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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
"...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
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.
"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...
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 -:)
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...