Do you want your shower to help Russian hackers? | John Naughton

The internet of things has created a global network of devices vulnerable to cyber criminals - and no one wants to fix it

M y eye was caught by a Kickstarter campaign for a gizmo called a SWON, described as "a connected conservation device for your shower". You unscrew the shower head, screw on the SWON and then screw the head back on to it. From then on, water goes through the SWON before it reaches you. The Kickstarter campaign needs $50,000 to be pledged before the product can be made. Last time I checked, it had 75 backers and had raised pledges of $4,798.

Before consigning it to the "leading-edge uselessness" bin, I clicked on the link. This triggered a video spiel in which four twentysomething hipsters straight out of central casting (male, baseball caps, black T-shirts - you know the rigmarole) explain why the gizmo is such a good idea. Apparently, every minute a hipster spends in the shower uses 2.5 gallons of water. "This is why," says the lead geek, "I created SWON, an IoT device that installs in under one minute." It will save its users "hundreds of dollars" in utility costs, and between 4,000 and 10,000 gallons of water a year, which in drought-stricken Silicon Valley is obviously quite a big deal.