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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: 2) by SGT CAPSLOCK on Friday July 17 2015, @04:52PM
Talk about security! Geez. How many stories does Soylent post on the front page about "XXX Has Been Hacked" in a month? Those are just big companies or government agencies. It'd be too pointless (because it's so frequent) to talk about everyone who has a private network compromised each day. A refrigerator, coffee pot, or even a doorbell connected to the Internet - those are just more things with potentially insecure firmware, backdoors, or other problems that could wind up opening my private network up to people who don't need to be on it.
There's also the matter of these things all phoning home with telemetry, constantly checking for firmware updates (which, in my experience, equates to strengthening DRM and fucking up the UI's rather than ever fixing security holes), and generally just wasting bandwidth for the sake of it.
That said - on a kind of related note, I'm messing with the idea of getting a new TV lately and I'm interested in one with a lot of things I want (4K with a nice bright panel - are they all made by LG?), but without all the "smart TV" features. I love my friend's TV that he just bought, but I wanted to facepalm after he did the latest firmware update and noted that the UI was about 50% as fast as before. He only uses it as a computer monitor, too, so it's not like upgrading Netflix or adding other things helped him. sighhh