Rather than IoT, I'd like to have networked Things under my control. The problem is not that they're networked but that they all want to phone home to central services.
I use a few IoT devices, and have them on a non-internet network. Unfortunately it requires me looking into each product first to see if it phones home, and deciding which features I want to give up by blocking that.
May I give a "collector's" point of view? I recently added a sort of phone home functionality to an app that runs on the client's network and the only goal here is to ensure that the people who use the software get value out of it. It helps me decide what to focus on and what matters to the customers.
It's not a substitute for picking up the phone, but it allows me to have more meaningful conversations when I do so.
Utopias require a slave class. Having autonomous robots doing most/all manual labor sounds pretty good - AS LONG AS they aren't all phoning home to their corporate overlords every 30msec.
When are we going to start demanding devices that are untethered from a mothership and run from home computers?
I'm an open source fan, but realize it's not a panacea, in and of itself...great care and a full understanding of potential negative consequences is only prudent...
Personally, I'm content with nursing along older appliances that were made well...but, I'm a bit of a handyman, and hate to give up on any machine until I'm convinced it's totally worn out, so IoT is unlikely to invade my home on a large scale any time soon...
"One such story was from a couple who were out of town when their furnace went nuts and raised the temperature in the house high enough that it melted every piece of plastic in the entire home."
There's just no way that a home furnace can generate enough heat to do that. Sounds like scaremongering to me.
I'm inclined to agree that a home thermostat is probably not the best place to be hacking around--especially, but not only, in cold climates--although this is really a comment on DIY generally rather than open source. Heck, I'm not even inclined to trust a Nest over a more traditional thermostat.
There are plenty of opportunities to fiddle around with sensors and other "smart home" gadgetry. But there are some areas where it makes sense to be very cautious.
That's not true. If you look at what most people consider necessary for utopia (food, shelter, medicine, architecture for fun activities) and do a first principles analysis of the labor inputs required, it comes in far lower than the comfortable output of the people being supported. Even if you use 100% manual labor and only use computers for information tech.
The only reason we seem so overworked is because ~70% of our labor goes into moat maintenance for our employer, profits for the capital class, and production of harmful products.
People used to sustain themselves quite comfortably all over the world. And they didn't even have the internet or electric motors.
All the classic examples of utopian thinking expressed in literature include a slave class which forms the majority of the populace.
I am hopeful that robots and the IoT could be that permanent slave underclass for us. But, for it to work, we must be the masters of our robot slaves and not some megacorporation. If we have robots not fully under our control/leased to us, or that are constantly watching and reporting on us, then we are the indentured servants/slaves rather than the robots.
The phoning home and rental model for IoT has intractable ethical and freedom problems IMHO.
We (https://flair.co) have an intranet solution but we 100% need to have a phone home to connect to others that don't have an intranet solution. Unfortunately its hard to take the internet out of the internet of things.
Also note that truly smart IoT devices need to operate on a data feed from devices in the home, devices outside of the home, and third party services (utility rates fluctuate over time for instance). They need to take raw data from these sources, 'debounce' or filter them into actionable events and then go ahead and move an actuator or make an adjustment to something. This is really hard to do all within a local network unless you have an onsite server farm and even then, you need for this onsite server farm to be able to fetch the code to run each device's task.
On the surface, an intranet of things sounds great, but every company is going to be making every device connect to the internet - there will not just be one that makes everything and everybody is not going to converge on a distributed cluster that runs in the home. The only practical way for large numbers of devices to integrate, in particular, integrate with deeper intelligence, is through the cloud.
Which is 20 years ago. Seriously, in most IoT / smart appliances, the "phone home" capability gives pretty much nothing for the user that couldn't be done without it. Including voice recognition, which worked off-line pretty decently for the last 10 years, and didn't have the network-induced latency. Phoning home is only there because companies are lazy and/or trying to monetize user's data.
I'd imagine phoning home heavily subsidizes some of the products through the data produced in aggregate and at the level of the individual through which research can be performed and which may also be monetized in other ways.
For instance, Google paid 10x revenue for NEST [0]. Profit is obviously much lower which means that's a very long term investment for the acquirer. But maybe not if the NEST product integrates with other Google products bringing more people into the Google ecosystem, incentivizing people to stay in the Google ecosystem, and providing data for Google to both improve it's ecosystem even for non Nest Users and to monetize with third parties.
Now if NEST stayed on it's own, it could integrate with other ecosystems or create it's own or just exist as a standalone product but NEST wouldn't have too much data to sell to increase profits, and wouldn't be able to draw as many conclusions as a company which could integrate their data with other data sources. It could create it's own ecosystem but comfortably living within another established ecosystem will probably bring more users to NEST as ecosystem creation is obviously very much outside the purview of a smart Thermostat.
So it sort of makes sense that these products "phone home" even if it's not exactly what we as computer software engineers and privacy advocates might look for in a product.
If by "functionality" you mean "stuff that makes money for the manufacturer and is at best marginally useful to the customer", then I agree.
Otherwise, the whole experience of the 20th century demonstrate that it's possible to build stand alone appliances that provide useful services to the paying customer while meeting the manufacturer's financial goals.
The creator of ZeroTier, a super easy way to set up virtual networks. Connects all your devices and encrypts the traffic by default. Pretty slick stuff. We use it in our backend to keep our microservices topology simple.
Apt. Microsoft actually seems to care about support, compatibility, and security, but it took years (a decade?) of Windows getting hacked for them to finally get serious about security. After another decade or so they're still a ways from fixing the problem, and part of that "fix" is telling people perfectly happy with their current Windows 7/8 systems to go to hell.
The IDIoT means appliance and car makers get to repeat this same slow learning curve, but on both client and server. In a decade or so, buyers will force them care about fixing their buggy, unsupported, insecure software (both client- and server-side this time). In another decade, they will be at around Windows 10 levels of support and security.
Oh, yeah, and a hacked car or HVAC system can kill you much deader than a hacked PC.
Which part of them is particularly environmentally sustainable?
The metals and plastics used in their manufacture is pretty minimal compared to cars or home appliances.
Their power consumption is low compared to heating or lighting (a macbook consumes power equivalent to about two lightbulbs, and most devices use less).
Earth metals represent probably the biggest environmental impact of consumer electronics. They're not actually rare, just expensive to mine, so there isn't an issue of sustainability. (As in, the earth metals aren't going to run out any time soon. There's some nasty environmental damage in the vicinity of the mines, but that's limited to a particular area).
I'm trying to fathom the reasoning behind this comment. Is it that because electronics are really useful and beneficial, they must have a proportional cost?
I think sustainability plays into people throwing out electronics instead of repurposing them.
> earth metals aren't going to run out any time soon
The fact that they will ever run out is generally not sustainable. You really think our use of them is going to DECREASE? Unlikely, unless people take conservation of materials more seriously than the convenience of throwing away rare metals.
Did you mean "unsustainable" in your first sentence ?
It seems to me that even at our current level of mass consumerism our lifestyles wouldn't be sustainable for more than a few decades. I'll give it to you that it's more a hunch than a an opinion backed by facts.
You're talking about cars or home appliances but generally we have a few of them. Each one of us will probably have thousands of IOT "things".
Billions of humans having thousands of things that are discarded and replaced by new ones when they fail or are not modern enough is not, in my opinion, a recipe for sustainability.
For the record I counted 17 sensors just for my house alarm and I didn't go overboard, if I hadn't be budget constrained I would have put much more than that.
The alarm is only one year old, but I wouldn't be surprised if in 5 years the company would tell me they're obsolete and I have to buy the new ones to get better protection.
That statement assumes the IoT is only the part that is exposed to consumers. It's also increasingly ICS/SCADA and other M2M technologies that as soon as they connect to the wider web are part of it. As @vdnkh points out below it is not new - just rebranding.
But the implications (especially for security) are huge. Not just because of new bugs or design flaws but also because the momentum (and media frenzy) it creates puts these old (buggy) technologies into the limelight of security researchers. E.g. stuff that was lurking in old protocols suddenly becomes relevant (want to stop a train? https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7490-the_great_train_cyber_robbe... ).
There are countless applications not just for BAC but also for logistics, power-grids, industrial automation, e-health, insurance, ... where the IoT is already actively pumping out use-cases, product ideas and actual products.
The "Internet of Things" is to M2M as "Data Science" is to Statistics. There are some differences but on the whole, it's a sexy rebranding of an unsexy industry. I'm a dev working at an industrial monitoring company making websites to our telemetry data. It's a real problem in a lucrative industry which has received a bit of a windfall with the rise of helium ISO shipping.
This is a common refrain and it sums up my attitude, too. Then I heard a discussion the other day on the radio about earthquake alert systems, like the one they have in Japan and one that I guess is in the works for here in California or the US.
I don't know if it currently works like this in Japan, but the idea is that with a reliable enough warning system, vital infrastructure could automatically respond to the few seconds warning an earthquake alert might provide.
Hearing that, an Internet of Things suddenly seemed to me a little more serious and useful. Of course that doesn't excuse poor security or sloppy design. It only makes it that much more important.
Earthquake warning does not require the Internet. It shouldn't even need the Internet. Japan's primary earthquake alerting system uses NHK Radio 1 and Radio 2, which have multiple transmitters and nationwide coverage. Alerts are also broadcast over TV and cellular networks. There are special receivers which detect the alert signal.
The high speed rail system has its own detectors, both along the rail lines and at the coast.
Pretty much this. Even though I say this as someone who built a home automation system that can do this, it is a bit niche and more of a hobby than anything thats really practical to most people.
And then when I see hypothetical discussions about smart appliances ("a fridge that can automatically order food when you're low!", "a dishwasher that can tweet when the dishes are done"), the thing that I really want are open-source hackable everyday appliances, not feature-rich ones.
E.g., I want to be able to confidently replace a busted controller in my dishwasher without necessarily having to shell out $100 to maytag for one that was only produced for a single year.
Sadly, yes, this is a wish born out of experience.
Would it make sense to have single device with microphones that could detect specific sound (i.e. beep of dishwasher) and also could distinguish it from other specific sound (i.e. beep of washing machine) and than push this as a notification via whatever means (i.e. twitter)? With few microphones it could detect direction of sound and than it could learn which appliance makes which sound.
Not that I see a need for something like this, but existence of such device could deter a bit companies from shoving such things to every appliance.
A coworker (at my dayjob) and I were discussing this recently. Supposedly it already exists in products that detect smoke alarms or handclaps. I can conceive of ways to do it in software.
Part of the problem with IoT, as others have pointed out, is lack of a compelling use case for most of the products. I don't think this is a fatal flaw unless all of the also-rans and wannabes and opportunists suck all the air out of the market before someone with a compelling application (and decent reliability!) can gain traction in a non-privacy-invasive way.
actually the idea of my dish washer (and other devises) having both a built in microphone and also the capability to connect to beyond my home network is creeping me out. what does it record when? is it really only listening to the beep or recording other audio, etc ...
Yeah, I feel it too. At the same time I have my smartphone with me all the time... Somehow it gained my trust. My idea is for 3rd party device. I would not trust appliance makers with such things.
It is also a bit like uncanny valley. Because if we will at some point build general purpose robots they will have microphones and cameras. On path to this there is a point at which you must trust having microphone and cameras from less useful devices pointed at you. If not how can we have off-the-shelf general purpose robots at our disposal? It also creeps me out... How can we achieve this? Some can say we shouldn't.
I think a lot of people are missing the point about IoT and in party I blame the term itself.
Try and turn it around.
Instead of calling it Internet of things which indicate it it's own thing, instead think of it as things connected to the internet.
Now you realize that this is already happening and it's a combination of our phones and our fridges, watering systems and load balancers all able to communicate.
So the user stories are already there we just don't think about them as that because of this claim of a separate internet. It's not. It's the same.
We know. A lot of stuff gets connected to the Internet that should not be. The architecture is wrong, too. Sure, I want my fridge to notify me on my phone about shortage of ketchup, or something. But it should not be doing it through third party's crappy server.
In a way, it's the problem of the current Internet, but exported to the hardware world. Just like NATs killed publishing, they also kill sanity in the design of connected things. I wish we could deploy IPv6 faster. Yes, I want my fridge to have its own IP - so that I won't have to proxy the communication through some random fly-by-night web startup.
A friend bought a IoT lock for his house. If someone needs in he can run some app on his phone and remotely unlock the door or give them a code to punch in that's only good for a set amount of time.
I am reading into your comment but I am thinking you are considering that the transient and seemingly non-stable nature of a lot of human and animal activity implies that Gaia cannot be an Earth-level macroscopic scale organism comparable to the human body. I think that if you consider the replaceable and transient nature of the molecules and cells in traditional organisms, you will see more correspondences between the two. Also imagine how at the microscopic level (even macroscopic level), humans and animals change quite a bit day-to-day..even moment to moment. So the busyness and seemingly "unstatic" nature of Earth-at-large is no reason to think of it too much differently than a traditional organism.
And considering two further things makes for even more interesting conversation: 1) there's no super-clear distinction between life and death..there's a massive difference in function and activity along the development and decay cycles that are possible for animals. 2) Animals without limbs or with added tools(extensions of our limbs) are quite workable.
This is only meant to add to your conversation; I'm not really detracting because I agree it's not in the same sense but rather a different class of a being.
Oh, and one more thing: Animals' collections of physical cells are also home to a large number of cells from a WIDE VARIETY of different "species" of bacteria and viruses..so many of which can basically take a person either up or down in health by a large factor. So this is analogous to the Earth which is home to a great diversity of humans, animals, plants, and so on. Beautiful really. Except for that which isn't.
Thank goodness I'm not the only one who gets this. (I know how that sounds but damnit I feel very lonely most of the time.)
Conceptually speaking, there is only one machine. Two "independent" machines, once coupled, now form one machine. And in the real world all the machines are already coupled.
Also, I feel like people should watch "Maximum Overdrive" and "Demon Seed".
Calling the iot a robot is a bit clumsy. This label will do the opposite of the intent, the prudent exposition of the iot as the largest unobtrusive surreptitious surveillance system of all. total information awareness come true.
Labeling it as a robot will rather make people discount the idea. "A robot? That man's crazy. Little things interconnected do not make a godzilla-like world stomping and destroying robot! Nuts!"
To be sure, putting all your industrial scada equipment on the public net could result in consequences similar to having a Godzilla running amok.
I have acutally kicked this idea around 4 or 5 years ago of A "WSW" but more so in a sense that modularity would have been the groundworks for such a revolution.
Modularity. Modules, taking the scale of what cpus on the phones have to what the cpus in the late 90's till now had... interoperability... it is just not there yet. Infact it stagnated.
a lot has changed in the last months alone. there are several standards ready for IoT (ETSI M2M) [0], some are still being drafted (W3C Web of Things "WoT")[1].
Where I still see lot of room for improvement in standards is for totally radically new use-cases. Standardization guys are usually industry representatives from bigger companies who think about inter-op (and to a lesser extent use-cases). But many use-cases in IoT transcend or even threaten the business models of what the bigger players have built their power/dominance on (they prefer sustainability over disruption -- god I hate those buzzwords).
Therefore smaller innovators (individuals or garage start-ups) who have radical ideas such as building a decentralized business model (maybe using cryptocurrencies or blockchaining and not driven by harvesting user-data or advocate strong privacy) usually don't have the resources or time to put one of their staff into the slow-moving standardization bodies to make/defend their case.
Though the W3 is extremely open compared to others and even there are official members who vote behind closed doors, ... if enough contributors bring ideas in the open discussion groups, then these points too might get standardized.
The biggest problem though is standardizing security.
It is no coincidence that most IETF drafts especially older ones and official RFC's have under "Security" a note that says "to be done". Thinking ahead what might become a design problem later is hard and depends on how the standard later gets understood by the industry. But more important there aren't enough people who understand security in standards groups. That is not just a standards problem though and more of a disease of our industry. Just look at most web developers and have them explain how XSS/SQL-injection works ... or ask an Embedded engineer who is used to building non-connected appliances to think about remote exploitable buffer overflows after they connects the thing via a CoAP proxy to the WWW ... Yes you'd assume they know that in detail but reality is usually most have no idea - not because it's hard but because we are not incentivized by making it extra secure (security often is a useless feature unfortunately only indirectly affecting your financial bottom line (when sh1t hits the proverbial fan)).
