10 ms·

The Internet of Someone Else’s Things

107 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

jeffreyrogers 12y ago
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?
- woah 12y ago
  My guess is that the reporter simply doesn't understand consensus at a professional level. 'Blockchain' seems to be used as a buzzwordy shorthand for 'distributed consensus algorithm'. However, if you are interested in a blockchain-based distributed trustless store that does not require a huge amount of storage, check out: https://github.com/dominictarr/secure-scuttlebutt https://github.com/dominictarr/secure-scuttlebutt
- api 12y ago
  Deep subject. 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.
  - pinkyand 12y ago
    Wouldn't something that uses consensus on multiple servers, at the price of more bandwidth , possibly also with replaceable IOT card on your device - to give you more options in case of something suspicious happens ?
- chubot 12y ago
  This question doesn't make sense -- Paxos and the blockchain solve different problems. You were probably misled by people talking about how the blockchain solves distributed consensus. That's a decent analogy but not a precise statement about computer science. 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.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  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
  - jkestner 12y ago
    What does mesh have to do with Internet connectivity? A WiFi network can also be off the Internet. Also, note that Thread is at least a year from being baked.
  - jon-wood 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
        ZigBee modules are available for less than $20 in single units. Just how much cheaper do you expect them to be? The license may be expensive, but the manufacturer is making the interfaces by the millions and that cost is amortized across the base.
      - jon-wood 12y ago
        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.
woah 12y ago
IIRC Firechat uses a central server, but sometimes over a bluetooth mesh.
thechut 12y ago
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/
Animats 12y ago
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.
- Retric 12y ago
  The sad thing is we could probably make a vary useful refrigerator that actively keeps track of it's contents and auto set's up a shopping list for you. Using the same basic approach as the self checkout lines (weight + bar-codes). Instead we end up creating 'fake' aka useless versions by sticking an iPad on a refrigerator and marking both up. Or even the simpler version that just has some camera's and wifi so you can see what's in your fridge while shopping.
  - Animats 12y ago
    Even the thermostat products are disappointing. Nest is cool-looking, but it doesn't really do much. The IoT talk was in a big industrial-type space near the shipyard in SF. The room had openable windows, ceiling fans, and openable skylights with big endless-chain mechanisms, plus modern HVAC. None of this was interconnected. 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.
jandrewrogers 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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...
__Joker 12y ago
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.
e12e 12y ago
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.
anotherevan 12y ago
I'm far more interested in the intranet of things, then the internet of things.
analog31 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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).
amirmc 12y ago
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/

107 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

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?

woah 12y ago
My guess is that the reporter simply doesn't understand consensus at a professional level. 'Blockchain' seems to be used as a buzzwordy shorthand for 'distributed consensus algorithm'. However, if you are interested in a blockchain-based distributed trustless store that does not require a huge amount of storage, check out: https://github.com/dominictarr/secure-scuttlebutt https://github.com/dominictarr/secure-scuttlebutt
api 12y ago
Deep subject. 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.
- pinkyand 12y ago
  Wouldn't something that uses consensus on multiple servers, at the price of more bandwidth , possibly also with replaceable IOT card on your device - to give you more options in case of something suspicious happens ?
chubot 12y ago
This question doesn't make sense -- Paxos and the blockchain solve different problems. You were probably misled by people talking about how the blockchain solves distributed consensus. That's a decent analogy but not a precise statement about computer science. 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.
higherpurpose 12y ago
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
- jkestner 12y ago
  What does mesh have to do with Internet connectivity? A WiFi network can also be off the Internet. Also, note that Thread is at least a year from being baked.
- jon-wood 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
      ZigBee modules are available for less than $20 in single units. Just how much cheaper do you expect them to be? The license may be expensive, but the manufacturer is making the interfaces by the millions and that cost is amortized across the base.
    - jon-wood 12y ago
      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.

woah 12y ago

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

thechut 12y ago

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/

Animats 12y ago

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.

Retric 12y ago
The sad thing is we could probably make a vary useful refrigerator that actively keeps track of it's contents and auto set's up a shopping list for you. Using the same basic approach as the self checkout lines (weight + bar-codes). Instead we end up creating 'fake' aka useless versions by sticking an iPad on a refrigerator and marking both up. Or even the simpler version that just has some camera's and wifi so you can see what's in your fridge while shopping.
- Animats 12y ago
  Even the thermostat products are disappointing. Nest is cool-looking, but it doesn't really do much. The IoT talk was in a big industrial-type space near the shipyard in SF. The room had openable windows, ceiling fans, and openable skylights with big endless-chain mechanisms, plus modern HVAC. None of this was interconnected. 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.

jandrewrogers 12y ago

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 12y ago
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...

__Joker 12y ago

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.

e12e 12y ago

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.

anotherevan 12y ago

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

analog31 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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).

amirmc 12y ago

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/