The Internet of Someone Else’s Things
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The speaker for Samsung had some good insights. They have a refrigerator with a touchscreen and Instagram connectivity, which costs more than a regular refrigerator plus an iPad. He said that they saw three classes of customers:
- Those who want the latest thing.
- Those who like to show off their houses to others (the granite-countertop crowd.)
- Those who just have a lot of money and buy the high end version by default.
None of those people are getting this stuff because it's useful in any way. These are decorative objects to them.
If that's the Internet of Things, it's going to be a fad. Granite countertops are so last-year now, you know.
Or even the simpler version that just has some camera's and wifi so you can see what's in your fridge while shopping.
An intelligent HVAC system measures inside and outside temperature, humidity, CO, CO2, and people presence, and controls windows, fans, vents, heating, and cooling. Such systems can be bought from Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and others. Some big buildings have them. They're great for places like hotels, where big rooms go from empty to full and back throughout the day, with no particular pattern. Smart HVAC systems note CO2 level going up, which indicates more people present, and crank up airflow, regardless of temperature. The main problem with such systems is not that they're expensive, but that they're hard to set up and configure, especially since they're typically run by someone at the janitor level. Setup involves running around with airflow meters while someone at the control panel makes changes to the settings.
Now this is an application for machine learning. Something like a Nest, with control of heat, air conditioning, attic, bathroom, and kitchen fans, and some vents to the outside world, could bring modern HVAC technology to the home. It would learn over time such things as how fast the house temperature ramps up when the heat turns on, how much heat the house loses to the outside when the outside is cold, and how far different parts of the house are from the various vents and fans. When you have a party and the house is full, all the necessary adjustments would happen automatically.
Now that's home automation.
I still wouldn't buy one as I don't quite see the value proposition (and am not deeply offended by mashing buttons to program a schedule), but it seems like a bigger step in the direction you are talking about than you think (and I guess it helps to have smart thermostats in the wild when you start trying to sell smart dampers into homes).
However, a vary dumb thermostat with a humidity sensor could save you a fair amount of energy in humid areas over a simple temperature sensor. After all a humid 80 and a dry 80 are different, not just in feel but also in how fast mold grows. Basically, set a max temperature for the humidity level, and decide if you can just vent outside air, or if you need to dehumidify incoming air, or even if you need to heat/cool the air. The other option of simply running a dehumidifier uses a lot of energy and tends to create an overly dry environment.
Hotels and businesses have those systems because they have a very high throughput of people and constantly changing conditions in a large number of rooms. To have unnecessary heating or cooling for even a short period of time adds up to a lot of money.
But it's not realistic to assume that home has that kind of changing conditions. External conditions may vary quite a bit, but you can easily smooth those out with insulation. A home wouldn't need nearly the same amount of fine and extensive control of a hotel or business, except in rare circumstances that can just as easily be handled manually.
You want to stabilize the temperature in a home? Add more insulation. Done. And it doesn't require an expensive home automation system.
But I would want to have something completely under my control, where the information doesn't leave the house.
During the summer, we manually maintain the indoor temperature by following a simple -- but very manual -- formulaic process:
- When it gets cooler outside than it is inside (evening, night), open the windows. - If it gets too cold outside, close the windows in rooms we're occupying. - When it gets warmer outside than it is inside (mid-day on), close the windows. - When the sun hits the windows directly, close the blinds. - When the sun stops hitting the windows, open them again.
Rinse, repeat.
If we follow these steps, we can keep the house a very comfortable temperature with zero energy costs.
If we don't, it invariably gets too hot AND/OR too cold over a 24 hour period.
"Add more insulation" doesn't help much, unless you're suggesting we use insulation as a window covering.
not to be mentioned politicians have been saying 'we need to upgrade our electric system to a smart grid...' i was like oh cool, whats a smart grid? i was thinking like super efficient wires that had little resistance and cool switching systems. no, its just meters on your residence that can measure electricity so precise they can tell when someone stays over, or when you turn on the lights.
The electric company is trying to force me to switch, keep calling for an appointment. no thanks.
Send your heart rate to your doctor and or the ability for him or a medical staff to monitor via your watch is invaluable.
A IoT toilet of the future should be able to analyze your specimen data, look for irregularities in it's data based on million of records and notify you to schedule a doctor's appointment.
Samsung is presenting the benefits of IoT terribly wrong it seems.
Still, it leaves the question of whether it's actually possible, worth it and will be embraced by enough people to work. I'm skeptical.
It's an idea/thought I've always wanted to work on as I noted above for a few years now.
Overall the cost to create it I'm thinking is enormous and it's not something I or another could create/invent in a garage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/high-tech-toilet-ta...
Of course there are many ways to skin a cat and no one is doing it here in the US... Yet. The one who does it best and has the biggest Rolodex/bank wins in this much needed space.
Further, If you want to opt out of technology that will extend and save your life that is your choice.
For me my health/extending my life span is more important then privacy. Others may or may not feel the same.
Sorry couldn't resist!
This is very, very different from the situation which would exist in an "internet of things" world in which my toilet, coffeepot, toothbrush, and the like were all snooping on me and streaming their results. By intercepting all this data, which we already know the NSA is constantly doing, it would be possible to automatically construct a statistics-based picture of my health, and that of everyone else around me.
This is incredibly creepy, fucked up, wrong, and not even a little bit OK.
I've always looked at IoT as a mesh network of many specialized devices talking to each other to provide an overall context. For instance, speaking from my background: imagine a location sensor on a patient's wrist detecting an iBeacon in a particular ICU room indicating the patient has been upgraded, then triggering their vitals sensors to set to continuous monitoring, then upgrading the alert level for the patient's notifications in a physician's EMR, so on and so forth. In other words, these "Things" act more as specialized sensors, like our ears and eyes, that relay signals onto a digital thalamus/cerebrum where signals are integrated, a context is created, and actions are then taken.
I may be totally off-base here, and perhaps this isn't what Internet of Things is really about. But I hope it is.
There is also "Internet" in IoT. I'm not convinced hospital equipment, like many other control systems, really should be Internet accessible.
Your alarm has a heartbeat feature to protect against that kind of attack? No problem, the thieves will just walk through your neighborhood with the jammer for a few weeks so you get habituated to false alarms.
Also you can have systems that spray them with DNA-spray and upload pictures of them to the internet, so that, hopefully, we will end up getting 99+% of them.
The fallacy arises that conflates a small number of persistent threat actors, with the much larger population of opportunistic actors.
A better way to understand this the expected loss with and without an alarm, versus the cost of acquiring and operating that alarm. My claim is that the cost of such a system would be greatly reduced by its ease of installation and maintenance. That its presence would be at least as effective as a standard 'tape & magnets' type alarm system, and so would be a better overall value than that those older wired systems.
[1] http://www.st.com/web/en/seminar/stm32l0?sp_rid=NjkwODIzMzI3...
The IoT has huge potential, but when a company with the resources of Samsung is making Instagram connected fridges, maybe it needs to be rethought. Similar to how the web was rethought circa 2000-2001.
These things are are not at all equal.
I rarely have people over; when it comes to socializing I would always rather go to the other person's house. This is less effort on my part (prep, cleanup, etc...). When people do come around I don't care what they think beyond hoping it's not, "Wow what a filthy pig."
I do however have granite counter tops. The up front cost is more, but I'm a stayer, not a mover. My long term cost is less. The counter tops were installed 7 years ago and they look exactly the same today as they did when I moved in. When I die or get sent to the old folks home (hopefully not for another 50+ years) those counters will still be there and look just as good as they do today.
In the long run this is less money and less time and effort since I don't need someone replacing my laminate counter tops every 10 years. They also withstand high temperatures and are more sanitary since they are sealed and don't break down over time (dents, dings, scratches like laminate).
If you were to see my house, what you would find is that it is very plain, but that things inside of it are meant to last.
When I moved in the upstairs flooring was carpet; it was in bad shape; stains, discolored, but I waited 5 years to replace it because I'm cheap. When I did replace it I bought solid wood; I got a finish that was on clearance because it was discontinued. Like the counters, the floor will last the rest of my lifetime, worst case scenario I will have to pay to have it resurfaced once in my entire life span. This is much cheaper than carpet over the long run.
My basement is still carpeting; when I purchased the home the basement carpet was stained so badly and stank so badly of dog urine that it had to be replaced immediately. I was broke from all of the cost of purchasing the home so I had the absolute cheapest carpet installed and it is still there more than 10 years later in bad need of replacement again. When I do replace it, probably next year, I will put in a life time durable tile and be done with it FOREVER.
The IoT is all around you and you haven't even noticed it. It's cash registers and gas pumps, traffic lights, traffic sensors and red light cameras. It's video display ads and airport arrival/departure signs and traffic warning signs and scoreboards. It's burglar alarms and security cameras and inventory control. It's remote weather sensors and irrigation systems. It's commercial HVAC systems. It's remote controlled tractors and construction equipment. It's oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers and other industrial test equipment. It's sensors in manufacturing plants and oil fields and environmental sensors in conservation areas. It's tracking packages and monitoring conditions in shipping containers. It's video cameras and DVRs. And hundreds more applications I can't think of right now.
- A lot of IoT data is passively collected and reconstructed external to a device you own for applications that run on the device. Decentralizing the applications does not decentralize access to the data in practice. This makes perfect engineering sense: it saves a lot of battery and bandwidth on the device to not have the device involved in phoning home even if it is effectively "phoning home". (Few people grok how sophisticated this type of data reconstruction is.)
- IoT data coming off consumer devices is higher velocity and higher volume than anyone imagines unless you work with it. Billions of records per second continuously, petabytes per day, from single data sources. See above: the data your device effectively generates is not limited by the bandwidth of the device. Most applications of this data joins several of these data sources, often in real-time.
- The fundamental operation done on IoT data that makes it uniquely useful for consumer and other applications is the spatial join. If you think you are going to do that on a decentralized peer-to-peer network then you don't understand spatial joins. Doubly so considering the aforementioned bandwidth requirements.
Having physical control of a device will allow some control of where data goes but the architectural requirements of IoT will greatly constrain the extent to which this is possible in practice.
- decentralization is fine; no one is complaining that a thermometer doesn't store temperature log (though it could have some benefits) - it's fine to store it on a server, but people are complaining that they can't store that data on their own servers, they have to use insert-random-toilet-paper-startup's servers. Especially that those third parties do not provide any value (even though they could, in principle), they just farm you for data.
- collecting a lot of data doesn't mean learning a lot of useful things; quite often it's the opposite. What really matters is what you do with this data. If your Hardware-as-a-Service smart thermostat records temperature twice a second and the only thing you do with this data is logging it and looking at pretty graphs, it could collect readings twice an hour for more-less the same value given to you.
- spatial join - could you elaborate on that? From cursory Googling, it seems to be a term from GIS that mixes some data with information about its underlying database implementation...
When you also assume that most of the IoT devices are going to be very low power and probably not have much storage or processing power, it seems an odd choice to use. What's the advantage of block-chaining over something like Paxos which is already widely used and more or less the standard distributed consensus algorithm?
The block chain solves the distributed consensus problem in a way that is robust against attacks. That's what is so costly. Paxos requires that every node be trusted.
The problem the article is getting at is emerging as a core technology problem. Either your security is feudal, the you don't own it model, or you are responsible for admin. Few people have the knowledge or time for that. So in that model it becomes the Internet of someone else's pwned things. Now instead of your car not starting because you're late on a payment, your car doesn't start because someone who heard about your blog on 4chan doesn't like you.
I think solving this problem in a way that is neither feudal nor opens everyone to attack is a core tech problem of the 21st century. It's an engineering problem, and no I don't think the block chain solves it. Block chain schemes as a class are too heavy and have scalability problems. They can work in some domains but not this one, and not universally.
There are several differences, but the main one is that with Paxos all the members are trusted, and have to be under a single administrative domain. With the blockchain, the whole point is to come to consensus without trust in a central authority.
Other differences:
- Paxos (Chubby, etcd) and related algorithms (Zab/Zookeeper) are used with a small, fixed membership -- i.e. 3 to 7 servers. Everybody else is a client. In contrast, the blockchain is for a huge, frequently changing membership.
- Paxos is expensive and is used within a single data center with LAN latency. The blockchain is used in the exact opposite situation: on the Internet with large latencies and large variance in latency.
Also, note that Thread is at least a year from being baked.
Hardly so. I really doubt users would care less. How many people really bother about that iPhone is locked. You can root android based devices with little ease still, people really don't bother or care. People will use things which are easier to use, have a seem less experience.
There are people working on new toolstacks for the difficult problems around decentralised systems [2] but it's important to realise that business models must also adapt. Until that happens, each smart device is just another mechanism for farming user-data (a la 'big data').
[1] Incidentally, 'Cloud' was a term that lagged the technology (we were already using it before the term was coined).
[2] e.g. I'm working on Mirage http://openmirage.org/wiki/overview-of-mirage and Nymote http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/
Not saying this is a perfect and open system, but it could be a step in the right direction and does not require a live internet connection for your things ot talk to each other.
AllJoyn has a lot of major backers but has yet to take off.