
The Internet of Someone Else’s Things - BIackSwan
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/the-internet-of-someone-elses-things/
======
Animats
The "Internet of Things" is still rather pointless. I went to an "Internet of
Things" meetup in San Francisco last month. All parties defined "IoT" as
"controlling something via a smartphone and cloud server". Most of the
applications are rather banal. There are smartphone-connected garage door
openers.

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.

~~~
kyro
This has never really been my impression of Internet of Things. The examples
you've mentioned seem far too obvious and simplistic. To me, it's far more
than scrambling to find the nth device to make smartphone-connected.

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.

~~~
Animats
That's an "industrial" application. Manufacturing plants have been heavily
networked for decades. Hospitals are going that way, but security is a
problem.

~~~
xorcist
I don't runderstand why you would want to have mesh networks at hospitals. It
is a controlled environment where you could roll out a centralised
infrastructure easily, with all the benefits of management, traceability and
accountability that follows.

There is also "Internet" in IoT. I'm not convinced hospital equipment, like
many other control systems, really should be Internet accessible.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Disposable things? They need to be zero-configuration or they won't get
used/connected at all. A mesh works that way; centralized usually doesn't.

~~~
xorcist
I don't what disposable tech exists in hospitals, but zero-configuration mesh
means no authentication, and I think most medical data is far too sensitive
for that.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
or... automatic authentication

~~~
xorcist
What's the difference? Or did I just have a "whoosh" moment (when a joke went
over my head)?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
No, you can provision new devices into the network automatically. True
somebody could be watching; but if they miss it then the device proceeds with
secure data streams.

------
jandrewrogers
Articles like this remind me that people have a really difficult time wrapping
their head around just how mind-bogglingly different the nature of the
Internet of Things architectures actually are. Traditional technical solutions
to most problems completely break down for this use case. Some specific
points:

\- 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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Those are lots of buzzwords but none of this happens or makes sense in
practice as we see it today (for consumer, not industrial, IoT).

\- 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...

------
jeffreyrogers
The article mentioned the possibility of a peer to peer based internet of
things and then suggested it use some sort of block-chain like algorithm as
its distributed consensus algorithm. That seems a bit strange to me since if I
understand the block-chain correctly it requires a massive amount of storage
that only grows as the network is more widely used.

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?

~~~
higherpurpose
Google and ARM already support a mesh networking protocol, so the IoT devices
_don 't have to_ be connected to the Internet - but can be, though a gateway
like a mobile phone.

[http://www.threadgroup.org/2014_07_Press_Release.aspx](http://www.threadgroup.org/2014_07_Press_Release.aspx)

~~~
jon-wood
There's also Zigbee[1] which was specifically designed as a radio protocol for
home automation, in which each device has a relatively short radio range but
works on the assumption that if you're automating your home there's likely to
be devices all over the place which can mesh together. I've not used it
myself, but it looks to be pretty popular amongst manufacturers.

[1] [http://www.zigbee.org/](http://www.zigbee.org/)

~~~
TeMPOraL
If it sounds too good to be true, it is - they had to break a perfectly good
protocol by making it closed and requiring a costly license to use it. If we
want good, consumer-friendly IoT, it needs to be built on a protocol that
people are free to hack on in their garages.

~~~
jon-wood
For a less nifty, but probably also less complex solution, I'm using Ciseco
radio units to build some home automation at the moment. They're available for
< $20, and with the right aerial have a range measured in kilometres (although
more usually a few hundred metres). I'm pretty sure there's also a repeater
mode on the actual radio modules if you need extra range.

------
__Joker
_For one thing, I suspect that at some point, after the first wave of the
Internet of Things, open APIs and root access will become a selling point_

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.

------
amirmc
IoT is a buzzword that is progressing through the hype cycle _faster_ than the
technology that enables it [1] - 'Appcessories' is a better term for the
things available to us right now, since they're inevitably tethered to
smartphones or someone else's backend.

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](http://openmirage.org/wiki/overview-of-mirage) and Nymote
[http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-
nymote/](http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/)

------
anotherevan
I'm far more interested in the intranet of things, then the internet of
things.

------
analog31
At least in my house, all Internet traffic still has to go through my router.
Could that be the place where we control who and what our things talk to?

~~~
Too
That would require reverse engineering the application running on the cloud
server and the transfer protocol so that you can host an equivalent version
yourself. It can be done, see for example pirated Battle.net servers for the
Warcraft games, but in many cases the effort simply is too much.

~~~
analog31
Aha. Perhaps I'd be satisfied with simply blocking the traffic, assuming my
refrigerator is designed so my food won't get warm if the fridge can't phone
home. (For now, a fridge with a mechanical thermostat and no microprocessor
seems to keep my food cold).

------
e12e
Firechat really isn't the best counter-example as it is closed source and uses
(afaik) a proprietary protocol. Additionally, it's only available in the
walled ios and android gardens, meaning google/apple and the developers are
both in a position to push updates. I'm not sure a profiliation of propietary
networks is a good solution to the centralization of the Internet.

------
thechut
The AllJoyn [1] protocol supports local communication between devices. It
gives devices of certain types the ability to tie into defined APIs for
specific shareable functions. So that your door lock could turn on your lights
for example.

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.

1: [https://www.alljoyn.org/](https://www.alljoyn.org/)

------
woah
IIRC Firechat uses a central server, but sometimes over a bluetooth mesh.

