The Internet of Things Will Be the World's Biggest Robot

Agreed...further, I'd want to be able to turn them off, easily...I'm stingy with bandwidth and giving away data related to my personal preferences...

The only feature I want (or really need) in an "appliance" , of any sort, is easy access to diagnostics if it fails...

I'd prefer appliances with something like OBD (II, III), installed in automobiles...

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.

An Intranet of Things?

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.

> When are we going to start demanding devices that are untethered from a mothership and run from home computers?

When "we" understand the value of Free and Open Source Software.

Some do, some don't, some don't yet, some never will.

When an untethered machine can provide all of the functionality of a machine that phones home.

(never)

"AS LONG AS they aren't all phoning home to their corporate overlords every 30msec."

We're working on that.

> Utopias require a slave class

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

IoT covers autonomous vehicles as well. Which is a growing industry that is advancing at a steady pace.

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.

Troll your family from afar?

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.

He loves it.

PS: He's also got the IoT lights :P

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.

Weapon bearing drones?

What about... World Wide Web?

... interoperability ...

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)).

[0] http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/m2m

[1] https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework

EDIT: typos (possibly even grammar mistakes gasp)