient centralized planning.

I think health care facilities get sold a package of integrated software and hardware, especially if it was 'state of the art' as joemikeb describes. The people buying it are impressed by the efficiency, don't understand programming, but see a lot of expensive hardware and feel they got value for their money. It seems to me the money was put in the wrong place because of a marketing decision. The programming was just to tie all the hardware together. Bean counters don't want to pay extra for things they can't see, but I bet they were angry when they spent all that money on all this expensive 'hardware' and then had a catastrophic failure.

It all boils down to the adage: Stupid is as stupid does.
While behaving stupidly doesn't necessarily imply constitutional stupidity, in such cases it sure seems to.

In defense of the hospitals the integrated data systems are a highly effective defense against all too frequent medical mistakes that at best cost literally billions of dollars in insurance premiums and drive up medical costs and at worst result in unnecessary injury or death of patients. Hospitals are, by their very nature risky places to be, but these systems do help mitigate some of that risk. In my recent hospitalization I saw countless examples of that risk mitigation at work and I was impressed and happy to see it at work. Of course that very integration introduces other risks. As has been so often postulated, "There aint no free lunch.

One of the largest, most modern hospitals here is right on the East River. So is the power plant that supplies the East Side, about 20 blocks away from the hospital. The hospital's emergency generators were in the basement. Then Hurricane Sandy hit....

If we listen to the presidential candidates and choose not to believe the climatologists when they talk about global warming and rising sea levels it won't happen — or will it?

Another elephant in the room. And I thought they were vanishing. They're in rooms.

http://www.nycaviation.com/newspage/wp-c...630-620x413.jpg

That sounds like a hospital administrator, NOT a patient, talking!

Are hospitals really run on a basis that puts money ahead of life on their "To Save" lists?

I prefer the military theory of procurement you described here, which, although it sounds extreme, at least makes some sense.

I did not say cost was at the top of the list of considerations. Patient safety and quality of care are at the top of most hospital's priority list and the complex integrated patient management systems play a critical role in that. But hospitals in the United States operate in a competitive environment and when costs get too high the third party payers will not pay anything and the hospital goes out of business. A famous charity hospital in Chicago may have to close (or may have already done so) because they held costs so low the Sisters who run it can no longer pay the bills. It could be argued they did not do a cost/benefit analysis or more likely the weighting was out of kilter. The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center just completed the newest and most modern hospital in the DFW metroplex and arguably the United States. because a cost/benefit analysis revealed it was more cost effective to start from scratch rather than try to bring its predecessor up to current standards. They were in danger of being closed for failure to meet minimum standards.

So the cost/benefit analysis has to be made to not do so is fiscal insanity. The same can be said of manufacturing automobiles, airplanes, stiffer clothes, underwear, fertilizer, petrochemicals or constructing buildings, bridges, highways, houses, etc. in fact virtually every aspect of our lives is subject to a cost/benefit analysis at some level. I guarantee hospital corporations, religious institutions, hospital districts, federal/state/local governments all do it and it is not wrong. It is the weighting given each of the various factors including cost that makes the difference.

That's excellent logic when your product merely affects life, but you get into some pretty dangerous ethical territory when your product IS life.

I wonder how the DA would have reacted if somebody had died because a cost-effective decision left an entire medical facility headless?

And here's a cheery little op-ed piece to share ironically on Labor Day weekend:
The Internet of Way Too Many Things

How would the DA react if the medical facility operated at a loss, went bankrupt and closed so the doors were locked when the ambulance arrived with a dying patient?

I know a lot of RVers who would love to have that black plastic propane sensor ring on their rigs. I don't know how big the market would be for backyard barbecuers but it would be a goldmine at Camping World.

As for the Leeo, why is that needed when smoke alarms are already available at less money and are linked to the home security system controlled by a smart phone?

I do see the need for improved WiFi technology that will have enough bandwidth to support all of the WiFi linked devices, enough channels so the neighbor's WiFi does not interfere with yours, and unbreakable security schemes to protect the network and devices from intrusion by the bad guys.

Ms Arieff makes some valid points in her op ed about integration, usability, sustainability, privacy and security. But I think her reservations are overstated. This technology's had a long infancy. I first read about a Mac being used as a voice controlled home automation center over 20 years ago in Popular Mechanics and the author was doing many/most of the things then that are just now coming to your local home store. The technology and its accompanying industry are finally moving from their infancy into a vigorous adolescence. As with all adolescents, mistakes will be made, there will be no small amount of trial and error. But just as we eventually matured into productive adults, I expect home automation technology to eventually mature into a useful and productive tool.

Thinking back, you should have seen my first Ohio Scientific computer in the late 1970s: Three different 8 bit processors (8080, 6502, 6800), 16 KB of RAM, an 8" floppy disk drive, an 8" green monitor, and a jury-rigged IBM Selectric for a printer and compare that to the Apple Watch on my wrist today orders of magnitude faster, more powerful, more useful and costs a small fraction of what I paid for that first home computer in real dollars. I can't wait to see what is available in the next 10 years — in the next 5 years! If the luddites don't get us.

Oooo, we gonna getcha, you betcha.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/07/16/nest-hack-privacy-tool/

I think there is a future in Faraday Cages.

Possibly with personal outrage, but not as if possible criminal negligence were involved.

Your IBM Selectric did not have auto-correct.

But it does have a correcting key, at least the Correcting 'Selectric' Typewriter does — and I say "does" because I'm still using my Selectric II typewriter regularly — even if jury-rigging it to serve as a printer couldn't make use of same.

I regret I didn't snag a Selectric when everyone was dumping them. Maybe one of the best products ever.

My wife bought one of the last of the Selectrics to use for work on her MTh and later preparing bulletins for church. She loved it and used it until I introduced her to a document formatting program based on the Standardized General Markup Language suing an IBM PC. The Selectric became surplus a few short weeks thereafter. (Later she returned the favor by introducing me to the Apple computer.)

When last heard of that Selectric was being used by a missionary somewhere in Africa. It was eventually replaced there by a Royal portable manual typewriter because the ribbons for the Selectric were too hard to come by and maintenance service was non-existent. The Royal portable has since been replaced by an iPad.

IMHO, "look and feel" of an ipad will never replace "rhythm and sound" of a Selectric.





When did 'guessing' replace spellchecking?

No argument there! But you will have to admit the iPad is a lot more portable and offers a lot more features.

Since the spellchecker could not differentiate between two correctly spelled words.

Admitted. Since my back injury, it hurts to even think about lifting one these days.

So, here is something a little quirky I discovered about the iPad autocorrect. I typed Windows (cap W) in an email but spelled it Windiws by mistake. It does not autocorrect. Try it.

Autocorrect ignores capitalized words, because they're likely to be proper names, which autocorrect has a terrible time with.

And lately I've been using that to disable auto correct on-the-fly when I want to put something not quite grammatically correct in a text msg etc. I tend to use slang to add appropriate emotion etc to my texts, and autocorrect really hates on me. it doesn't care for sound fx either...

"PBS: Rise of the Hackers"
Stuxnet on the loose. Don't drive that Jeep.

I've noticed that the autocorrect in iOS 8 is much worse than that in iOS 7, and iOS 9 makes it worse still. It's like it tries to be too smart; it will substitute a common word for a less common (but still correct) word, sometimes leading to comical results. It's really frustrating.

As far as I know, I have invented a game. It consists of composing a text using only the suggestions provided by autocorrect/anticipatory typing in iOS.

An interesting related question is using the above method only, what percentage of the resulting texts are 1.) sensible; 2.) what you wanted to say?

3.) Poetry

Game on!

4) Proffit!

Cool. Go for it!

Ok, but now that I installed ios9 the word suggestions no longer come up above the keyboard,

Under Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> ENGLISH, turn Predictive on (or toggle it off and on again, if it's already on).

(Aside to tacit: I suspect you already know this, but on that same screen under ALL KEYBOARDS, you can turn Auto-Correction off.)

There should be a short white line in a thin grey stripe just above the keyboard. Touch it and swipe up to make the word suggestions appear. Swipe down to make them disappear.

Thanks. There it is.

I can help. It's not obvious, but:

1.) Pretend you are going to send a new text message, or go to an old sent one.
2.) Tap in the text entry box.
3.) Click and HOLD on the emoji (smiley face) key
4.) In the pop-up menu that appears, turn on "Predictive"

Voilá!

1) Start with middle anticipated word, always The:

The fact I can see it as an excuse for the next few weeks of school...

2) Type first letter and keep using middle anticipated word:

What is your name on my way home from work to be in my head...

The examples above seem to use prior two words to guess at the next.

3) Type first two letters in each word and use the middle anticipated word:

Four score and seven years ago. / For school and see he agreed.

This one is interesting, is it trying to make a sentence or just guessing at each word? It switched the ye to he.

Great—and interesting—experiment!

It could be doing all of that. In the case of "ye" to "he" it might have been anticipating a typo: "y" is just above "h" on the keyboard and "he" is a common word. That is more likely than making a sentence since "ye" could have been a typo for the beginning of "you", which would still make a sensible sentence.

From what I have seen, I would agree with you on the prior words used to suggest the next one.

Same sentence, third predictive choice for 'ye'

Four score and seven years ago:
For school and see yeah again.

So, if the word 'school' is high on the predictive list, let's see if it knows history:
Four score and s [here is where it recognizes it]

What it did not do is figure out that I typed the same phrase many times and it did not 'learn' it. Not surprising, it's very familiar with 'school.'

At a certain point it loops, first predictive choice:

The only one who is the best thing ever is when you get to see you in the world to me and my mom is so much fun and I have to be a good day to be a good time to get a new one is a great day to be a good day to be a little bit of a new one is a great day to be a good day to be a little bit of a new one...

See the new update is so much better than the original version.

There. You next Ira, start with one letter and use only anticipated words that come up.

Started with "F" and somewhat appropriately produced the following:

"First time since the beginning of the day before the game is on."

L

Love it when you are the only one.

Like the way I am so excited to see you.

Love the fact that I can be used.

Let's go nuclear—start with "Z".

Zip up and get it together.

Zero stars, but the only thing that could have been the most beautiful and amazing day with the same thing as the first time!

Wow! The depth of meaning in that last one will require some deep introspection. [the preceding sentence was not written by predictive typing, just to clarify]

Z

Zombies are so much better.

Zero tolerance for the next two years.

Zero in on the way you are a little too much of a good time.

A

And the rest of the best thing ever is the only way to go out.

Can a moderator pick up this string at 36573 and start a new topic?
Good one!

B

By then it would be great to see you soon.

But it was not immediately clear whether the government of the day before, I have no clue.

But it was a great way to go to sleep and I'm still not sure how to get a job.