(flickr/mjtmail)

Firms specializing in technology security make it their business to scare potential customers, but that doesn't make an Internet Identity (IID) report predicting cyber doom in 2014, highlighted today by Ray Kurzweil's Accelerating Intelligence, any less spooky.

According to IID, looming cybersecurity threats in 2013--more mobile malware, increasingly aggressive hacktivism, attacks on the cloud--are "well-anticipated and mundane."

Those "mundane" threats are nothing next to the bleak wasteland of death and destruction IID expects in 2014:

[By] 2014 significant new methods of cybercrime will emerge. These new threats include the utilization of Internet connected devices to actually carry out physical crimes, including murders and cybercriminals leveraging mobile device Near Field Communications (NFC) to wreak havoc with banking and e-commerce. IID also expects the industry to combat such threats with new platforms for sharing intelligence across researchers, commercial enterprises and government agencies.

IID elaborated on "Murder By Internet Connected Devices" with scenarios that sound pretty plausible. They predicted that criminals could use pacemakers with remote connections, control systems on Internet-connected vehicles or even connected machines that control IV drips to potentially carry out long-distance, untraceable crimes.

It sounds like hyperbole, but pacemakers (for example) are already hackable, and as Forbes noted in this early December post about the reality of compromised medical equipment, Homeland has already used a hacked pacemaker as a plot device.

IID also warned about the dangers of NFC-enabled smart phones. NFC, or near-field communication, allows information exchange between compatible devices. It's pretty common on phones now but may one day even permit cars to talk to each other. Paul Ferguson, the company's vice president of Threat Intelligence, says NFC could be "a gold mine for cybercriminals and we have already seen evidence that they are working to leverage these apps to siphon money."

Additional threats IID believes may manifest in 2014 include an increase in state-sponsored malware, like Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu, a successful cyberattack on a power grid and an "exploit of a significant military assault system like drones."

Not directly mentioned but already in the wild: hackers already taking advantage of poorly-secured supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems which have easily cracked web administration pages. At the moment SCADA vulnerabilities might just cause discomfort and disruption, but in 2014's creepy killer web scenario, compromising a large-scale heating and cooling system might just be round one in an all-out infrastructure attack on a regional, even a national scale.

In posting a link to the Kurzweil write-up about IID's dire warnings, Quartz's Christopher Mims sounded the necessary note of caution needed after reading hints of a looming cyber-pocalypse:

Cybercriminals will straight-up kill you, says firm that profits massively by hyping threat. kurzweilai.net/murder-by-inte…

— Christopher Mims (@mims) January 4, 2013

Duly noted. However, if IID is correct, we've only got a year.

Cower and whimper accordingly.

Don't do this.

Around 9 a.m. Friday 53-year-old Jeffrey Johnson, a former accessories designer with Hazan Imports, shot and killed a 41-year-old former co-worker. Reports from the scene indicate the shooter was confronted by police outside the Empire State Building and was killed when he opened fire. At least nine others were injured during the shootout.

Every smartphone owner in the vicinity began tweeting about the drama, many uploading photos taken on the fly--to Twitter and, perhaps more strangely, Instagram.

Instagram even posted a blog entry highlighting some of the photos taken at ground level and from offices several stories above the scene. Some of the photos circulating online, including those on Instagram, were gruesome. One particularly disturbing shot, evidently taken from high above the scene, showed a partially nude body surrounded by police personnel, lying in a pool of blood.

Posting witnesses' and bystanders' amateur smartphone pics of unfolding and newsworthy events may by now seem encoded in Twitter's DNA. Although this exchange between Anil Dash and Jeff Jarvis proves not everyone is willing to accept such horrible content. After Mr. Jarvis tweeted a link to a photo (warning: it is a graphic photo) taken by a Twitter user with the pungent handle @yoassman, Mr. Dash objected that there was no warning about the nature of the image.

But there's something slightly surreal about uploading your hastily-shot iPhone pic of a bloody white sheet over a mysterious shape on the sidewalk to Instagram. More than Twitter and many other social media networks, Instagram is built upon a kind of Silicon Valley-born rosy worldview that seeks to filter our world, lift us for a moment out of the mundane. Instagram is where you post your child's senior prom pics and photos of your artfully-rendered fruit salad. It has built its reputation with forced nostalgia, with manufactured hipness. Instagram wistfully washes hasty iPhone snaps with a pleasant sense of time gone by. There would be something comic about the concept of crime scene photos on Instagram if the reality wasn't so horrific.

Instagram seems to have signaled they want it both ways: to let us prettify memories as if we're living in a hazy, bygone era but also have a Tahrir Square news moment in the spotlight.

Aurora Massacre suspect James Holmes on CNN

Shortly after a black-clad psycho opened fire in an Aurora, Colorado midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises on Thursday night, killing at least 12 and injuring 50, Reddit users began racing to compile as much information on the tragedy as possible. In the process, the link aggregation giant became a real-time feed of raw data, much of the information accurate, some of it not, all of it published for a fully-engaged and active audience well in advance of any national news outlet. The Future Journalism Project on Tumblr defined it correctly as crowd-sourcing the reportage and noted some of the most organized efforts by Redditors: sequential, linked threads in the /r/news subreddit:

• Comprehensive timeline: Aurora Massacre
• Comprehensive timeline, part 2: Aurora Massacre
• Comprehensive timeline, part 3: Aurora Massacre

Each post was a crisp feed of new developments almost as they happened, Redditor integ3r frequently editing out bad data and polishing good information as commenters threw everything they could find into the pot regarding first-person accounts of the shooting on Twitter (and elsewhere on Reddit), possible victims and information on the suspected killer, 24-year-old James Holmes.

In spite of integ3r's best efforts, there were information misfires (and the usual trolling) in comments, making sourcing the Reddit threads a risky proposition for members of the mainstream media following along. We don't know (for example) if ABC's Brian Ross used Reddit as his source for a spurious and widely-ridiculed conflating of Mr. Holmes with a Jim Holmes whose membership status in the Denver Tea party was once posted online, but a link speculating about the connection was posted--and debunked--in one of the Reddit timelines well in advance of Mr. Ross's statement.

A frequent version of this question has popped up in various Reddit threads about various nuggets of information regarding the Aurora Massacre: why isn't this on the national news? The answer is that networks are attempting from the first report to build a narrative, make a story. Reddit is simply after pure, virtually unfiltered information and Redditors more than willing to sort it all out for themselves as they go along.

Reddit's unfiltered onslaught of good and bad data when covering rapidly breaking stories like this mass shooting isn't superior to layers of vetting by editors and producers slaving away in editing bays in newsrooms across America--but it is likely becoming a hidden, key ingredient whenever Big News blood sausage gets made.