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The Internet Of Things

Posted by Zonk on from the will-it-help-me-find-my-socks dept.

Roosta writes "BBC News has an article by Bradley Horowitz, responsible for novel technology development at search giant Yahoo, looking ahead to the 'internet of things'. He discusses the importance of the 'W4' problem, the four 'W's' being who, when, what and where, and how to bring together metadata to make the world a more searchable place. 'All entities - everything from the particular chair I am sitting on to objects like the Lincoln Memorial monument should have a unique digital identifier. As an example - let's start with people. I don't know if darren@yahoo.com is the same as darren@gmail.com. There is a problem of managing identity across the internet, so when I say Darren Waters I mean this person and all of the manifestations and representations and personas of that person. The ability to knit those together is a huge challenge and opportunity for us as an industry. That's what I mean by resolving people - I mean this person and not the likely thousands of other people who share your name.'"

9 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. I like my privacy, so please, no email ID by ion++ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I am not sure that i want anyone but those i tell to know if darren@yahoo.com and darren@gmail.com is read by the same person.

    1. Re:I like my privacy, so please, no email ID by plover · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I am not sure that i want anyone but those i tell to know if darren@yahoo.com and darren@gmail.com is read by the same person.
      The problem we'll encounter is that if everything is tagged individually then relationships can be made between tagged items.

      We're seeing this with hypothetical RFID scenarios. If you have RFID tagged car keys (like a SpeedPass token) and a credit card, when you walk into a store and buy something those keys can be read and associated with your credit card number. If those same car keys come back but you use a different credit card, a relationship between the two credit cards can be discovered. Any RFID tagged merchandise can be used in the same manner, and associated with you. Eventually a whole "cloud" of your tagged stuff will be related, so that even if you pay for "Catcher in the Rye" with cash, they can still figure out that you're ion++. And that's just with today's technology.

      Today, only your IP address is associated with downloading a copy of Shrek 3. IPv6 is going to make sure that your cable modem, your computer, your RAM and your hard disk are all associated with downloading a copy of Shrek 4.

      --
      John
    2. Re:I like my privacy, so please, no email ID by plover · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Unfortunately, I don't believe enough other people do care about the issue.

      Take shopper loyalty cards, for example. For a benefit of perhaps 1% of the value of the transaction, people are glad to give away their private information. From that, they learn that "it's not so bad, I get a discount, and I always shop there." The industry might even spin the issue to say something completely factually incorrect, like "this privacy law will mean the end of frequent shopper cards!"

      People are sheep. They can be led around like cattle for one penny on the dollar. Don't count on them to pass any legislation protecting themselves.

      --
      John
  2. Author needs to get out of the basement by Harmonious+Botch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    'All entities - everything from the particular chair I am sitting on to objects like the Lincoln Memorial monument should have a unique digital identifier. Jawohl! Everything vill be numbered today und vill be ready for inspection tomorrow.

    No. The world should not be re-organized to suit computers. Computers should be reprogrammed to handle a complex world.
    We see one of the classic symptoms of the bureaucrat here: someone who thinks that the person - or thing - should be subordinate to the numbering system.
    1. Re:Author needs to get out of the basement by kpharmer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And regardless of the deployable outcomes of linking *too much* personal data...

      Side note: notice that he talked about links our email addresses, but didn't talk about linking corporate identities? How about shedding a little light on the incestuous relationships between corporate boards & ceos?

      But aside from that - the real world consists of things that are hard to classify:
          where their boundaries are gradual:
              - rivers (change over time)
              - events (see example from TFA about coffee shop outside of event)
              - times (new years eve party started exactly when? 8:00 pm? 11:00 pm?)
          or where there are different opinions about what a thing is:
              - table can be a chair if you sit on it (see Wittgenstein)
              - a stick can be a tool, weapon, toy, etc
              - what a computer is has changed over the past 90 years
          or where there are arguments over which parts of a thing are the thing:
              - is your mouse part of your computer? how about your monitor? your hard drive?
              - does your home include the yard? odds are sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't

      And this doesn't even touch on concepts (the TFA stated that we should label concepts). That's truly rediculous. Imagine the above problems magnified a hundred times to deal with abstract concepts and language.

  3. A philosophy of approach by naoursla · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We can modify the entire world so that our current machines can operate effectively, or we can modify our machines to operate in the current world.

    We can give every person a serial number and an easy means for machines to track that serial number, or we can train the machines to do voice and face recognition to do authentication the way humans do. We can attach RFID tags to every item sold at every store, or we can develop vision algorithms to recognize and track the items with cameras to achieve the same results.

    I worry that modifying the world to make it easy for machines will make the world difficult for humans. We should modify the machines fit our needs not the other way around. I would rather live in a world that is full of robots than live inside a giant world-sized robot.

    Changing the environment for to help machines operate is nothing new. Railroad tracks provide navigational control for a very non-intelligent transportation machine.

  4. Re:There's this thing called privacy by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What a strange world he must live in if he thinks we actually _WANT_ everyone to know everything we do and to search all information that's available.

    Oh, he's under no pretense that YOU want any of that. He thinks that there are businesses that would pay his company a basket full of dollar signs because THEY want to search all information that's available about who you are and what you do, regardless of what you want. And he's right.

  5. When did context die, and when was the wake? by BobMcD · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's what I mean by resolving people - I mean this person and not the likely thousands of other people who share your name The chief reason we get to reuse names has traditionally been that they really don't overlap that often. This is very similar to IPv4 addresses.

    For example 192.168.1.50 is my MythTV box, just like Darren Waters is a buddy of mine from High School. When I say 'Darren' to my wife, she KNOWS who I'm talking about thanks to a little thing known as context. This proposal would change the way I refer to 'Darren' to something arbitrary and unique. The trick is, my brain already does this for me. When I think 'Darren' I can instantly access millions of memories of unique events that put his name into context. An identifier assigned by a third party isn't going to help me access these memories. In fact its quite likely to make it harder. And, should another Darren come along, THEN we move to a more unique identifier such as a last name, job title, or short description. In other words a context.

    The same can be said about the Lincoln Memorial. Should conversation need a better description, you can specify any number of details to delineate them. The Lincoln Memorial in DC is different from the one at his birthplace (assuming there is one, I'm too busy to google it...)

    This idea only works in a world large enough to discuss all the Darrens that might overlap at once.

    And to go back to my box, I don't want or need it to be in a network large enough to have to contend with the identity of all the other MythTV boxes in the world. I'd rather deal with IPv4's limitations than deal with IPv6's wear and tear on my memory.

    TFA's solution is to let the machines do all the work, but that's a fantasy. Who inputs all that data? Who keeps it up to date? Who decides how to sort and analyze it? Humans do. And like I said above, we use things that the machines can't yet handle like memories, comparisons, impressions - context.

    And that doesn't even touch on the issue that two different brains file things in completely different ways.

    Show me the need, and I might be convinced. But until then you're playing with fire, Mr. Horowitz...
  6. Overcomplication? by Warbothong · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I can't stop myself from thinking that if Yahoo! hadn't made forwarding email messages from me@yahoo.com (or even using POP3 access) a 'premium service' then I could get all of my Yahoo! mail sent to me@gmail.com already if I wanted to, and thus consolidate both addresses in a useful way that is transparent to people sending me messages to either. But of course, if Yahoo! didn't make those things 'premium' then I wouldn't have defected to Gmail in the first place...