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The Next Tech Revolution
L-Wave writes "Here is an interesting article on cincinnati.com about the next revolution in technology. "The Internet revolution was about people connecting with people. The next revolution will be about things connecting with things." The story mentions having "tags" on every possible items from glasses to grocery, and each one identifying itself on a network...very cool stuff." We've run some earlier stories about the Auto-ID Center and RFID tags. This is an important topic - it will be a huge social issue once people realize that consumer goods will come with tags that allow them to be tracked individually.
This is all fine and good, but all I really want is a remote control that beeps when I can't find it.
I want the ability to monitor everything.
I also want strong safeguards in place to stop people monitoring things they shouldn't be allowed to, and using the results for purpouses that people haven't agreed to.
My Journal
Wow, I should try to get a patent for that. I think I'll call it Divx. What's that you say? It's already been tried and was a colossal failure? Hm...
Neat stuff. I really like the concept of self-serve grocery checkouts myself. Typical paranoia though:
it will be a huge social issue once people realize that consumer goods will come with tags that allow them to be tracked individually
Maybe I just don't get it. Keeping tabs on 300 million US citizens is well-nigh impossible - noone cares about the individual, and actually logging this much data is pretty much a moot point. Now imagine this extended to several hundred BILLION consumer goods. Do we really have anything approcahing the capability to DO anything with this much data, let alone something bad? I mean, it's sorta fun to think that the government/corporations/whoever really cares about me individually, and is devoting massive amounts of manpower and/or computer resources to tracking my shopping habits, but.. why would they bother?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
In Singapore, cars "talk" to the streets they drive on. In Tulsa, Okla. retailers test a system that lets products inform the store when they're bought. In home kitchens later this decade, frozen dinners might automatically give cooking instructions to microwave ovens.
The Internet revolution was about people connecting with people. The next revolution will be about things connecting with things. And it's taking shape in pockets around the globe. For the first time, big companies such as Wal-Mart, Gillette and Procter & Gamble are joining to give the technology serious momentum.
In a twist, this next technological chapter won't emerge out of ever-more- powerful computers and faster Internet connections. This shift comes from the opposite direction. It will ride on pieces of plastic the size of postage stamps, costing a nickel or less. Each plastic tag will contain a computer chip, which can store a small amount of information, and a minuscule antenna that lets the chip communicate with a network.
In time, when billions of tags are out there and communicating, the technology will infiltrate business and everyday life to a greater extent than today's personal computers, cell phones or e-mail. In decades to come, its impact might be as fundamental as the invention of the light bulb.
Those tags will someday be on everything -- egg cartons, eyeglasses, books, toys, trucks, money and so on. All those items will be able to wirelessly connect to networks or the Internet, sending information to computers, home appliances or other electronic devices.
Grocery items will tell the store what needs to be restocked and which items are past their expiration dates. The groceries will check themselves out in a split second as you push a full cart past a reader. A wine lover could look on a computer screen and see what's in her wine cellar. Prescription drug bottles could work together to send you a warning if the combination of pills you're about to swallow would be toxic.
"Any single one of these (tags) is like a one-celled organism," said Glover Ferguson, chief scientist at consulting firm Accenture. "They're just smart enough to say their own name." Like cells, their power will come from billions of them working together, he said.
"We're really talking about the next 50 years of computing," said Kevin Ashton, executive director of the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Auto-ID is the program backed by Wal-Mart and the other companies, and the center is trying to create a standard, like Internet protocol, for the tags' communication. That would enable any tag to connect to any network, much as any PC can work on any network.
The technology doesn't really have a handy name. The tags are known as radio frequency identification tags, or RFID. The Auto-ID center calls the core of its standard "ePC," which stands for Electronic Product Code.
Perhaps an appropriate umbrella name might be tinyband. Today's hefty computers and super-fast fiber-optic networks communicate on broadband technology. Tomorrow's little nickel tags will work on tinyband technology and as little as 96 characters of information.
Traffic control via RFIDs
RFID has been around awhile. During World War II, the military used a high-powered, bulky version of it to identify friendly aircraft. Starting in the 1970s, the federal government stuck RFID tags on nuclear materials to better track them. In the 1980s, commercial warehouses used it to locate loaded pallets.
These days RFID shows up in a few familiar places. The technology is in ExxonMobil's Speedpass -- a key fob that works like a credit card, wirelessly identifying you to a gas pump. On highways across the United States, wireless toll booth systems such as E-ZPass work on RFID.
Singapore relies on the technology to control traffic. Its system, called Electronic Road Pricing, or ERP, charges different prices to drive on different roads at different times. Driving on one main artery between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. costs $3 (in Singapore dollars -- about $1.60 in U.S. currency) but is free from 2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. The pricing encourages drivers to stay off busy roads at busy times. Every car must have an RFID tag, and it communicates with readers along every major road. The road readers identify each car and send the information to a central computer, which adds up the car owners' bills.
Lost glasses? Tag to the rescue
Widespread consumer use of tinyband will take time -- perhaps a decade or more. That's what happens with new technology. Computers didn't move from businesses to homes until more than 30 years after the technology was born.
Some chastise tinyband proponents for promising too much too soon. "You have to manage realistic expectations," said Cliff Horwitz, CEO of SAMSys, which is making a universal reader that can talk to tags from any manufacturer. For the foreseeable future, "MIT has a pretty extreme and unrealistic view of the world."
Others, though, can't contain their excitement. The real fun will start once the price of a tag gets down to around a penny. Then adding a tag would be no more expensive than stamping a bar code on a product. Bar codes today are on nearly every item made for consumers and business. Imagine that every one of those things will have a small amount of intelligence and ability to communicate. The world around us would almost come alive.
Arno Penzias -- a Nobel prize-winning scientist, one-time head of Bell Labs and an investor in Alien Technology -- has a favorite microcosmic scenario:
You lose your eyeglasses. They've fallen under the family room couch.
The tag on the eyeglasses connects with a reader in the family room -- readers would be all around a house. The reader is also getting signals from everything else in the room.
Tags work a little like radar. A reader sends out a signal looking for tags. The signal excites the tag -- the tag itself has no power --and causes it to return a signal containing its information. This request and return of a signal happens more than 100 times a second for each tag.
The reader pipes its information across a wireless network and dumps it into the home computer. The computer looks at the data and deduces that the signal from the glasses takes the same amount of time to hit the reader as the signal from the couch.
You sit at the computer and type in a search box: "Where are my eyeglasses?" The computer spits back: "Under the couch."
"In a few years, high-end consumers will likely start using tag readers to locate items in the house," Penzias said.
Aside from technology challenges, tinyband will increasingly test society's acceptance. Privacy will certainly be an issue. For instance, insurance companies might want to use the technology to know where you take your car, so they can charge more if you regularly park in high-crime neighborhoods.
Privacy "is an issue. There will have to be a social discourse about what we want and don't want, " said Accenture's Ferguson. "But the technology isn't going away: You can't un-invent it."
One where all the smart people who are concerned about privacy start a mass exodus to countries where this kind of thing will not be tolerated by the public at large. Scary to say, but here in the US, we will swallow anything that A) fights Evil(tm), or B) Makes our neighbors jealous. I see the potential here for both.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
The first tech revolution was definitively about making information worthless, not connecting people. Saying 'connecting things to things' sounds a lot like bringing b2b and c2b without brick and mortar storefronts or something like that.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Dinner: Ahhh too hot... cool it down a bit..
Mic: Shaddap before I make you wish you didn't open your mouth...
Dinner: Why I oughta....
This would be rather amusing, no? :)
We are done making cool invention. We have the TV, Radio, Computer, car, train, phone, boat, plane, space shuttle. We have overcome every inate obstacles we posses as humans, all that is left is to improve on them, and of course genetically engineer ourselves. If that happens...
Which part of this is news? This area became hyped about 2 years ago. I don't mean to say that there should not be news on this subject, but the introduction was a bit... umm... exaggerated :)
There's couple of articles on the same area in here.
I wish I had patented it. I had this idea about 2 years' ago, and to be fair probably a lot of other people did too.
The concept is simple- putting tags on everything which just gives them a unique id. Then you create a bridge between the internet and the physical world.
Examples:
1) Your car HUD can warn you of drivers who have been "modded down" when you see them on the road.
2) In the store, you can look up reviews of consumer electronics items by scanning the item.
3) Email people you walk past on the street if they have made their email public- also dating services can tell you if you are compatible, if they are single etc.
4) Scan tags on famous landmarks and get taken to pages of info on them.
5) Each shop and cafe you walk past has a tag so you can go to its home page and check its prices and offers.
6) Returning stolen items to their owners (if you make the tags non-removeable).
I'm sure you can think of many more applications...
graspee
Tags and chips in everyday items. Smart clothes and shoes. "Yawn!"
There has to be an exciting NEED to do these things before they'll take off. Remember: just because something is technologically possible, that doesn't mean it will be taken up by the public.
This will be great for burglars. Just drive down the street with a high-powered RF scanner and inventory every house before deciding on the one with the best stuff.
It will be the Singularity before all this predicted long term good effects on the quality of cola sprite.
... that many people as here ... want this kind of stuff.
You are 90% boring here on Slashdot. Sorry to say - but I really don't like CO2 level in 2100 predictions, or how the car will negotiate with another for parking place in 2040.
But then again
- Thomas
You sit at the computer and type in a search box: "Where are my eyeglasses?" The computer spits back: "Under the couch."
Which is too bad if the reason you wanted your glasses in the first place was to read the screen. What we really need is a Star Trek-style voice interface to go with this stuff. Of course, then the deaf are going to have trouble looking for their hearing aids...
OR you could read the instructions
OR she could, i don't know, go down into her cellar? How far could it be?
God forbid you acutally talk to your DOCTOR about all those pills your taking.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, just cause it's new (and fangled, no less), doesn't mean it has to be shoved into every thing. Do your lightbulbs REALLY need webservers? Does your microwave REALLY need to be able to check your email? It seems like everytime they get soembody to say something like this, they all come up with the most ludicrous ideas for how to use this tech. For instance, why didn't he suggest meshing these things with pressure sensors and putting them into your tires. Then have you car tell you that you have a low tire and whatnot. I am going to shut up now, because lack of sleep and this cold are making ramble.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
When you're finished you put the scanner in a terminal which prints your receipt. with this receipt you go to a special (selfscanning only) checkout to pay.
No lines, saves time
You can always see how musch you're spending
You can bag while you shop, saves time
:)
Stealing is pretty easy this way but i wouldn't there because there are random checks. And if you get caught there are evere punishments
It's a neat and cool system but i haven't seen it anywhere else? Has anybody else seen this system before?
Remember running out of IP addresses with IPV4? Remember reading about IPV6? "An IP address for every lightbulb in every house in the world"... "An IP address for every neuron in every brain of every person in the world"... That kind of thing.
Things talking to things are nothing new. "Ubiqtious computing" and all that crap. Fucking ancient sci-fi theme, talked to death on the net at least a decade ago. Then comes Slashdot. Front-page news in 2002. What a waste of bandwidth! And you want people to subscibe to this tripe?
Any time soon, my lettuce will spoof the fridge's IP and order its own mayo, using the pizza's credit card.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The reason that we've spent all these billions of dollars to set up the internet, for people to communicate with people, is because we, and by we I mean the human race, really want to communicate with eachother.
My can of deodorant has no intrinsic desire to socialise with it's own kind. Whence, then, comes the impetus to enable it to do so?
If a consumer good is valuable enough to justify this kind of outlay (in a commercial setting) then it is expensive enough to have car-salesman types wander the floor pressuring people to buy it. Unless these built-in chips talk and engage in high pressure sales tactics (here's a cool one, "please, buy me, or I will be tortured horribly and dumped on the scrap heap!") I don't see the percentages.
As regards things that talk to things after you've bought them; there are merits of doing this with every consumer device that already has a computer chip built into it. However, this is far less of a revolution than when we put computer chips into our cars in the first place, but we weren't thinking about "revolutions" back then so it was just progress.
In order to qualify as a revolution, it has to substantively alter the way we, human beings, live. Internetwork protocol has done this, at least in my case. However, while communicating with city traffic control may vastly alter driving from your car's point of view, it'll make only a slight difference to you, the driver. It's a nice trick but hardly a revolution.
The revolution will come when people talk to machines directly, through TSA (today's sinister accronym, my favorite is DNI, or direct neural interface.)
The next struggle against the intervention-of-big-things-in-our-little-lives will come not when built in chips start monitering our shopping habits - b/c IF YOU DIDN'T BUY IT WITH A CREDIT CARD BIG BROTHER DOESN'T CARE - but when the government tries to restrict my right to have robotic claws, replace my eyes with digital cameras, etc.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
No one can get a job in the technology industry anymore. Companies are closing daily. Over five trillion dollars lost on the stock market.
And people talk about a tech revolution?
Michael, have you killed the rest of the /. editors? I can't think of any other reason why you've posted the last 5 articles.
...or maybe in water.
Medication that tells us when we're about to intoxicate ourselves.... the fruit bowl that tells the supermarket that a customer will buy some more fruit...
Shame on you! If you don't buy that fruit again from the supermarket as you don't like the flavour because the supermarket just stocked it for you!
Isn't this a little weird? The items around us will tell us how to live by what we've just brought. Shops will know more about us and what to stock. Shame on you! If you go and buy some food from the corner shop because it's "cheaper".
Eventually we'll be in a world of signing contracts when were born to the supermarkets that we must buy their food, so they know what to buy from other companies.
We'll be monitored in a grasp of technology, people knowing everything about you. Even more than you do by analysis your trend patterns, and your not even allowed accessing that data.
The world economic will be easier to play for larger companies and not so for specialised smaller companies.
All this useless information flying about, the pencil says it needs to be sharpened. Hence you must sharpen it.
Stress levels will increase and privacy will be easier to brake. We'll have more stupid things going into our court system rather than things that matter.
Okay so it's a nice idea... but I feel all that information is dangerous, to us, and to the world. I think something's should communicate like the remote to the TV, but that remote may have the information that your computer holds and decides to stream it to the networks for air.
If we have technology that communicates "item to item" that's great, but security precautions should be put in place. But lets think about this logically, we can't handle today's security issues correctly. How we gonna manage item to item security?
What happened to one step at a time?
There once was a price tag from Kmart
that had slashdot crying it was too smart
what they didn't know
was the price would be low
when you hacked the WinCE at it's heart
Did you hear about the story that Tokyo train commuters are being radiated "like a chicken in a microwave" because of everyone using their cell phones to read their e-mails ? Wait until are bombarded every time you are in a store or you can that to yourself sitting in your own home. Maybe that will be my new hobby - to scrape off all those RFID tags.
..and when cincinnati.com is on the cutting edge of technology you should be afraid, very afraid!
"The next revolution will be about things connecting with things"
The assumption being the world is a big trusting place where every appliance from air conditioner to zuchinni slicer reports back to corporate headquarters to make the consumer experience a better one.
Personally, I have seen more than enough to come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no reason to trust corporations with even the bare minimum information required to do business with them. To offer any more information is very near a guarantee to be mistreated in some way or another.
Communicating devices my ass. If such thing were to ever be introduced it would be done so in the same manner as the web browser. That is, to send everyone out completely exposed to the worst eleements of society, much like wandering out into a game reserve wearing a suit made from t-bone steaks.
There is a need to be suspicious in the turn of the century. The number of no-good predatory motherfuckers make it an absolute requirement. But whatever floats your boat. I suppose iof you go around the 'net all day with cookies and java script enabled, you wouldn't mind having a toaster with a camera hardwired to Bread Corporation. And yes, I think there are a good number of you who would be foolish enough to be taken in by a scheme as blatent as that. Why? Look at yourselves. Hard to pick out the humans from the sheep.
All this talk about connecting appliances into a network is ludicrus... sometimes a toaster is just a toaster. We don't need 'super appliances' that think, they would suffer from the vcr problem of being too complicated to use/control/program and most people would be stuck with the factory settings that they might not like.
Having said that, there's an article in the most recent issue of MIT Tech Review that talks about a company in Philadelphia that has done exactly that. Created a tag that has network abilities, and a teeny bit of storage, all smaller than a dime and at the cost of "pennies."
d
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Every time you buy a bottle of booze, a message gets sent to the government and to your insurance company. Hell all of your food choices get sent to the insurance co's.
Do you dumbasses actually think that this stuff is being done for your benefit? Heloo stupid motherfuckers! Earth to stupid people! HELLLOOO!
It seems a lot of people seem to have gotten quite worked up about how useless this idea is. I would say that, like most technologies, the possible uses for these tags are limited largely by our imagination.
The the success of ePCs will depend on two things; firstly, that the wireless infrastructure is in place. The tags might cost a couple cents, but if the network isn't already in place, few people will will be interested, as not everyone wants to build their own wireless networks.
Secondly, industry will have to sell ePCs as cost-effective products that effeciently take care of specific tasks. That is, someone will have to make the tag that can fit in a pair of glasses. Tags that will be able to withstand freezing or heating, water, or any number of conditions.
Assuming that there are enough companies making the tags, and assuming that a signficant portion of the world is covered by free "tinyband" wirless networks, the possibilities are limitless.
If implanting a tag costs 1 cent, or even 5, then thousands of companies will become interested in adding these tags to their products. If the tags are easily programmable, then the manufacturing cost will be minimal, and thus worth the risk.
Some applications are almost inevitable; e.g. traffic control, shopping store uses, warehouse uses, etc., etc. RFID is already popular in these places, and tags are the next logical step. There will always be someone trying to improve RFID, and ePC tags are the most natural progression.
Other applications may be more difficult to bring into wide-spread use. For example, your shopping store might tag your groceries so that they can be instantly rung up at the cashier's counter. However, the canned soup company will probably be more reluctant to add a (second) tag to their product; this would require a high degree of specialization. This would first require that a large number of appliances can make use of specialized instructions embedded in various different tags. Only then would the soup company embed cooking instructions in an RFID tag.
Why not just read the instructions on the label? Well, if the soup company can make their soup cook itself, simply by sticking on a tag that costs a few cents, then the almost certainly WILL do that. You might still prefer to read the instructions, but that's a rather stupid view of things. It's in the soup company's best interest to add as much value to their product as possible. The few cents it will cost to produce a tag is well worth the value it will add to a product.
The only problem is that a large-scale infrastructure has to be in place first. This is where well thought-out standards will come into play. It will only work if the majority of tags are interoperable with the majority of scanning devices. That is, the cooking instructions in the soup tag should work with any model microwave.
This means that everyone from Campbell Soup to Nike to Safeway will have to start worrying about network communication protocols, as well as "APIs" for highly specialized tasks. For example, an API for embedding cooking instructions in a can of soup would be vastly different from the API for embedding chemical and medicinal data in a bottle of prescription pills. And yet, somehow, all these different applications have to interoperate on a single, seamless network, and the devices that use these tags will have to do the same.
I don't know how anyone will get all the soup makers and microwave manufacturers of the world to use the same cooking instruction API, delivered over a single communication protocol.
Chances are competition will lead to a vast array of incompatable tags and networks. Then billions will be spent on trying to glue all the incompatabilities together. It's so massive an undertaking that the smallest amount of fragmentation in standards could lead to widespread effects.
For example, if you have a type X microwave, and it can only read type Y cooking instruction tags, then you might be forced to always buy food with type Y tags (if you want the food to cook itself).
Thus, soup manufacturers would suddenly LOOSE market share, and this is not acceptable. Hence, standardization is key to widespread acceptance.
As for privacy concerns - I can't even imagine to think of the issues that will start to arise. Imagine a theif breaking into a house, and scanning all the RDIF tags, to figure out what products are in the building. Then he cross references the product data to price lists, and, like magic, he knows the estimated value and location of every product contained in the house. All he has to do is go pick up the most expensive products in the house - and that shouldn't be too hard, since the location of the tags are known.
Or imagine the same theif walking around the streets, scanning everything in sight, looking for valuable things to mug off of people.
I'm no expert on security, but I would imagine that RDIF is quite insecure and difficult to protect. How would any sort of authenticatation system work? You obviously don't want to embed an encrypted password in every stupid little product that you own. In fact, chances are that you won't be able to make any changes to the tags once they are manufactured and embedded into the product.
Essentially, it could be that someone could just stand outside your house, and get a list of all the things that you have inside, by scanning radio freqencies. You would have to protect your entire house from this sort of eavesdropping. The problems arising from this technology are numerous and difficult to overcome. Security is a huge issue, and if it can be addressed early on, this might even work someday.
Well first we get to read the story about WHY cell phones alone should be annoying, with excessive RF and all that. So why not encorporate that into EVERYTHING, so that EVERYTHING can emit even more excessive RF just for the purpose of my watch being able to communicate with stop lights... Although a cool concept, is this REALLY necessary.
Pardon me if it seems that the languag is getting just a little too recursive here, or something.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"The next revolution will be about things connecting with things." The story mentions having "tags" on every possible items from glasses to grocery, and each one identifying itself on a network...very cool stuff."
:-)
I predict that this is going to be another giant failure just like the internet. The usage of internet is dropping all over the world, isn't really strange if you take a look at the available quality-content there. Loaded with crap
Without working business-models failure is all that is left and this will be no different.
None of the applications you've discussed actually require the RFIDs at all and the prescription medicine one requires considerably more than just RFIDs.
The variation in cooking power between microwaves wouldn't be fixed by sticking some kind of identifier on meals - they already have these, they're called barcodes. You're assuming every microwave is going to be programmed with some kind of lookup table telling it how to cook each item, which is all fine and dandy until I want to cook a product that was produced after the microwave and which it therefore knows nothing about.
If the wine lover really wants to know whats in here cellar she could knock up an Access database in ten minutes. Wine tends not to wander off once you've put it one place.
As for the prescription drugs - how exactly are RFIDs supposed to identify interactions? Firstly you need some kind of external reader unless you're planning on putting medicines in computerised bottles - remember these tags don't have any processing power. Second, you're assuming that there even is a universal database of drug interactions (its all potential interactions which depend a lot on the individual).
Ya, your kids, your dog, your wife, pretty soon they will be shoving a chip up your nose when you are born.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
Does this mean I can call them up and they will be able to tell me where my other sock is?
I thought HP had been looking into this for some time now in their CoolTown project (althgouh the HP tags aren't smart yet, because of cost issues).
Ah, yes. Network everything. That'll solve a whole host of problems, like.......uhh... See, I always wished that my...uh......errr..
(*cough*CUECAT*cough*..)..
The whole point of invention is to solve a problem. The fact that my toaster lacks a login prompt doesn't qualify as a "problem" to anyone. I don't want a programmable heat grid in my toaster so I can burn little designs into my English muffins. I just want a friggin English muffin that isn't burnt on the outsides and soggy in the middle. Solve that first. I don't want a friggin SQL database running on my fridge. I want one that doesn't make my ice cubes smell, and no amount of TCP/IP is going to fix that. To my knowledge, there is no "Ice Cube Scent Removal" RFC.
The problem with whiz-bang ideas like this is, like the CueCat, that they don't solve any problems. Infact, they try to solve a problem that never existed in the first place. So lets suppose I have my whole apartment wired. My aquariums have webcams, my dishwasher floods both my network and my kitchen floor, and my television watches me instead of me watching it. What have I gained, other than an ego-erection? Bragging rights over my nerdy friends? Or a LAN crowded with garbage traffic, none of which will ever be used or implemented in any form other than for novely and amusement.
Put that in your socket and sniff it.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
RIAA can't avoid this convergence, they can't avoid the connection between their incompatible audio system and the computer, and as everybody here knows if it is in the computer there's no way to avoid user to do whatever he wants.
So I think that RIAA must find (again) another way to avoid the so called mp3-piracy (IMHO the problem is the CD-R drives, but...)
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
There is no question that this is way way bad, so, I only want to know one thing. How do we defeat this thing? How do we prevent someone from driving by and inventorying our every possession?
I don't think we can jam it because the stupid neighbors would complain that they can't find their keys...
It would probably be tough to pull it off of every device...
Maybe a shielded box could be made in which you could place it and aim a high power RF signal at it to burn it out.
If the range is short enough, I could buy the land surrounding my home, but you could still fly over and pick it up.
I don't see enough noise on here. Talk about a massive violation of privacy. Why give a rip about what can be picked up about you at a website if someone can drive by your home and inventory your every possession?
Police want need a search warrant anymore to check what brand of shoe is in your closet or whether you have a blue blazer, etc.
It will be easier than ever to profile everyone in a neighborhood based on things like what books they read, how many violent video games they own, etc.
This stuff isn't worrying someone?
Gershenfield and Hawley have been working on this one for ages over at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. Hardly news. PARC also, naturally, is in on it.
There's actually something called the 'Things that Think' Consortium working in this direction. Swatch is in it too; remember in the Barcelona Olympics how you could buy a special edition Swatch with an electronic tag in it, prepaid to allow you entrance to the events? Well, that was in 1992, a decade ago.
So in other words, what we have here hardly qualifies as news. Ubiquitous computing has been a work in progress for ages and will remain so for a few ages more; it's not vaporware, it just needs time.
But honestly, I fail to see why this qualifies as newsworthy, and a submission about successful experiments into getting monkeys to move a cursor with mind control isn't.
This kind of thing is what keeps me from subscribing, to be perfectly frank. Maybe when story submission/acceptance begins to follow more democratic guidelines like the moderation system.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
The story mentions having "tags" on every possible item
Doesn't this even sort of sound like the CueCat? I just thought it was strange....
..i thought the internet WAS about connecting things, you know the important things, people, not glassware..so since the important one has died down the usless one will take it's place eh?
The Truth: There is no string:)
This sounds a bit like Cooltown which is HPs project to get everything connected. It's pretty Linux-centric too. The UK magazine has Cooltown as it's cover feature this month.
Now if they tie it to a clapper or some such so that I can find my glasses, then I might be tempted to go along with it.
It truth it really seems that acceptance of something like this will likely depend on how it's marketed. Help find old folks when they go drifting off from the nursing home, be used to determine that someone has fallen and can't get up. (6 hours without moving at the foot of the steps is a good sign) Imagine a lost or missing child, stolen artwork, etc. I can see viable, sensible uses for the technology, but at the same time have concerns over how it could be misused.
This won't be another "tech revolution" and there really isn't anything in sight that is. Instead, its just an evolution after the dot.com bust and this will be a slow one. I for one do NOT want everything talking to or even connected to everything else in this way and my guess is most others won't either.
... probably from the same talking heads of the dot.com era.
The article is just another propaganda item
Haven't you ever bought anything with a UPC?
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
Put a small amount of baking powder in a dish in your fridge/freezer.
After a few days, your scents should be removed.
I don't mean to troll, but I have to ask...
Is anyone actually putting serious effort into making this happen, or are people just making stuff up? It seems like every six months, somebody writes a very optimistic, excited article about their toothbrush talking to their television, but nobody is actually making it happen.
irb(main):001:0>
Wow, now I will really know when looking at a georgeous woman if they are fake or real!
Commercial kitchens, yes. (Whatever happened to the big McDonald's robotic kitchen project they announced a few years back?) Offices and factories, probably. (Any place that has property ID tags now is a good candidate.) Automated checkout at stores, maybe. Home automation, no. Home automation gear has been around for decades, and remains a niche product.
If you really want to do something in this area, develop a cheap device that can make an estimate of the number of people in a room, and use it to control heating, ventilating, and air conditioning. HVAC systems for classrooms, conference rooms, and such should have both a thermostat for temperature and a people counter for airflow. Fan speed should crank up as the number of people increases. It would probably even save money, because empty rooms can go down to minimum airflow.
Checkers are already scanning the barcodes or typing in the keycodes of the products.
If the register can print a receipt that shows all your purchases and your debit/credit/check then they can already link your habits to your bank account.
Might as well as use a club card for a discount or pay in cash if you really care about your privacy.
(OMG they found out I eat the same food as the other 100 million people around me)
I remember several years ago, the shopping carts at Giant Foods (huge grocery chain around here) were fitted with LCD screen and sensors. It would help you locate products, find your way around the store, etc. It would also bring up ads and talk about the stuff that you're passing at the moment.
Miserably failed and they removed them...but it was a neat idea. Probably way before its time.
The point of which is that any good intention can be converted to wrongful use.
Imagine all the ways such technology can be used in wrong ways, for apparently the supporters of this either have blinders on or plans to abuse it.
Certainly we all have been hearing the word "privacy" one gawd aweful a-hell-of-a-lot especially in sales pitches where your privacy should be a default thing to respect by others and only invaded with your permission (not the other way around causing yo uto constantly be fighing for your privacy).
Imagine a criminal taking inventory of your home, in their effort to take from you....or even kill you.
I don't doubt this. Relevent tech jobs in that frickin' town are sparse. It's a town of salesfolk and chemical engineers, most of which work for GE and P&G. You're either a good bullshitter or you're trying to make a better diaper.
...it can only be about where to hide your body after they've figured out a way to puree you.
The general idea of enabling a computer to identify things in physical reality, or even the idea of identification of things in the abstract world of computing is not the tech revolution but only a part of it.
There are nine action constants, one of which is the ability to IDentify and cause a sequence of actions to take place upon such identification.
The other eight parts (also including the 8th) [using the metaphor of the
Matrix movie):
AI (Alternate Interface) Switch
You start or begin things and stop or end things.
PK (Place Keeper) Apoc
You need to know where you are in doing something, keep track of things,
especially if you need to set something aside to do other things before
you can go back to something and continue.
OI (Obtain Input) Tank
You get things to pass to other things (variables).
IP (InPut from) Mouse
You select where your getting something from and what to get
when you get things.
OP (OutPut to) Dozer
You select where your sending something to and what to send
when you send things.
SF (do StufF) Neo
You do things a step at a time, even when your doing more than
one thing at a time, each you do a step at a time. And the things
you do can be or include doing the nine things.
IQ (Index Queue) Morpheus
You look up what things mean, and use the meanings to (SF)
"do StufF". Often the meaning is from a Selected Abstraction Set.
ID (IDentify things) Trinity
Sometimes you gotta know what something is before you know what to do.
So you test things to see what they are. Once you know what something is,
you can (SF) "do StufF".
KE (Knowledge Enable) Cypher
When looking up or testing something (IQ and ID), you may only want a
certain part of it. This "KE" helps you narrow down what you want to
look up (IQ) or test (ID). When you look up a word in a dictionary,
you limit your search to the section starting with the first letter
of the Word.
These NINE things can easily be made available in the form
of computer functionality, easy for us to use.
And With This we can Automate The things We Do thru computers (not that
this is not what the programming industry does, but this is for the
general end user.)
Or in other words, once you have identified something, whatdo you want to
do with it or based on it's existing?
for more information see my home page.
So... All you need is a high-voltage zapper of some sort -- one of the handheld "stun-guns" will do nicely. Pay for your item, take it out to your car, and ZAP! it before you take off. Failing that, a quick zap in a microwave oven (three or fewer seconds) should do the trick.
I don't care what kind of RFID chip whatever item you buy may have in it. It's not going to be able to withstand a few hundred thousand volts, or a blort-load of high-energy microwaves.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
As interesting the tech stuff on this may (or not) be; and as controversial as the privacy issue might be with this concept/ the real issue is that this is about corporations trying make their products more desirable for customers. Plain economics.Why is Wal Mart, Gillete and all these good'o boys involved? "to make our lives easier"? ... yeah right, they want us, you, to be dependant on their products so that you buy more of them.... I don't care if my toster is lost under a pile of smelly laundry, but hell, if Ma Bell can make it talk to me while I watch 'Real TV', than heck, sound like a great idear t' me.....
;)
AT&T are working on systems that track everything in an office so you desktop can follow you around, phone calls can be routed to the nearest phone to you, etc:
AT&T - Location Systems
They have some videos to watch on the topic... a few years old, but still interesting:
AT&T - The Video Collection
They have a nice away around objections to the system knowing where you are... if someone looks you up, you get their name and details...
It's is a pretty specialised system, though - I can't see it exactly being any use in your average family household...
I mean, who wants that kind of thing in their home?
What will happen is that this technology will be used in a sub-set of the preposterously unrealistic,uneeded,unwanted, and overly large
designated target "everything".
So manufacturers may have tags on in the parts
Warehouse or something like that.
But to think that everything will be tagged is not
only stupid, (remember the internet Fridge that
orders your groceries for you) but frightening.
Everything is monitored facilitates everything
being controlled.
sigh.
How many times do we get a ridiculous idea because someone indulged in the age old faux-pas
of extrapolating a limited utility to everything.
It won't be extended to "everything"
anymore than we will all use the Internet Fridge.
Sorry.
they going to track what I see or what I drink?
Only 'flamers' flame!
At least not on the scale envisioned here.
There is always some grey soul some where dreaming of how if employees only didn't have to take bathroom breaks and coffe breaks how we could save the Billions we are losing.
Only we are not losing Billions.
Anymore than we have not lost Billions of dollars
worth of Gold because a greater amount of it wasn't placed on Earth.
Some parameters can be pushed back and enlarged
some could or should not.
Explain to me the difference between this scheme
and putting a monitor in your shorts to cross
correlate gas expelled and food consumed.
So some Stepford person would pay good money for
this info?
So fsching what?
The other thing this would create just as many
inefficiencies as it would supposedly eliminate.
too unwiledy a Beast.
So stupid.
Hi,
0 0 IP addresses
Imagine IPv6 and it's numbers (2^128):
340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0
Now imagine each item having it's own IP address?
Can anyone say every hair on every human on the earth AND every square inch on the earth's surface having an IP address WITH IP addresses left over for everything else?
It's just the beginning folks.
I must say, the reaction to this stuff is unbeleivable to me.
.. To a busy person, like me, the prospect of being able to have important food items automatically ordered FOR me is super cool. Kind of like automatic bill-pay (a lifesaver) but for food....
All over this thread is the argument: "Do we really NEED a smart toaster?"
I for one, do. I saw a demonstration of the Thalia appliances (From Sunbeam) and was very impressed with what they could do. For example, they pulled up a recipe (conceivably across the Internet) for a cake. The central kitchen computer automatically uploaded the recipe to each of the appliances used in it.. for example the oven was automatically preheated and the mixer was powered on and ready to go.
The mixer prompted you to enter the ingredients at the right time. It had a scale built into it, so you could just add the ingredients to the bowl without having to use measuring cups and the like... it told you "when".
When something needed to be mixed, the mixer handled it itself... literally just took over. The only user intervention in the process occured when they entered ingredients (in a much more efficient manner) and poured the contents of the mixed ingredients into the pan and stuck in the oven. The oven (didn't actually work when I saw this, but it was "planned") would eventually know how long to cook the cake...and shut itself off. For more complicated recipes it could properly vary temperatures..
The point is, by themselves these are cool advances. But it goes farther.. how many people do you know who have several clocks in their homes that are only showing the right time about 6 months of the year (depending on whether daylight savings time is in effect).. a "smart clock" will not only properly set itself, but can handle these changes for you.. uber cool. No more oversleeping the next day because your alarm clock didn't get set.
Controlling lights via the network has important security and aesthetic concerns. I've seen home-networked based lighting schemes that make it easy to set mood lighting (no more reliance on purely off-white light).. no more plug-in light timers either.. and that's a definite positive.
The prospect of being able to take inventory of my food items while i'm at the grocery store is exciting. How often do you get the store and go "damn, do I have milk?"
I could go on.. the point is, by themselves these advances are not neccesarily huge (and hardly revolutionary) but taken in aggregate they are very exciting (although I would argue that it is still somethign short of a revolution).
After all, we didn't NEED the washing machine.. and when it was introduced many people simply forged on with their hand washing ways (after all, they didn't need this modern hogwash).. I bet if your reading this either A) You have or use a washing machine or B) You don't wash your clothes:)
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Have a look at this.
et cetera.
Simply abominable...
I'm sorry, but WRONG!!!
Try this one: Geeky Thief walks into your house with a handheld device, swishes it around a few times and walks out with the smallest and most easiest carried objects that just told the intruder where they are hidden. Wonderful.
Move faster
Till we heard about Echelon, we never knew that such a massive operation is underway by Democracies such as USA,UK,Australia,Canada and New Zealand. Don't forget that Echelon is run by democratic governments but the French have accused these countries of using the network for corporate espionage.The massive increase in computing power has increased the possibility of maintaining a database about citizens.
Technically it is possible to maintain such a database using high end architectures such as Cray supercomputers.Recently, a florida based firm has developed a rice grain sized transmitter for US army which can pinpoint the position of the soldiers in the war situation using GPS. It is a great invention as far as war scenario is concerned, but would you like someone to maintain a database of where you have been going, what you have been doing, which night clubs you visit, who you have been meeting?The idea of such a databse and the possible uses of it is really frightening. Who will administer it? What are the chances that such data is not used for corporate espionage or political purposes or pure blackmail? More often than not it will be used for wrong purposes.
It is likely to be a reality. We may not like it, but it is going to happen, because nobody seeked the permission of US Congress or UK parliament before setting up The Echelon network, so we should not assume that it is going to be done this time around.
One just hopes that this technology is used to trace criminals, rapists and Terrorists, if that is done, we can find some solace in living in such a world.