Greedy datagrabs, crap security will KILL the Internet of Thingies Is the Internet of Things a nightmare, a glorious utopia, or might it just never happen? Last week I was asked to offer a few thoughts in a panel discussion for over 200 PriceWaterhouseCoopers staff, ranging from hackers to business geeks. I’ve only touched on IoT briefly, when David Cameron at CeBIT announced he was throwing …
The most obvious benefit to intelligent fridges is being used to smooth peak electicity demand by shutting down during TV breaks etc. Except this doesn't even need the internet, just the AC frequency signal and a bit of random number generation should do it nicely and securely. One would think it in the generator's interest to pay for the chip.
Except it hasn't happened. Why?
I don't EVER want my fridge shutting down, but my water heater and maybe my A/C are OK if someone pays for it. I have a device where my power company can shut off my water heater at times of high demand, and they give me a chunk off my bill.
So yes, it has happened, just not with a fridge.
That is a really good idea, and I can think of a number of other appliances that could withstand a couple of minutes "off" time with no real impact. Electric heaters & ovens, aircon, washing machines, dishwashers, pond pumps, central heating systems, bread makers, printers. Even entire production lines ...
From an engineering perspective all that is required is to modulate an on/off signal onto the mains and let "smart" devices turn themselves on/off as required. I agree, no need for IOT here.
I'm sorry
It woiuld not be OK to turn off most of these;
". Electric heaters & ovens, aircon, washing machines, dishwashers, pond pumps, central heating systems, bread makers, printers. "
Pond pumps maybe. Are they a significant contribution to energy use?
But electric heaters and ovens have a device that keeps the temperature at a functional level, it's called a thermostat. Anything else is going to be ineffective. You can't leave people without heating for long and the energy would just be used to regain temperature a short whiole later. Ovens often need to cook at a steady controlled temperature, and agai the thermostat controls that. Better insualtion is a damned sight more useful that Big Brother controlling our cooking times.. Bread makers need to make bread according to a schedule.
And printers? Routine office printers or big industrial ones? Do office printers use much energy when they're not printing? You can't completely switch them off if you want to switch them on again. So the effect isn't going to be great. Apart from the little matter of practicality, having them when you need them.
Most modern refrigerators have other controls besides thermostats. One of the more significant is a pressure sensor that signals the compressor to hold off on restarting until the pressure has bled down a bit to reduce the inrush current when it does start so as not to blow a circuit breaker. Historically refrigerators are on their own circuit for this very reason since if the fridge tried to start while another appliance was running, such as a simple coffee maker, it could easily trip the breaker/fuse and you could return from work to a rather unpleasant circumstance.
This is where I see smart appliances actually being useful since a fridge or freezer can hold off starting so they don't cause a spike that takes the circuit down. That way if a fridge and coffee maker are on the same 1800 watt circuit and the fridge only needs 500 watts to run but 1500 watts to start it could tell the 900 watt coffee maker to pause while it started and resume once it dropped below the threshold.
As for the "we need X" IoT fridge, I'm married and get/send these texts already depending on who is out. The only time I come home and find I've not picked up something we need is when we're all out together.
That's interesting. I thought fridges just plugged into the mains, like almost everything else. Mine have always done. As have those of my friends and family, the places I've worked, etc.
Are we talking everyday domestic fridges, or big industrial jobbies.
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You do realize that industry, i.e., big machines and such, has had IoT for some time, right? It's just that nobody has made a big deal about it. Industry does have quite a lot to monitor, from the tire pressure in dump trucks to all kinds of factory processes. But it's an intranet, for local use only, security breaches aside.
Yes, I have IP cameras, but I don't open my network to the outside. That's part of the sensible nature of security, is to not expose what doesn't need to be exposed. So what about the fridge? The fridge isn't supposed to nag, it's supposed to report what's in it when you're at the store, trying to remember what's in it. You do realize that the alternative is to write things down on a slip of paper, right?
Look at all of the things that we use remotes for today. You realize all of that's IoT, but without the internet, right? I remember when a friend of mine, madly obsessed with remotes, had them all lined up on his coffee table, and then he wanted to turn off the telly. But that didn't work, because he'd grabbed his calculator instead. (It was hilarious watching him mash that red C/CE button!)
So what it comes down to, do we need industrial control for the home? Maybe a bit, but that's all there is, really. Old thermostats need to be replaced with something a bit better, but mainly because the old ones stick a bit, and don't turn off the heat when they should. But it's not because we want the heat only when the electricity is the cheapest.
"You do realize that the alternative is to write things down on a slip of paper, right?"
Well, carry it in your phone if you must. But the fridge list can only tell you what you've run out of. With a bit of big data snooping it might know that you usually need butter on Wednesday, or whatever, but beyond that it's not going to be any better than a list of things you bought and used previously.
" Yes Amazon, I did buy Gorgonzola last week, no I don't want to buy another effing lump of the effing stuff"
Think of all the stupid emails you get from Amazon about stuff you've already bought ( often from them).
Yes, and those SCADA systems are notoriously insecure despite their high prices and the fact they control critical infrastructure and are managed by professionals . Even air gapping is insufficient, cf. stuxnet. What hope does cheap semi-disposable consumer equipment run by people without a clue have?
Thingies need to have a strictly restricted scope. If they are safety-sensitive (for example room lighting) then they really shouldn't be accessible to anything except a local thingy controller, which might be secure, or might itself be accessible only through local routing.
Don't know ebough about IPV6. With IPV4 you might use the private LANs, for example
192.168.80.x or 192.168.80.x/23 /22 etc., a site's worth of thingies, which for the greatest safety would be a separate VLAN or physical LAN.
192.168.80.x and another IP address y.y.y.y, the thingy-controller gateway
y.y.y.y could be (say) 192.168.14.207, itself accessible only on the LAN or through a NAT-router, or
a "proper" IP address accessible from the world, if you trust it's secure enough.
If the thingies are safety-critical ... well, I wonder how long it wil be before someone attacks a SCADA network and brings down a town's electricity or even a national power grid?
I'm more concerned about the "smart grid".
IoT is easy to secure, just don't connect the damn things(i.e. don't use them), smart grid is likely to be forced upon us whether we want it or not (at least that seems to be the trend anyway). I am not concerned about someone "hacking" into the power in my apartment, much more concerned, no matter how "secure" the technology claims to be that bad stuff can feed back to the power sources or distribution centers and get them to shut down(or worse).
I think we've all seen enough distopian futures in fiction not to trust machines with knowledge about butter consumption or anything so vital. It's just we've seen the huge data lapses from just about every major US retail chain this year, and that's money - something as precious to a corporate as blood plasma to humans, we're spooked and distrustful. I don't want my fridge to have any opinions about me, let alone grass me up to my light bulb and anyone my lightbulb is busy blabbing it's mouth off to.
It's possibly the other way around : there are some advantages for us (the comparison with industrial IoT is very good .. what we're talking about here is making it affordable for consumers) but the attraction to corporations is all about what they can get out of it .. and that's largely hype, and relies on us naively allowing them access to it.
Bring it on, I say, but keep it useful : don't give away access for peanuts, as we have with so much other data.
"What are the advantages to me?"
A little less personal admin in your life, I suppose: Less shopping lists, no need to remember to fiddle with the thermostat because Nan is coming over tonight and you can do it via your phone instead. Minor useful advantages that you may or may not want to bother with.
'Gamifying' would be the next step to popularise uptake. Upload your tooth-brushing stats to the internet league tables to beat your friends and win gold stars. Honestly, gamifying stuff that's otherwise pretty useless tends to result in enormous popularity and people clearly enjoy it, based on the number of Candy Crush requests I receive and social media updates about how far people have run today.
Maybe some minor money saving: Turn the lights off from your phone. Some extra re-assurance: Did I really turn the oven off?
I suspect a lot of it will do for personal admin what the mobile did for social admin: Cut out on some of the pre-planning that we do in our lives. Just like there is now no need to pre-plan a trip to 'X' pub for 'X' time, because you can text people if the pub happens to be full of tossers and change plans, I can see myself deciding to turn the heating on and the oven because I'm going to chip out of work early, or whatever.
I'm still a bit 'meh' about it: I don't need to compete with people for toothbrushing scores, I don't like intrusion, but I would quite like to have the oven on for my pizza and a warm home when I get in from the pub. It's not a game-changer; mere convenience.
"..I suspect a lot of it will do for personal admin what the mobile did for social admin: Cut out on some of the pre-planning that we do in our lives. Just like there is now no need to pre-plan a trip to 'X' pub for 'X' time, because you can text people if..."
As in, "Sorry I missed my godson's christening, I didn't see the message on facebook" which I heard recently.
Only then it will be, "Sorry I didn't buy the eggs, Tesco didn't realise we needed them ."
Considering that the current internet is anything but secure, I would never want an internet of things. First of all, hackers will have a field day. Major corporations cannot even secure cash terminals. Everyday I read about how all the customer's credit card info was stolen from some major retail firm. If the professionals cannot secure the internet, how is these intelligent appliances going to be secure.
Secondly the government is currently on a binge of trying to find out everything that it can about peoples private lives (to stop terrorists and child molesters of course). With 5eyes and the NSA collecting every possible piece about citizens that they can, it will be sooner than later that they will want all of the info from these machines (like how many people have more butter than they need, or did they leave the lights on in more than one room). That will create an Orwellian nightmare for the people. Of course corporations will expect to get all of the data that they can. No thanks, I'll pass on this idea!
"Seriously, is the world populated with saints and angels?"
Well, yes, apparently.
A certain percentage of our population(s) are currently, and actively, maintaining a stance that regulation and laws are bad. Almost all laws. Therefore if/when we remove regulation and laws it simply must be due to the fact that, fundamentally and essentially, everyone will indeed act as saints and angels from that day onward.
Don't look at, or blame, me. That's their political stance when boiled down to purity of concept: regulations are bad because everyone will always act for the good, as regulations get in the way of 'correct' acts.
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No AC. You missed the point. Without all these rules the free market will sort everything out to perfection. No company will get too large and be able to control price or supply. No contract would be devious and unfair. No children would be used in production. No products will be unsafe because we would just choose the safe one from a free and open market, hotels would charge a reasonable price for internet use and.....,Oh wait. .
"Last week I was asked to offer a few thoughts in a panel discussion for over 200 PriceWaterhouseCoopers staff..... and this was a challenging audience that can smell bovine waste products a mile away. "
Because that's their core business. Tossers.
And if we've got any PWC'ers round here, perhaps they can explain the epic failure of "Green Deal" that was one of your little earners wasn't it? Until the brown sticky stuff of Green Deal Finance Company got stuck all over your paws, just like the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby? Ever expecting to see that shareholder loan money again, or did you smooth talk DECC into paying those generously upholstered invoices on the sly?
The problem is that all these companies are coming up with fancy new devices with features that require your device to connect to their server. That immediately puts a breach in the (fire)wall of your home because someone is extracting data that they think may be useful to them. I notice they generally use proprietary and unpublished protocols and never give you the option to run your own server that does not need to talk to the outside world. I appreciate that most people are sleepwalking into the surveillance society, but some of us are unhappy about having all these devices that phone home even though it's not strictly necessary for function. Some are even designed to require a remote server even when it's not necessary, solely to be able to gather the data.
"Sleepwalking into the surveillance society"
Sleepwalking? Sleepwalking???!!!
They're lining up with credit cards in hand asking "YES SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER!!" to the biatchslapping they've gotten used to getting. They are moron sheep being led into a shiny door marked "Meat enter here", and then wonder how come their cousins who went in 1/2 hour ago haven't come out the other side yet (they have, but now they fit into nice stackable prelabeled tins marked "Fresh").
And what's that smell, they ask? "Wow, smells like Shepherd's pie! Must be waiting for us in there!" So they dance around on their little hooves in happiness while the herder hits them hard on the arse to push them along, lest the gravy [train] runs thin.
bad security in IoT has one important cause that bad security in the "normal" internet does not: scarcity of resources. encryption is computationally intensive for embedded microcontrollers that otherwise need to do very little processing. and encrypted data adds a lot of overhead to protocols designed for embedded networks, which increases power consumption a ton (not important for mains-powered devices, but very importany for battery-powered ones).
just thought I'd add that here, since it's very rarely mentioned. of course, imo lazy/cheap development is still probably the biggest reason why security in the space is so dismal...
I think it's mostly the power issue that limits the use of encryption.
Many low-cost microcontrollers like Atmel's XMEGA come with AES-128 support that is really easy to use and takes at most a few hundred microseconds (I'm being lazy not looking at the datasheet here!).
It's a bit more of a pain to bake in provision for distribution and updating of key, but there are long-established standards (e.g. STS) that could be adapted for this purpose.
But that's a stupid way to do it.
Far brighter to have a key for the household, and then you add that to each device when you buy it, which it uses to encrypt output.This is then picked up by your personal server which holds the decryption key.
Heck, you don't even really need to use a public/secret key pair - you could just use a single key across all your devices, and change it if one got stolen, the same way I change a house's locks if one's keys get nicked.
Why risk having a mechanism for pushing out keys, etc. that can be so easily subverted?
I'm not enticed by fridges that can tell me if I'm getting fat; I'm not enticed by devices that devices that connect to some external service for rating my greenness or dietary status; I'm not enticed by devices that exchange credits and coupons with external devices; and I'm not enticed by the ability to control the heating, shutters, and lights from my phone.
Here's what I see: a fridge that will nag and probably won't have the firmware capable of coping with multiple people with different tastes and/or dietary restrictions/allergies, meaning ultimately you will be expected to conform to the fridge, not the logical other way around; make it sound as awesome as you like, the truth is that such sites would not exist if devices didn't regurgitate large amounts of data to them, it's none of their damn business if I make a hot chocolate at 3am; more data spewage built into the design; and the last one - yes, great idea, the closest a domestic house would get the "mission critical" able to accept commands from the outside world, what could possibly go wrong?
It might be nice to tweak the heating from my chair, get the TV to switch itself on when a programme I want to see begins, programme the washer to do its thing at midnight from a browser interface, and see if the lasagne is cooked yet by pinging the microwave. But this is all from my desk to other parts of the house. Anything outside of that scope is not a risk worth taking.
Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) says the value of a network will increase exponentially with the number of nodes.
Walking across the room to switch on the heat is not a terrible burden, and we’ve had thermostats to do that for decades. (It would be nicer if the thermostat had useful interaction with the seasons. 21° is refreshingly cold when it’s 27° outside, but 21° is excessively hot when it’s 16°.) It’s a bigger problem when you’re managing a commercial building and need to walk up multiple flights of stairs to reach all the thermostats. And you pretty much need the Internet if you’re managing an entire campus (Microsoft’s 88 Acres, which is not online anymore).
For me, the matter isn’t whether it’s online (online is better), but whether I have control over where the data go. That sort of security is crucial and currently missing from the Internet of Things.
Why wouldn't the fridge be able to cope with multiple users? That seems to me an unreasonably pessimistic assessment, unless you insist on charging out and buying "version 1" the moment it's announced without waiting for a few years' development to make it half-way useful.
Don't get me wrong, I have yet to hear a convincing use-case for this 'IoT' idea. But to assume that it will all be permanently stuck at a "proof of concept" level coded by know-nothing numpties who've never had to sell a product to an end user - seems unnecessarily harsh.
I can imagine a fridge that can tell me what's in it being useful - if it can interface to a shopping list app on my phone. Sadly, that's a piece of the jigsaw that no-one I've heard has actually mentioned yet, so I'm very much afraid it's been relegated to the "oh, that's just packaging" pigeonhole in the engineers' minds.
"But to assume that it will all be permanently stuck at a "proof of concept" level coded by know-nothing numpties who've never had to sell a product to an end user - seems unnecessarily harsh."
You're obviously not familiar with the dismal mess that is the firmware and applications of most "smart" TV's.
Years (if not decades) after suitable protocols and hardware were cheaply available, and years after privacy became a consumer concern, these devices offer weak and slow functionality, often have the most criminally inept user interfaces, struggle with quick easy interconnectivity, have maker-loaded spyware reporting back to base, and are very quickly discarded from the maker's "supported software & devices" list. And that's top-brand TVs. Can you imagine what the software on a mid to low end smart fridge would be like?
Hardware markers don't get software. They don't understand the need to support it, they don't have experience in creating software, and their mentality in all things is build to the lowest cost, bundle it out the factory gate and forget it.
Why wouldn't the fridge be able to cope with multiple users?
I take three beers out of the fridge.
How does it know I'm not going to drink all three? All it knows is that three beers are gone; there is no understanding of the purpose[1] of them going.
Vic.
[1] I might be having a binge. I might have friends over. I might have only been storing these beers whilst my neighbour's fridge was broken. I might have decided that this beer is awful and I want to throw it away. There are many ways in which data without a realistic model is simply misleading...
Also, maybe you took the beers (canned, barcoded etc,) out to make room for the home brewed (nn electronic tag) stuff your mates brought round. Or because you're expecting to bring back a supply of cider from the farmer's market.
I don't want my fridge becoming one of those hotel room things that tries to charge me each time I knock a bottle of their nasty wine while trying to squeeze in a carton of proper milk for my tea.
Why would I expect the fridge to track what happens to the beers after I take them out?
I'm not asking for my fridge to tell me "Buy more beer". That's no part of its job, that's why I need a separate "shopping list" app, and that's where I would worry about how much and what kinds of beer I want to have around the house this week, including beers that never go anywhere near a fridge at all. And my fridge would then interface with that app to answer the much more limited question, "How much beer, and of what type(s), is in it right now? Assuming the bottles all contain what they say they do."
And my fridge would then interface with that app to answer the much more limited question, "How much beer, and of what type(s), is in it right now? Assuming the bottles all contain what they say they do."
So - that would be the fridge not dealing with multiple users, then?
That's where we came in...
Vic.
It's my f*****g fridge. And I don't want anyone outside my house knowing what I keep in it. It's no one's business if I do choose to fill it with cream and beer. Nor do I want it telling me not to.
I know perfectly well what to avoid buying. It's not the fridge's decision, it's mine.
*Sorry about the cliche.
Supermarket cards are voluntary. You can keep them in your wallet and pay cash.
Or you can game them. Shop in Sainsbury's for a few weeks with loyalty card, then start shopping at Tesco for the next few weeks. When you return to Sainsburys you'll get extra vouchers to persuade you back next week as well. "Rinse and Repeat". (or "Every little helps"). Add another supermarket if these two ever get wise to your game.
I can forsee a future where tossing dice to decide the little things may become a good strategy. Let them data-mine THAT!
Good article, Andrew. (I have been critical of some of your output in the past so credit where due.)
The real problem with 'IoT' is that what was once simply home automation is now accessible externally, which is worrying from both a privacy and security standpoint.
It not be necessarily possible to burn a house down but if security cameras and alarms can be controlled over the Internet, they can be disabled over the Internet.
In addition, what a way to select targets! A simple scanning tool could find out those networks with juicy, expensive electronics inside. If you can then find out someone's details from those systems - many will have registration details to connect to online services - then you can likely find where the house is. Any activity logging could go a long way to showing when people are home and presto - you have a target, a haul and a timeframe.
That and, you know, I am sure our must-protect-the-children/fight-the-terrorists governments won't at all be interested in slurping up data from these devices . . .
You only have to look at the relatively recent revelation about LG 'Smart' TVs phoning home with information about all the files stored on an USB device connected to the TV and any files played through it over the network.
Given that our governments seem to think that combating copyright violations is second only to combating 'terrorism' in their pile of ends-justify-the-means imperatives, do you really want this stuff transmitting back to homebase?
Yes. There is a place, perhaps, for a network of things inside my house. There is very little to be said for connecting that network to any that is accessible from the Internet. In over six decades of inability to control things inside my house remotely I have suffered only very minor and occasional inconvenience. The notion of connecting everything I might want to control to the Internet, even through a VLAN, gives me a righteous case of the queasies.
Smart meters, surge pricing and SLAs
A maximum price I can be charged per unit for unrestricted 24/7 supply like I get now.
The ability to use real time price signals from the distributer to cap my own useage how I like so when I go to turn the immersion heater on during corrie it might ask if I want to wait a bit.
The only data sent back to the distributer should be my current demand (it's nothing to do with them what I'm doing with it)
The market should spread the load.
Generaters will still have to have sufficient backup/contingency for full peak demand like they do now.
Investors in electricity have not done badly in the past and it is time they invested in some new infrastructure to ensure the business continues and my lights don't go out.
A few points on "iot"
a) A lot of this stuff, I don't want. I don't want to spend extra for an internet connected fridge, washing machine, dish washer. I don't really need a remote thermostat either although that could be useful. A lot of this will be a device looking for a market, I'm pretty geeky and still don't feel the need to spend lots more to get "remote control" versions of devices, just to be able to remote control it.
b) I don't want devices tied into some single vendor, i.e. you get it and it "phones home" to the company website to get it's functionality. I think a lot of these products do just that, they tie into a online service. I'd like to be able to access the product directly. It sidesteps privacy concerns regarding widespread data grabs if the data stays local, and avoids the problem of having a company decide to discontinue it's service meaning your device lost functionality or completely went kaput. But...
c) Some devices really are designed with security as an afterthought (or not there at all), they assume a LAN with no hostile devices. This is usually a safe assumption with IPV4 but not really with IPV6.
While your two problems are true, I think the biggest killer will be people asking why?
You might sucker a few people, once with promises of great new features but once they turn out to be a waste of time that will be it. Who wants their fridge, toaster, light bulbs... accessible online?
...wouldn't recognize REAL work if it slapped them in the face, and are totally incapable of doing any.
Who exactly ARE these numb-nuts who come up with these completely effete ideas?
Sorry, but I've had "e-intrusion" up to here; and not a week goes by without a breaking story regarding a major financial catastrophe due to hacking.
Get this, blockheads--and this includes Google, BIG TIME--loud and clear:
I'm LEAVING the internet as fast as I can; NOT, for God's sake PUTTING MY HOUSE ON THE INTERNET.
"Good ideas are overrated...The world is filled with people with good ideas and very short of people who can even rake a leaf. I’m tired of good ideas." --Andy Rooney
"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better" -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Lot internet connection a week or two ago, and while the lnterwebs were down I tried to print from my phone(Android) to my Brother printer. Didn't think much of it as It's something I do from time to time, without much fuss
What I realised due to my net downtime, was the Brother app needs the internet to do it's thing!
Anything I print makes it's way out to Brother, gets rendered, then gets sent back to the printer
Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth ... App deleted.
There are so many problems with the Internet of Things. And what's so funny is that for all the industry is shouting about it (and licking its lips about the coming cash bonanza), almost all of those problems are created by the IT industry itself.
Security in embedded systems is currently laughable. And doesn't seem to be improving, despite the last 20 years of computer history. That's pathetic and inexcusable. Almost no-one who's used a computer in that time hasn't had to deal with spam, incoming viruses and phishing. And coders and engineers use computers more than most.
Everyone is so greedy that there are seemingly as many compteting standards as there are industry players. It's going to be impossible to dominate IoT in the way you could conceivably dominate the operating system market, because you're talking about so many different players. Especially if you're talking about commercial as well as domsetic systems. There are now some alliances, but there seem to be hundreds of them too.
Then we come to data privacy. People are starting to notice Facebook and Google. They may continue to ignore the problem, but society can change very quickly. Politicians can suddenly take notice of a problem, if the electorate shout loudly enough, and suddenly tell all those corporate lobbyists to bugger off. Remember that Germany are increasinly influential in the EU, and their electoare are already deeply concenrned about privacy. They've just got their commissioner put in place to look at it, and there's reasonable evidence to suggest that it was anti-Google elements in the German press (Axel Springer) that helped get the current Commission President his job. The EU may suddenly start pushing for better privacy, so might the electorate. A lot of the IoT and internet companies seem to be blissfully unaware of this risk.
This wouldn't be so much of a problem, except the easiest and cheapest way to run these things is going to be via websites. Otherwise you have to have appliances designed for the control job, which then have to be flexible enough to do all sorts of things. i.e. mini PCs.
The next problem that I think is huge is one that is dear to my heart. Or pisses me off every day in my work (depending on your point of view). The hideous and stupid cheapskatery of the building industry. This is true of both the commercial and domestic lot. The industry is set up to fail, because clients never get involved enough or have their interests properly represented. The only time they do interfere, is to screw everyone over on money. So costs get cut in totally inappropriate ways. This means that there's never going to be wiring for IoT, or places to fit the sensors.
Take an example of something I saw over ten years ago. Central Locking for houses. The idea being that just like a car, you leave, press the button on your keyfob, and everything gets locked, and alarm is set. Or you get a warning if you've left a window open. This would cost almost nothing to do when building a house, but to retrofit it (and not have it look a mess) would cost thousands. The same is true of solar panels (PV or thermal). Installation usually costs more than the equipment, but when you're already building the roof, that installation cost drops to a couple of extra hours work from the guys already onsite.
That throws everything back on wireless. Can anyone think of a wireless installation they've used that's worked flawlessly? And hasn't crapped out at some vital moment? And how many times do you have to explain to people that it might be a good idea to reboot their wireless router before claiming their broadband or computer isn't working? That's one major disadvantage of wireless. As well as interference, buildings with thick internal walls that block signals. Before I've even mentioned hospitals, who're paranoid about wireless signals (although less so than they used to be). Certainly last time we looked at a wireless sensor for work, one of the main target markets was hospitals and so the idea was nixed. Just as well, as I was working up my arguments as to why it wouldn't work in this application anyway - and rather concerned about how enthusiastic people were getting about it.
The place the internet of things should take off is commercial buildings. Many of them have already got BMS systems. Which will take a variety of inputs and can be easily programmed. Many of them have also massively cut back on maintenance, and often no longer have caretakers onsite. So remote reporting is an obvious solution. And many of them suffer from the problem that vital kit is in locked rooms, that it's not always easy to find the keyholder for. Plus there's easy access to wiring ducts, and non-public facing areas to put everything. But I guess that's not cool enough for the Silicon Valley types - and there's no enticing gobs of data to attract anyone either. Also you're dealing with engineers, who're less likely to accept products that are still in beta. Wheras it would actually be a good place to build the industry, due to the ease of retro-fitting stuff.
I'd say it's hard to predict. There are many reasons for the industry to fail to take off. But the fact that so many people have smartphones and tablets means that the control issue is a lot easier. So my feeling is that it's ten years away, as it has been for the last twenty or thirty years. But it only takes a few surprising products to go mainstream, to suddenly kickstart a whole industry - where the technology has been available for a while, but not been properly made to work. Sorry, that's a lot of text to eventually say "I don't know"?
Can we look forward to a futures market for Uber fares, so that punters can hedge against hurricane rates? If so, will speculators use high-speed trading techniques to profit from instability? Maybe we can look forward to surge pricing futures options. The mind boggles!
If you think we have a choice about this. They will create them and there will come a time when any fridge / washing machine / doorbell / catflap etc you buy will need to be connected to the internet to work correctly. Failure to do so will void the warranty and terms of use that you agreed to when you bought / rented it. Enjoy the future it's coming and nothing you can do will stop it.
No chance. I believe it's in Sky's Ts&Cs that you have to connect your Sky box to the internet. But it works perfectly fine without it. I rather foolishly plugged mine in, in order to be able to record stuff from my phone - and in fact use a phone/tablet as a nice remote control. And my reward was for them to update the software and make it slightly worse... But it worked perfectly well for months without.
I guess the worry is if there's ubiquitous WiFi out there, or 4G gets incredibly cheap. Then the buggers will be able to log themselves on without your permission. But while they have to connect to my WiFi router, they stay offline, and expecting connection would be an unreasonable term in the contract that would be struck down by UK and EU law.
Anyway, the appliance makers want to charge extra for it. Like the TV makers have this bizarred idea that people want to pay extra for smart TV. My Panasonic cheapy has the same panel as some of the smarties, but is missing about £5 worth of chippery that would make it smart and have put £300 on the price. Of course by only giving me 2 HDMI connections, and RCA stereo sockets that only take input (rather than output sound), they've severely limited the connectivity. So if I needed more than that I'd have been forced to buy a smart telly, but it's way cheaper to have some sort of cable switcher thingymajig.
In the case of a smart fridge, it's going to need a display screen and a way to interact (something already built into a telly), so there'll be a genuine extra cost. Or a smartphone app, in which case it'll all be managed via the manufacturers website. I wonder at what point will it be impossible to buy a dumbphone - so that manufacturers can assume that everyone has a smartphone to act as controller?
Before IoT really gets anywhere, we will all need a brain upgrade followed by a re-boot. We already suffer from information overload or withdrawal symptoms so dealing with all the nagging crap messages from household appliances is going to be impossible.
Imagine for instance sensors in your kitchen detect that you are about to lower a Mars Bar into a deep fat fryer - all the lights start to flash and a virtual avatar announcer pops up and waves it's finger at you for being so naughty!
Imagine for instance you are about to engage in a sex session with your loved one, but IoT detects that she has forgotten to take the pill for a few days cos her brain has been overloaded with Take that pill..dammit woman messages. You get all lovey dovey and at the critical moment your IoT virtual avatar announcer pops up and says neenah neenah neenah can't go in there matey.
The list of possibilities for mischief/practical jokes with IoT is endless...
The bigest problem is going to be when we are all plugged in switched on and then phut...who will be able to cope!
I see nothing wrong here. We already have pictures and movies that are not analogue but digital, with sufficient precision that we cannot tell that they are binary - the human eye/brain is fooled by those 12 frames a second. Audio is the same, except for those self-delusional so who rate CD records as less "real" than vinyl. I believe that we will soon live in a world divorced from reality and provided by digital I/O.
Now, if we configure each "Thing"in our IoT with a set of limit values for certain actions, then in a while we will end up surprised when the internet decides that we need to do action a rather than action b based on previous experience, bid data analysis of recent trends or how many beers I have extracted from that fridge. Do I want? No way. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
... the upgrades will be glorious.. the upgrades will be glorious
do you even want to imagine the global plan once the thingies are standard and they have thought out some needed reason for why your toaster needs to be connected to Health and Safety server in Seattle ... then the future upgrade will be final.. and the vibrations and all the extra that can be send or implemented per group of people ... is wet dream...
advancements what and how can be heard by using electricity is be on what you have seen from science fiction movies..
but in the end... we are by far long before all that spiritually reachable by deeper ways anyway... if it may be called spiritual.. compared to REAL spiritual worlds where you can access after cleansing your self and taking magic mushrooms with a women... more then few times perhaps... then you know... specially after first time you become one new body... how and who has been accessing us so many way..
(just look in to bio fields research five star gov is doing and advancing...)
but as long there is still one human left to think or breath or love or dream none of the sides are giving up.. one because of worry other because of Hope..
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