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One of the leading thinkers in the new computing sector known as the internet of Things (IoT) can't help but look at all the flashy, expensive, feature-packed gadgets on the market today – things like Google Glass or the Apple Watch – and keep coming away with the same thought: too many device makers keep getting it wrong.
Given the nature of his chosen field, serial entrepreneur David Rose – who's also a researcher with the MIT Media Lab, where he's taught for six years – might be expected to want the next generation of connected devices to pick up where smartphones leave off. Indeed, that seems to be the nature of the race to figure out what the next dominant computing platform looks like, whether it's Facebook snatching up Oculus or Microsoft working to bring its HoloLens to fruition.
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In a book he published last year, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire and the Internet of Things, Rose sums up his hope for the future of technology: he wants it be dominated less by glass slabs and more by tools and artefacts, just like his grandfather's space was filled with.His grandfather, for example, never hunted for the one tool to serve as an all-purpose tool hub or for a tool that would eliminate the need for other tools. His shop was filled with hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, clamps and more – and they all enchanted the young Rose because even in their simplicity, those tools could lead to a multiplicity of imaginative creations.
The Internet of Things could also, beyond proving a privacy debacle, be a walled garden whose walls reach to infinity.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Valkor on Thursday July 16 2015, @10:32PM
My doorbell doesn't need an IP address. Neither does my car air conditioner. AND SO ON.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 16 2015, @10:40PM
Your problem is that you don't have a 2000m2 house.
Having three kitchens, four pools and two rec/fitness centers makes that whole "Connected Home" make a lot more sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @12:09AM
Most people don't have a 2000 m2 house. Therefore, most people don't need the IoT.
Also, I don't believe you have a 2000 m2 house either
(Score: 4, Funny) by gargoyle on Friday July 17 2015, @08:27AM
That should be a wooshing sound you can hear, but the woosh was in the other wing of the house.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday July 16 2015, @11:30PM
you are correct. none of those things needs an ip-addr.
and not every iot solution means that every object gets one.
this is part of the problem; for some reason, there is a perception that iot is always about routable ip.
some of us use xbee, IR, zwave, other kinds of data transports. and - surprise! - not every thing needs or GETS to talk to anything public on IP networks.
at best, you'd have a single IP presence that controls and proxies for non-ip things. and that must be trustable (so that means no single vendor can have control over it; only you).
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @02:43AM
I think this hits the nail on the head, no pun intended. It's not the "Internet of Things", it is "My Personal Network of Things" that is going to be the revolution. Trying to get every device to talk to every device will be a nightmare. But having a custom wireless network where all of your devices can talk to each other... that's where the revolution will be. Think of how bluetooth has made it easy to have your phone connect to the speaker system in your
car. You'd want your appliances to talk to you and each other, not the Internet. You want the refrigerator and the stove to work in tandem, let's say by defrosting the roast and preheating the oven. What you don't need is your refrigerator/oven going onto the Internet and looking for new recipes.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday July 17 2015, @08:06PM
It's not the "Internet of Things", it is "My Personal Network of Things" that is going to be the revolution.
You're going to need to come up with a name that produces a better acronym than that - "Pee Not" is a terrible idea.
Trying to get every device to talk to every device will be a nightmare. But having a custom wireless network where all of your devices can talk to each other... that's where the revolution will be.
Actually, I think the revolution will come when the manufacturers begin opening their APIs. Once that happens, "get[ting] every device to talk to every device" isn't necessary - they just have to talk to a [handful of] control devices.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Friday July 17 2015, @07:21PM
The Internet of Things stuff would become more interesting and useful when we get iSavant/Virtual Savant wearable devices:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=5719&cid=135706#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
I would have been more excited about "Virtual Savant" features (and "Virtual Telepathy", "Virtual Telekinesis" once brain-computer interfaces become better and thought macros become possible).
And there is a standard, easy and secure way to discover/enumerate and control the devices and to control the access to those devices.
Years ago I proposed something like this (to the IETF and ICANN): https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yeoh-tldhere-01 [ietf.org]
The idea was to create a foundation for more stuff to be built on because back then it would have been hard to know what devices in your location/"magical plane" aka WiFi network are available for you to control and access.
But everyone seemed more interested in approving yet another dotcom TLDs (.info, .biz).
Without a standard or defacto standard developing, every location would be different, you'd have to learn how each place worked to use the publicly available devices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @11:33PM
You got it quite nicely.
The IOT has to beat simplicity and cheap. That is hard to do.
A toggle switch costs a couple bucks at most. A connected one? Start around 15-20 at a minimum. Then needs another 200-500 dollars worth of controller to keep up with it. What does it do? Oh the exact same thing but from across the room.
I want a 'connected' house. But for the life of me can not figure out how to make it cost effective and worth doing that makes it better than what I have which is simplicity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @01:33PM
The IOT has to beat simplicity and cheap. That is hard to do.
A toggle switch costs a couple bucks at most. A connected one? Start around 15-20 at a minimum. Then needs another 200-500 dollars worth of controller to keep up with it. What does it do? Oh the exact same thing but from across the room.
When it comes to price and reliability it's hard to beat simple discrete I/O. I work in the process control industry where despite advancements like Fieldbus plain old twisted pair and 4-20mA signals remain king even on newer projects.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @02:13PM
where despite advancements like Fieldbus
You have also almost hit on why there is no 'smart home' sort of thing.
Every manufacture wants to be 'the owner' of the bus. Each one with its own protocol. Each one with its own SDK. Each one that you need to buy into their eco system for it to work right. The only ones getting any traction are the 'free' ones where the manufacture said (go for it I do not care and will not sue).
This sums it up https://xkcd.com/927 [xkcd.com]
plain old twisted pair and 4-20mA signals
That is it right there in a nutshell. You have to beat simple and cheap. The systems I see out there are massive complications on a very simple idea.
Many of these companies of 'value add' is I give them money for a proprietary system that only sorta works and is out of date and EOL in 3 years.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Friday July 17 2015, @12:03AM
Yes, security, blah blah blah, but let's finally dispense with this charade that nobody around here wants their everyday appliances to communicate over something as standard as TCP/IP. Certainly nobody who's ever messed around with Arduino, anyway.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Friday July 17 2015, @01:49AM
Yes, security, blah blah blah, but let's finally dispense with this charade that nobody around here wants their everyday appliances to communicate over something as standard as TCP/IP. Certainly nobody who's ever messed around with Arduino, anyway.
So about .1% of the population. Right.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @01:52AM
(Score: 2) by Anne Nonymous on Friday July 17 2015, @02:18AM
A few choices [makeuseof.com].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Friday July 17 2015, @05:16AM
An excellent example of why the IoT worries me.
Here are four devices, priced around the $200 mark. They have a button to "ring the doorbell" and a camera to see who is at the door. I can see this being a useful addition to a home. The problem that I see is that they are completely inoperable with anything else, and that their useful life probably won't outlast your current smartphone.
Sure, they'll all do their advertised job - for a while at least. Then a new doorbell will come along with new features, or the smartphone app will be discontinued, or you won't be able to work out how to connect it to the new WiFi access point.
The original article mentions Rose's grandfather - and I'd like to extend that by mentioning the apocryphal "grandfather's axe". (Sure, I replaced the handle twice, and the blade a couple of times, but it is still "My Grandfather's Axe".) The same thing was possible with doorbells - replace the buzzer, replace the wiring, replace the button with a fancy model when the porch is remodelled. That old "doorbell" was intrinsically "interoperable". It seems that we will lose that with the "Internet of Things".
Unless we want to be constantly purchasing the same functionality every few years, we must ensure we can communicate effectively with IoT devices. That means adherence to open standards. It means that the source-code of smartphone "apps" needs to available to study and modify.
The possibilities opened up by IoT are vast. It's exciting and there are many useful things that can now be achieved, and no doubt many more yet to be discovered. All these possibilities, however, are predicated on being able to connect devices together. A single sensor is not very useful, but a world of possibilities opens up when joined in tandem with other devices. Thus we must be always be mindful that end-users have the ability to communicate with their devices in a transparent fashion, otherwise - fifteen years hence - our homes will be littered with once-operational plastic junk.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday July 19 2015, @03:23AM
That's a problem solved by open source software/hardware and standardized/open source protocols. Stallman might be crazy, but he's right about some things.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday July 17 2015, @04:29AM
The problem is that in practice, tech vendors will do something over an established protocol (TCP/IP as an example) but put their own easily-crackable proprietary twist on it which will be figured out (maybe keep the packet source/destination ports and ACK mechanism intact but scramble the rest with a bit-shift or use proprietary fields or something), and as usual it will get figured out and by the time you realize they did they'd already have everything rotten in your fridge, or blow up your oven etc. This is assuming that most people who consume that technology are using unprotected internet connections and poorly-configured consumer routers.
The fact that you mentioned Arduino at this point is pretty sad, because it means that you know even less about technology than I do.
People trying to make money from something based on existing technology are usually fucking lazy. A popular brand of 3-D printer actually used something like an ROT encryption which everybody figured out and bypassed with a Python script middleman. I bought a guitar amp years ago which was supposed to work only with their mating foot-controller, but I plugged in a midi footcontroller from another vendor and saw how the amp reacted as I sent CC and Pgm Change messages (which were not standard and on non-standard channels but still produced enough results to figure out what was going on) , essentially reverse-engineering parts of it...then I saw how in the product forums that others did the same, and were working with other users to try and run a complete MIDI reverse-engineering of it so anybody who owned the amp could have a spec and use the MIDI controller of their choice rather than shell out another couple-hundred bucks for the brand name.
Shhheah. Those discussions were shut down pretty quickly. Possibly because people knowing too much costed the company money (fuck you Peavey, I'll never buy another of your shit products again), but because the amp itself was a piece of shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Friday July 17 2015, @08:41AM
Yes, security, blah blah blah, but let's finally dispense with this charade that nobody around here wants their everyday appliances to communicate over something as standard as TCP/IP.
It is no charade. I don't even own a 'smart' phone. I'm sure as hell not going to use what will likely be a bunch of proprietary user-subjugating software installed on home appliances that communicate over the fucking Internet; I just love the idea of everything phoning home, DRM everywhere, and all the security issues that this will bring about. How retarded can people be?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @09:47AM
To quote from the prophet Barnum, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
(Score: 2, Interesting) by hoeferbe on Friday July 17 2015, @03:01PM
Amen. I've heard "IoT" referenced as "Internet of Targets" because of all the security concerns. The privacy and digital restriction mechanisms are just as worrying, too.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by davester666 on Friday July 17 2015, @01:27AM
...and...
I'm not interested in seeing advertisements on either of these things, or the many other IoT devices. Particularly since I already paid for the device.
Remote control of devices is of remarkably limited real-world usefulness [turning lights on/off, remotely reconfiguring your router, etc]. And touchscreen UI's are relatively poor for local use [hit the switch to turn on the light vs unlocking phone, navigating to app, finding the right switch entry and then hitting the 'switch']. This might get better with Apple's Siri/HomeKit support.
And paying every month for this stuff to work [Schlage locks for example, $9/month] is even more obnoxious.
Nevermind the constant tracking these companies do because "you agreed to it", because if they do give you the option to 'opt out', you get to opt-out of all iot functionality, not just their tracking.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Balderdash on Friday July 17 2015, @03:46AM
I already have enough notifications on my smartphone without my fucking refrigerator telling me that the milk is almost out of date.
I browse at -1. Free and open discourse requires consideration and review of all attempts at participation.
(Score: 2) by Balderdash on Friday July 17 2015, @03:59AM
I can see the advertisement: "10% off all orders if you subscribe your refrigerator to our new Foodland(tm) network! We'll keep an eye on your refrigerated products and give helpful recommendations for replacing items which are approaching the expiration date."
On page 17 of the EULA will be a line that grants "Joel Schmeckellick LLC" dba "The Foodland Network(tm)" dba "Foodland(tm)" permission to send notifications from third party advertisers.
I browse at -1. Free and open discourse requires consideration and review of all attempts at participation.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday July 17 2015, @06:28AM
You must live on the Islands. Aloha!
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--