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Rapid technological innovations, including the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), introduce a range of uncertainties, opportunities, and risks. While it is not possible to accurately foresee IoT's myriad ramifications, futures and foresight methodologies allow for the exploration of plausible futures and their desirability. Drawing on the futures and foresight literature, the current paper employs a standardised expert elicitation approach to study emerging risk patterns in descriptions of IoT risk scenarios. We surveyed 19 IoT experts between January and February 2018 using an online questionnaire. The submitted scenarios provided expert's perception of evolving IoT risk trajectories and were evaluated using thematic analysis, a method used to identify and report patterns within data. Four common themes were extracted: physical safety; crime and exploitation; loss of control; and social norms and structures. These themes provide suitable analytical tools to contextualise emerging risks and help detecting gaps about security and privacy challenges in the IoT.

This research explores hacktivism as a new form of online political activism. It uses qualitative interviews with a gender-equal sample of ten self-defined hacktivists to address issues of gender and the discursive strategies used by males and females to handle the hacktivist community's male-only stereotype. The semi-structured interviews are analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA). The analysis indicates that male hacktivists relate to this dominant male-only representation through discursive techniques such as the suppression of gender (Male Oblivious Discourse) or mechanisms of vindication (Male Justification Discourse). Female hacktivists use the accentuation of gender and sexism to counteract male-dominant discourses and establish Female Discourses of Resistance (Emphasis Discourse; Negation Discourse). These gender-related argumentative positions and rhetorical mechanisms demonstrate how the male-only stereotype is created and maintained, and how it affects not only hacktivists' talk and sense-making, but also their identity and the hacktivist actions they perform.

Technology-facilitated abuse or ‘tech abuse’ in intimate partner violence (IPV) contexts describes the breadth of harms that can be enacted using digital systems and online tools. While the misappropriation of technologies in the context of IPV has been subject to prior research, a dedicated study on the United Kingdom’s IPV support sector has so far been missing. The present analysis summarises insights derived from semi-structured interviews with 34 UK voluntary and statutory sector representatives that were conducted over the course of two years (2018–2020). The analysis identifies four overarching themes that point out support services’ practices, concerns and challenges in relation to tech abuse, and specifically the Internet of Things (IoT). These themes include (a) technology-facilitated abuse, where interviewees outline their experiences and understanding of the concept of tech abuse; (b) IoT-enabled tech abuse, focusing on the changing dynamics of tech abuse due to the continuing rise of smart consumer products; (c) data, documentation and assessment, that directs our attention to the shortcomings of existing risk assessment and recording practices; and (d) training, support and assistance, in which participants point to the need for specialist support capabilities to be developed within and beyond existing services.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>UK statutory and voluntary support services do not feel well equipped to respond to tech abuse.</li><br /><li>Shortcomings in documentation and assessment practices make it difficult to estimate the full scale and nature of tech abuse.</li><br /><li>Tech abuse training and other support mechanisms are needed to amplify the UK sector’s ability to assist IPV victims/survivors.</li></ul>

The standards landscape for IoT security is currently developing in a fragmented manner. This paper provides a review of the main IoT security standards and guidelines that have been developed by formal standardisation organisations and transnational industry associations and interest alliances to date. The review makes three main contributions to the study of current IoT standards-development processes. First, governments and regulatory agencies in the EU and the US are increasingly considering the promotion of baseline IoT security requirements, achieved through public procurement obligations and cybersecurity certification schemes. Second, the analysis reveals that the IoT security standards landscape is dominated by de facto standards initiated by a diverse range of industry associations across the IoT ecosystem. Third, the paper identifies a number of key challenges for IoT security standardisation, most notably: a) the difficulty of setting a baseline for IoT security across all IoT applications and domains; and b) the difficulty of monitoring the adoption, implementation and effectiveness of IoT security standards and best practices. The paper consequently contributes to a better understanding of the evolution of IoT security standards and proposes a more coherent standards development and deployment approach.