UK universities unveil £28m hub for Internet of Things Blighty's universities have teamed up to today unveil a £28m "Internet of Things" research hub in a bid to make the UK a "world leader" in the much-hyped technology. The Hub is a consortium of nine universities and 47 partners from industry and the public sector. Funding for the Hub includes a £9.8m grant from the Engineering …
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... when the intrinsic lack of security has enabled them to circumvent the DRM.
At which point it'll be time to move on to the next fad. Pausing only to consume the beer, of course, assuming a hacker hasn't already messed with the temperature settings.
Perhaps it's a fridge for smart beer...
I would assume that smart beer would contain a "chemical fingerprint" (a la smart water) that would only be apparent once the beer rental period was complete. A quick flash of UV light on the walls and pavements near pubs would show the "audit trails" and allow the problem to be traced back to source.
Now, combining this with the "quick jolt of 230V" mentioned elsewhere and you have a self-correcting and auditable scheme for tackling this particular anti-social habit. But I digress...
I mean look at 1980s home computers. Those weren't "pre buildt" machines. They were computers which, when you connected them and turned them on, provided you with a (more or less) blank screen you could program on. You could just start typing, and program them. You could even just enter a single line of program into them and they would just execute it. All thanks to the magic of BASIC.
The company making that computer did not tell you what to do with it, at best it gave you suggestions. That's why you suddenly had a Cambrian explosion of uses for computers. While before that your computer would be used to hunt down oppositional forces or organizing a funeral, you could now do lots of different things. You could hook up a robot arm to it so it would drop an egg onto your breakfast table or simply play a computer game.
This is what's missing in the IoT world today.
Yeah, but there's your point. This is an era that spends too much time inventing silly names and descriptions for re-inventions from the past tarted up and hogtied so that they can fleece the flock.
Raspberry Pi is a good idea. It encourages people to learn and invent.
IoT is not a good idea. It's merely a label used by certain people so they can look "kewl".
I dare say that some folk will now point me at copious white papers on where I am supposedly wrong with that statement but (a) that assumes that I haven't already read them (or at least some of them) and (b) doesn't dodge that one thing.
The consortium will work together over the next three years to explore critical issues in privacy, ethics, trust, reliability, acceptability, and security,
So it's unis... some government money.. and some industry types and their money... right?
Being a committee, it'll be sometime around the heat death of the universe before they agree and then there's the issues.. I don't see any that this or any other IT related industry would have an interest in. Unless it's "none". The goal of profit overrides any of that.
I wish they would add "social policies" to their list of critical issues. I am all for creating technical standards, and certainly in favour of sorting out privacy and security, but I think a really important issue about IoT is to get it out of the hands of major corporations and into the hands of open-source developers, community projects, peer-to-peer services and garage-based entrepreneurs.
That would help with many of the issues such as privacy and ethics and would really allow British innovation to flourish. The UK has nothing to gain by buying into the perverse definition of IoT as something done by big cloud providers: Google, Amazon, Samsung, LG, etc are not British companies.
I would quite like an intelligent thermostat. However, I have no interest in buying one which sends any data outside my home, nor in paying for it as a service or with advertising. Sell me a box to replace the box which is my current thermostat, but which I can configure to receive weather forecasts and can control remotely. That is the sort of IoT which would be worth paying for.
Ed Vaizey, digital economy minister, said the project is part of the government's ambition to make the UK a "world leader in the adoption of Internet of Things technologies".
I would far rather that the UK was recognised as the place where it was determined that other in a very few specialised cases the IoT was a waste of time and money, and that the tale of "The Emporer's New Clothes" has a clear modern parallel.
The universities involved could finish up being tainted with the accusation that they conspired to foist a whole load of vulnerabilities on to a public that is not equipped to realise that it is being comprehensively conned. Or simply gullible, depending on how cynical you want to be.
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