Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
aka outside
Great -- thanks for giving away my e-mail addresses. At least now I know who to credit for my new influx of spam.
--Darren
In the future we'll have numbers instead of names, and I'll be number 1!
...Why?
I'm all for spimes/blogjects/fountains that respond to stock prices, but for crissakes why does my inanimate chair need an IPv6 address?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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.
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.
Will it be called the World Wide Who, When, What and Where Web? WWWWWWW is quite catchy I think.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I'll have 0000000000001 because it was my idea.
Technology has been progressing in this direction inexorably for some time now. It seems like every new advance we make is somehow capable of eating away at our privacy. So... even though the ability to tie all of a person's personal data together really seems like a Bad Thing, can it be prevented? Or just defended against on an individual basis, like people now who choose only to use cash so they don't leave a digital paper trail?
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
And you're number 653,505.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
"I don't know if darren@yahoo.com is the same as darren@gmail.com."
Um, yes. I have many different email addresses precisely so people know know that 0123456@hotmail.com is the same person as 0123456@gmail.com.
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. Still, if he's that trusting, maybe he'll buy the bridge I have for sale.
There may be a reason I have John@yahoo.com John@gmail.com Perhaps John@yahoo.com is a public email address. where John@gmail.com is a contact that does not want spam. When you resolve John@* create a database. It fucks everything up.
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.
...just a comment on the quote in the summary.
There is often a REASON that darren@yahoo.com will not tell everyone he knows that he is also darren@gmail.com. Personally, I manage my email in such a way that accounts I have at various locations serve different purposes - commercial/junk, family and friends, work, university, etc. I don't necessarily want all of these identities crossing over and I would like to have precise control over who has this information to begin with - and that includes some commercial giant search company who thinks they can offer me "privacy" settings to maintain my control over my identity as long as I give up all of this information to them.
To an extent, this relates to the criticisms leveled at MySpace and Facebook recently as well. Too much centralization of identity opens brave new worlds for people you may have only the most tenuous of relationships with to find out more than you may be intending to share with them.
That said, I'm off to RTFA because I don't think that giving everything a unique identifier is a bad thing; I just don't think that Yahoo or Google or anyone else necessarily has a RIGHT to know how all of my personal identifiers are connected.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
FTA: I am in a supermarket and I pick up a can of tomatoes and I place it in the shopping trolley. Immediately my mobile phone flashes green to indicate to me that it is a good buy. I go down the aisle and choose a bottle of wine but this time my phone flashes red to suggest I reconsider.
Great. Now I have to get permission from my phone to go grocery shopping.
Wny not skip W4 and go to W5H? The classic 'who, what, when, where, why and how' of information has been around for years longer than the Internet and covers the basics.
While it would be nice to have that concept for some things, part of the benefit of the internet was the ability to not tie all that stuff together.
In real life, my boss has no idea what religion I practice (or don't), or what my political views are.
If my identities were all tied together, this would mean losing that separation in cyberspace. I wouldn't be able to maintain a "political commentary" identity separate from my work based identity. Heck, there are several posts on Slashdot I would never have been able to make due to reprisals.
bad idea dude.
Then again, I didn't RTFA, so maybe this isn't as bad as I think, but I'm glad my boss isn't seeing me be this un-thorough.
16) And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads,
17) that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Who knew it would be an IPv6 address?
One key problem with identity is non-uniqueness of names -- there can be several people named Darren Waters. Disambiguating these is nontrivial because it requires other identifiers (e.g., age, hometown, address). Often times the searcher doesn't know anything else about the target. Add spelling errors and things become even more confusing.
A second "which 'Darren Waters'" problem is role-segmentation. I, and am sure many, have multiple online persona reflect different interests, roles, and communities. Depending on the context, I'm a geek, engineer, photographer, stock trader, businessman, etc. Any meaningful search for me would need to specify which version of me they were looking for.
Searching for a person implies both uniquely defining the person and defining which aspect of the person one is looking for because "which 'Darren Waters'" is a problem with two dimensions of ambiguity.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Why? Seriously, why should my chair have some unique identifier, and why should you need to search it? It is a physical entity that I sit on. If it is physically present then I can sit there, if not then I'll hunt for it myself. I don't need google to find it.
Good!
Central management of internet identities and central linking also means no anonymity. No ability to create an identity on a per user group basis. Why should the people I discuss 40wheeling with be able to link to my identity as a campaigner for gay rights? The two are separate worlds and I like them that way. They don't need to interact and I see no reason that you should force them to interact.
Tough, go join another industry.
When last I checked Yahoo was in the business of searching out information not mapping all things including my chair. I don't want Yahoo to know about my chair, that is why I didn't make a webpage for it.
Yes well again I'm not wooed by your crocodile tears. Yes when looking up things there is the possibility of confusion but some global numbering system won't change that really. Even if such a system was implemented it would reduce privacy, probably by outing many a closet homosexual, but the people who really wanted to game it still would and even though you matched the serial number for Bob Henderson at 2213 Mockingbird Lane, and found that he likes Monster trucks, and old Judy Garland Movies you still wouldn't be able to believe it. Because someone who wanted to hide their love of Monster trucks may just have been posting under his name.
Even if you put the force of law and economics behind it, say the way that credit card fraud is banned it will still happen. The net result of an internet of things would be 1) My chair having its own fan club 2) Yahoo getting into the ChoicePoint voter-roll purging busines, and 3) people too weak to protect themselves being outed for no good reason.
Lest we forget there is a reason for anonymity in this world. Many people, esp those coping with personally difficult things, want to broach them under different identities for fear of persecution. Others, like me, just value our privacy as a matter of course and feel that more information only benefits others, not us. Finally dangerous or unpopular ideas (say phamplets advocating for the American Revolution, democracy, and the rights of man) cannot be published except anonymously for fear of violent reprisal. That's why Benjamin Franklin used the name 'Mrs. Silence Dogood'.
I didn't realise that Amazon did this already, but perhaps that outlines another problem: When I search for, say, and author on Amazon, I get a huge list, not of books, but of versions of books, often at random, which is rather annoying. No additional filtering or organising is done, so there are still pages of out of print, out of date, out of stock books to got through.
I guess without a lot of additional code, UIDs for everything won't make a lot of difference.
As with Wikipedia, issues of scope and conflict resolution will be the ever-present hurdles. That is, if this technology is ever implemented and widely accepted. One could envision an internet-wide database of people, yes, but by what process is the user assured the Albert Einstein referenced on it is really Albert Einstein the scientist? Mr. Einstein of Portland, Oregon is about to cash in on this "internet of things" thing.
Sounds like the techno-fascist Horowitz has already been assimilated. Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh may have had the right idea after all.
I'm sure a lot of people/things don't want to be found, let alone indexed and searched. I think that's one reason why ldap never became a global directory for people like DNS has for hosts.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
{
spam(i);
}
It's the reason I quit using ICQ years ago.
Camping on quad since 1996.
A government's wet dream. How sweet. Implant RFIDs in people from birth and *poof* it's 1984 just a few decades late!
What I want is for my home phone to warn me before I leave the house how my Desk Char is doing. That way I can know whether or not to bring my emergency chair.
Advance planning is always good.
Amassing a comprehensive knowledge base of who, when, what and where is noble enough, until you consider the reason for it, which isn't explicitly mentioned: marketing. He speaks of being able to accurately identify a single person on the internet; the obvious reason why they want to do this is to be able to target advertising more effectively.
The answers to who, when, what and where are "junk food" information. How and why are the sources of real knowledge, and require critical thinking and reasoning to comprehend.
"...the four 'W's' being who, when, what and where, and how..."
For very large values of 4.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
so that all information on the internet about a person is available at one convenient location. This will prevent employees from wasting time googling their own name...
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Why would we WANT to manage identities. Thought one the freedoms of the internet was anonymity and freedom of speech.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Evil as this is... can it be prevented?
Yes. Systems like this work well against a low level of random noise, but have a high vulnerability to deliberate poinsoning.
Simple example, that people (including myself) really do... Go to your grocery store and apply for one of their annoying "we promise we won't track you but your coupons will magically relate to things you usually buy" customer cards. They generally give you two of them (sometimes even four, as two keychain fobs and two wallet photo sized cards). Give each of these to different random people, making sure to get at least one back in trade. Every few weeks, trade again. Congratulations, you have now very thoroughly poisoned the store's database of your buying habits.
I've done that wiht cards and passed them off to a friend who travels with the Ren. Faires for a living. She's since passed off my cards to others, so now Winn Dixie, Petsmart, etc. think I live and buy (on at least a weekly basis) stuff in 5 or 6 different states, which vary depending on the time of year....
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Well, let's start with the idea that this is an exaggeration.
... let's say about twenty to twenty five years. The problem with identification systems is that they embody invalid assumptions. This is the most common flaw in relational designs: keys that embody invalid assumptions. Over time, simple, meaningless scalar keys tend to entail the fewest nasty surprises, but even serial numbers embody an assumption: that we never need to compare record identities between systems that might assign the same number. In that case, we fall back on our (flawed) ideas of key candidacy.
Everything doesn't need an unique ID. You don't need an ID for every cashew nut in the can.
However, there's probably a reasonable reason to have an unique ID for your chair -- at least at some point in its lifetime. Maybe for inventory control in the store; or as part of the nasty divorce settlement you will go through with your wife several years from now.
So to restate the problem, it is useful to be able to identify things uniquely at various points in their lifetime. The question is -- what is the best way?
I've been a relational database designer for
I've come to the conclusion that keys should either be scalar strings representing abstractions or classes, or they should be UUIDs (or similar values that can be generated uniquely and autonomously). So "Monday, tuesday, wednesday..." are fine as keys identifying days of the week. Or maybe not.
One problem I come across in my job is identifying species. Well, sometimes species are renamed (not a problem), but sometimes they are split by new taxonomical criteria. So it's worse than starting with genus A and species X and ending up with A x and A y; really a taxonomic identification of A x prior to the recognition of the existence of A y is a different thing than afterwards. Really, we should have A x (prior) and A x (after) and A y (necessarily after), and the relationship between all three designations need to be clarified at a different level of design.
In these kinds of problems, we are immeasurably helped by meaninglessly unique designations. When in doubt, a designer should split things, because it is usually more practical to combine that which was split without need than that which was combined in ignorance of need.
Now with respect to the problems particularly around privacy, that giving things identifiers raises. The post-facto-lumping principle I posited above takes care of that. That is to say multiple identifiers in different contexts presents no problem. When there is a legitimate need to cross reference identities across policy domains, the uniform an guaranteed unique nature of an universal ID makes this much easier. So you can have pseudonomy as a gay rights activist -- you have an unique identifier which with some crypto -- can verify messages from you. If in the future you choose to associate your gay rights persona with your political party volunteer persona, you can provide any (or no) party with information proving the equivalence of your identity in each sphere.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Evil as this is... can it be prevented?
Yes. Systems like this work well against a low level of random noise, but have a high vulnerability to deliberate poinsoning."
The larger question is not whether the system itself can be poisoned, the question is how and who will trust the system and will they understand it can be poisoned?
Will you be hauled into court and have this metadata presented in the same manner, as say, fingerprints are?
The problem is not the system itself, but how much TRUST people will put into it.
The AC who responded to you really hit the nail on the head. The problem isn't simply that the data can be collected and collated, but that people will begin to turn it to any purpose they can and some of them may be double-plus ungood! What if spammers could get their hands on the purchasing habits of millions of consumers? On the surface it sounds like it could maybe be ok, after all at least they'd be spamming you with stuff you *may* have an interest in buying. The problem is that if spam begins to have better targeting, it'll also have better success rates, which means more money, which means more spammers. Poisoning the data wouldn't help in this case. You'd just be bringing *more* spam, targeted at people other than yourself - pretty much like today, but with better resources for the spammers.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
Get em while they're hot!
Deleted
"It's at doubleyoo doubleyoo doubleyoo doubleyoo doubleyoo doubleyoo doubleyoo dot mysite dot com."
I think your proposal would cause the stock price of the word "septuple" to skyrocket.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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...
In the late 1990s, somebody was selling a "bar code everything in your home" kit. You could print bar code stickers, and there was a wand for scanning them. If you loaned a hammer to a neighbor, you could check it out and get follow up messages if they didn't bring it back. Really. Didn't sell.
This is roughly the same idea.
Much of the "Internet of things" is silly. There's not much utility of putting sensors in everything where there are no actuators to act on the data. If we had lots of robots running around, it would make sense; all those sensors would alert them to rugs that needed cleaning, shoes that needed to be put away, and supplies that needed to be restocked. But just sending the data to a web page or a phone is pointless.
Collecting data from devices that need maintenance makes sense. One of the more useful applications is to have commercial air conditioning gear communicate with a maintenance center, so that excessive crud in the chilled water or low compressor pressure is detected early and units can be fixed before they fail completely. But those systems have lots of actuators; they can switch compressors, open and close valves, adjust dampers, and work around some problems while calling for repair service.
But the ability to talk to things so dumb they can't do anything is sort of pointless.
The reason for multiple email accounts and especially aliases and such is for personal safety on the web.
There are countless articles on kids and also adult idiots who meet up in chat rooms, hand out their personal data like it was free candy, and then get fucked over in various ways because they weren't careful enough.
I have a specific alias to be associated with all my chatroom activities so they can't tie that version of me to the me in the real world. I also have a pen name and substitute fake names for real names when I write.
Things have gotten bad enough with employers looking up personal web accounts of potential employees, and making biased decisions based on things written there. Sometimes, I think, a bit of annonymity is needed to maintain sanity.
"if only i had known i would have been a locksmith." -albert einstein
I believe that this is what semantic web projects like FOAF are designed to do.
Hasn't this guy heard of the URI? (see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html)
The problem isn't coming up with systems to name things the problem is how to
associate semantics (i.e. meaning) to the things that are named that allow programs to operate
on them. I think some guy (Berners-Lee or something) has been working on this -:)
Was it Mencken said something to the effect that people who say they want to save the world really just want to control it?
This is a pathological solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You don't need to know who I am (that is, what skin I inhabit); you only need to know what our relationship is. If I'm the person who put in the highest bid, I'm the one who gets the item. If I'm the one who deposited the money, I'm the one who gets to withdraw it (Swiss Banks understand this--they don't give a dam about identity).
What you want to know is that you are dealing with a consistent persona "in sickness and in health".
I have a number of personae that I keep isolated. The important ones have enough in common that with some work you might connect the dots. Others have unrelated names and don't even share the same workstation or network access. None of us are doing anything illegal, but I have good reasons to draw distinctions. Getting them all linked up would serve no one in any legitimate way.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Build this nut-job a virtual world and let him do whatever he wants in it.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Somehow, every "new search technology" comes to back to the same idea, which is tagging objects with categories outside description of their traits in the online world (keyword, address, memory location). This guy is no exception, except that he's put a psychotic business model on top of it, instead of finding a way to evangelize RDF to the web at large (in my view, a good idea).
technical writing / development
And once everyone has an assigned number no one will be able to buy or sell anything without their digital sign embedded in their skin. Cue Horsemen...
The unique ID should be a plank time resolution timestamp of the date of creation of the object....
:)
were it not for that whole relativity thing which always screws things up
"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."
Didn't they call that Microsoft Passport? Or is that Windows Live ID nowadays?
"The problem of managing identities." Do people really want this "problem" solved?
Technology isn't about what is useful, it's about what is cool. So warning that the offce burnt down is pointless. A reminder of Fire Extinguisher Day, that's hip.
That would be great, but I think God already beat you to it.
.....
Now all we need to do is find a bar code reader with a fine enough resolution
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
No, I doubt they'll ever be able to associate me or any of my computer components with downloading a copy of Shrek 4. I stopped at 2.
No.
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...
... He wants his science fiction book title back. Bruce Sterling has been talking about this idea of years. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/03/20 /distributing-the-future.html
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-385773935 9956666768