The Internet Of Things

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.'"

Comments

I like my privacy, so please, no email ID

[ion]

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.

Author needs to get out of the basement

[Harmonious Botch]

'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.

Re:Author needs to get out of the basement

[kpharmer]

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.

A philosophy of approach

[naoursla]

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.

Re:There's this thing called privacy

[poot_rootbeer]

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.