protecting against the risk of self-incrimination through our smartphones but neglected the far-greater risk the more pervasive Internet of Things (Io T)

poses to our personal liberty and the future of global e-commerce.

Io T can be traitorous in two ways: to their users by acting against their interests by exploiting sensitive personal information and to freedom of global e-commerce by motivating nations to prohibit the use of Io T connected to foreign-domiciled data centers due to threats of foreign mass surveillance.

In particular, future holographic-type glasses, or “hologlasses,” could be used against their users in ways more insidious than smartphones are today, as discussed by Wicker.

Hologlasses promise all the functionality of today’s smartphones— but without the disadvantage of having to look down while holding the device. The world’s largest computer companies have publicly discussed their expectation that hologlasses could be in use at the scale of today’s smartphones by 2030.

Moreover, hologlasses promise many applications that are inherently impractical through smartphones alone. For example, they likely will include facial recognition to instantly tag people a user might encounter, providing real-time relevant background information, including even ongoing analysis of their emotional states.

Some police officers in China are already using early-model hologlasses with facial recognition to nab those in a police database as they walk by.

A backdoor in hologlasses could enable a “we see and hear what you see, hear, and do” capability to provide extraordinary insight into a user’s private thoughts. Protection against self-incrimination through hologlasses could become a contentious legal (and political) issue, way beyond Wicker’s discussion of smartphones.

Beyond threats of personal self-incrimination, defending against the threat of foreign mass surveillance could also make freedom of global

NEIL SAVAGE DESERVES praise for his informative overview of recent computational re- sults related to Nash equi- librium in his news story “Always Out of Balance” (Apr. 2018).

I fully agree that the notion of Nash equilibrium does not always reflect how competitors behave in competitive situations, and that the fact that Nash equilibrium is provably computationally intractable makes it less useful than John Nash himself might have envisioned when he developed it. However, Savage also overstated (somewhat) the effect of intractability by claiming the intractability of computing Nash equilibrium necessitates researchers abandon this notion in favor of other competition-related ideas.

While looking for Nash equilibrium yields additional computational complexity, the decision-making problem is, in general, already computationally intractable (NP-hard) for non-competitive situations (such as when a company makes internal planning decisions). In doing so, a company would be looking for an optimal solution (such as one that would aim to help produce maximum profit), but computational optimization is, in general, NP-hard. Such computational intractability does not mean researchers have to abandon the idea of optimization and look for other ideas.

Many real-life problems are NP-hard (such as robotic movement) and what makes working on them such an intellectual and computational challenge.

Indeed, there is no general feasible algorithm (unless P = NP), so computer scientists need to be creative when designing algorithms for specific practical problems.

Vladik Kreinovich, El Paso, TX, USA

Beware the Internet
of Traitorous Things

Stephen B. Wicker’s Viewpoint “ Smartphones, Contents of the Mind, and the Fifth Amendment” (Apr. 2018) correctly pointed out the importance of

When to Hold ‘Em

DOI: 10.1145/3210585

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