Smartphones and Museum Security

This is almost unrelated to Sharepoint, but directly related to management issues within software development. And museums.

I recently acquired a smartphone, one of them new-fangled pocketglass businesses. It is from Google because my friends are hackers and therefore when they hand down phones, they hand down the best phones, flat glass things with changeable batteries made in Korea like fashion will be for the next ten years, and the phones are generally scraped absolutely clean of nonsense. After receiving their phones, I place them in plastic boxes and use them until they are run over by cars.
Number Of Phones Lost To Being Run Over By Cars, Last Three Years: Six.
Suspicion of Value of Phones Generally: Very High.

As an outsider to how systems are supposed to work, this new pocketglass causes me deep-set suspicion.  Every major piece of software I have ever touched has seemed, once I got inside it, hideously broken. I am aware in my bones that things rot. For example, there is almost certainly a botnet in nearly every major museum, all over the world, because as museum staff we just don't have the money to prevent them; bureaucracy, of which proper software security is an evolved form, is hopelessly expensive. Having gone through the wringer of Microsoft's idea of the future, always a relay race of catch-up, I wonder how long it will be until these tiny perfect glasses begin to break. My hacker friends say not long.

There is an interesting problem here: banks tend not to store things that are actually irreplaceable, in the sense that more cannot be printed, but museums sure do. Whatever it is a given museum stores, it is almost certainly not multiple. We don't do multiples. There are no copies of this work. The work is the work and the whole of the work, and though there may be records, scans, and 3D prints of it, once it is gone, it is gone. And museums are almost always going broke, but lately, they are going broker, faster. The things we store are valuable because they are the sort of thing that is not taxed as income, and cannot be easily shared, except, of course, that it can. We hold the cargo cult in our bellies and our basements and our records-keeping. We are no longer truly funding or valuing our own research, but the things we were once researching still need to be preserved, at great cost.

A pocket glass radio that can control everything, including electronic locks, and that talks to other pocket radios by touch. I am wondering what their common cold is going to look like, and what doors it will pop open with its coughing.