An IP Address For Every Light Bulb

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday NXP and Green Wave Reality announced to the world that they plan to give every lightbulb an IPV6 address. Hot on the heels of Google's 900 mhz announcement, Green Wave Reality already has iPhone / Android / and Web-based support. Looks like the lighting wars have started."

Comments

Wrong place

[plover]

Architecturally, this is the wrong place to put uniquely addressed devices. The addresses should be in the fixtures, to avoid the maintenance headache of readdressing bulbs every time they are replaced. If I want the lights in the room to dim, I don't want to tell the bulbs, I want to tell the room that I'm sitting in. The room contains the fixtures. The fixtures contain the bulbs. How the room talks to the fixtures and the fixtures talk to the bulbs are different questions, but individually addressable bulbs is a maintenance disaster waiting to happen.

Just because they're conveniently end-user replaceable doesn't make it a correct choice, just slightly more practical. X-10, Z-Wave and Insteon are all also equally incorrect in that they generally put the control at the point of the switch, instead of the fixture. Again, the user's ultimate goal is not to control the switch but to control the room's lighting, which is defined by the fixtures and their locations within the room.

Re:Wrong place

[The MAZZTer]

Easy, make the fixtures DHCP servers.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are wiring a light base to be always on with no switch (not sure about electrical code on that one, but definitely dangerous when it comes to changing bulbs unless the end user really knows for certain where the breaker for that circuit is) safety (and availability of power) says the switch makes the most sense.

Re:Wrong place

[danlip]

If you had an LED light bulb it might last long enough to be functionally equivalent to the fixture. I think it is pretty silly either way. This feature will consume additional electricity, and if you want to turn the light bulb on remotely the circuit has to be always on even when the bulb is off. This does not seem to be a good way to save energy.

Re:Wrong place

[softWare3ngineer]

Might a dhcp fixture might assign ip address its own bulbs? I might want to have a fixture turn on only 2 of 4 bulbs or maybe ping all the bulbs i have address for to see if any are broken, or maybe add rows of bulbs for something like a extensible chandelier. just a thought. i suppose the just sending commands / queries to the fixtures would also work.

Re:Wrong place

[geekoid]

They will, and the light will just communicate with that. The advantage of giving one to the lightbulb is that you acn follow it if it's moved.

I mean, from an Architecturally stand point. When the fuck someone will move a light is another story.

Re:Wrong place

[softWare3ngineer]

my apologies for grammar. hope you get the idea.

Re:Wrong place

[R0UTE]

And don't forget to NAT everything while you're at it.

Re:Wrong place

[Z00L00K]

Imagine how much fun pranksters would have if they found the addresses of your light fixtures. But it could also lead to some awesome light shows.

Re:Wrong place

[gfreeman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9FbjjkKo4

Re:Wrong place

[Relayman]

No NAT with IPV6; there are so many addresses that it's totally unnecessary. What, people want to do it anyway?

Re:Wrong place

[kcbnac]

"An ultra-low-power standby supply controller with 10mW no-load capability"

So we want to go from having the switch disconnect power to the lights, to adding 10mW for EVERY lightbulb in existence...how the HELL is this part of a 'Green Wave' in helping me manage power consumption in my house?

Presume I have 50 bulbs in my house. At 10mW, we're talking 2.5W of always-on baseload draw. Multiply that times 75 million (rounded down from the 75.11 million Wolfram Alpha gave me): 2.5 * 75,000,000 = 187,000,000W of 'IDLE' power drawn so I can 'make the most of energy savings in the home.'

HA!

Source:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=houses+in+america
(It gave a 2009 count of owner-occupied housing units)

Re:Wrong place

[LWATCDR]

Depends.
Do you want to pay a lot of money for this LED bulb that will save power and last a long time or do you want the cheap bulb.
vs
Do you want this cool bulb that will save you money and allow you to control the lights from anywhere in the house.
I tend to leave a light on in the morning if I will not be back until late so I can see when I get home. Timers are a pain. If I could turn them on remotely when I got home it would be great.
Over all a net savings in power.

Re:Wrong place

[neurocutie]

no its a good way to easily slip in cameras, mikes, speakers, everywhere... electricity increase, at least at first, could be tiny... a few milliwatts...

Re:Wrong place

[ptrourke]

Ever get the feeling that nobody else got the joke? I'm here to spare you from that feeling.

Re:Wrong place

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Pervasive and ubiquitous surveillance, disguised as an assisting technology for energy efficiency.

How many gift Trojan horses must we look in the mouth, on a daily basis?

Re:Wrong place

[Moryath]

Since when has all this automatic stuff ever been done with energy efficiency in mind?

One look at all the craze over "wireless everything" shows you that people aren't serious about energy efficiency.

Then again, there was a time we had to get up off the couch to change the channel, too. Imagine the lazy people of today even thinking of such a thing or knowing where the controls were on the damn TV.

Re:Wrong place

[R0UTE]

There also isn't DHCP with IPv6, hence the sarcastic comment... Oh well I guess my crap joke was worse than I thought. Or I overestimated the knowledge of the average /.er.

Re:Wrong place

[afidel]

Multiply times 2 since the PF will be .5 or so given the target price point.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why ipv6 weenies are wroing. Addressing can be a security or information concern. Nat isnt a complete security solution, but it is part of one. (fuck assholes I know the difference between Nat and firewalling) I still believe NAT mechanisms have a legitimate place.

Re:Wrong place

[tlhIngan]

No NAT with IPV6; there are so many addresses that it's totally unnecessary. What, people want to do it anyway?

Well, if I want every lightbulb to have a consistent IP address when my ISP decides to give me a new prefix, I'd rather not want to renumber everything inside it. Or adjust all the settings.

Can you imagine? Your ISP decides to give you a new prefix and you'd have to program it into your switches so they can talk to the right lightbulbs again.

One of the benefits of NAT was the internal network was separated from the external - changes to the external IP addresses didn't influence the internal ones - simplifying management and administration. Some places don't mind going through the rigamarole, but I'm sure most homes have better things to do than manage their networks (if they even know how).

Sure you can assign more IPv6 addresses to ensure that your home server is always FC00::100, but having to know all the IP addresses of each machine when diagnosing things just gets to be a pain. Yes, you can use DHCPv6 to staticly assign addresses, but given how badly most devices handle DHCP IP address changes, it'll be a reboot fest.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

"there are so many addresses that it's totally unnecessary" where have I heard that before?

Re:Wrong place

[DerekLyons]

That's why you should be talking to the house, not the room, fixtures, or appliances. One always on circuit that can power up downstream only circuits as needed. There are times when distributed systems are the hammer you need, but this isn't one of them.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Architecturally, this is the wrong place to put uniquely addressed devices.

Thats because you're holding it wrong.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but in terms of managing easily swappable CCD cameras with WiFi links, only the lightbulb really makes sense.

Re:Wrong place

[Tuan121]

You can do both.. the room has an ip address, and supposedly however it's hooked up the room will know what is connected to it automatically so it doesn't matter if their ip addresses change.

However then that also gives you the option of talking to a specific device without requiring to go through the room overlay.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Either one will do as long as the government can monitor how green you are today.

Re:Wrong place

[amliebsch]

Ha! Make you're neighbor's house start doing this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmgf60CI_ks

Re:Wrong place

[BlueKitties]

I think an additional DNS layer of sorts would be most fitting. That way, sockets AND lightbulbs can change without extensive reconfiguration. Further, it means I don't need to replace all of my current sockets to upgrade my house.

Re:Wrong place

[geekoid]

50 bulbs? really? big house.

Anyways, let say your bulbs are 10- Watts.
That means if you use 1 of your 50 bulbs for 15 minutes less per day, you break even. Everything else is a gain.

Re:Wrong place

[RedACE7500]

I want the cheap bulb.

Re:Wrong place

[Firethorn]

There are a number of options other than this though, that don't need the addressing/network connection.

For example, light/motion sensor lights. Set your porch light to come on only if it's dark and somebody approaches.

For a room, perhaps a reed switch in the door or just tie it to a timer. Or have it do both - something like 'turn light on for 5 minutes whenever switch activates'. Then again, perhaps an infrared sensor that lights the room when it thinks a human is inside.

As danlip mentions, the networking features will consume more power - and you gotta get the power pretty low when you're talking about 15 watt LED/flourescent bulbs.

I like the idea of putting the addressing into the fixture, if you do anything - that way you can better account for legacy wiring that simply chops power off when the switch is thrown, or just select the most appropriate lighting level setting system - whether that be IP addressing, dimmer switch, motion or other sensor.

Re:Wrong place

[vlm]

X-10, Z-Wave and Insteon are all also equally incorrect in that they generally put the control at the point of the switch, instead of the fixture.

"Insteon", more or less a modernized competitor of X10 and friends, does three-way switch emulation by having remote switches remotely switch the switch that switches the load. Yeah, I know, confused the heck out of me the first time.

Putting the PoC at the switch is apparently necessary for 3way switches, or you need to extend the protocol to add a "toggle" function.

Re:Wrong place

[Anrego]

generally put the control at the point of the switch

This actually makes the most sense to me. You are gonna want the physical switch to be in sync with the light fixture, and want to have the physical point of shut off for safety (changing a light bulb comes to mind). You can't use a traditional switch because if the traditional switch is turned off, your fixture isn't getting power and can't toggle itself on.. so you are going to need a special switch anyway. Having no inline switch (that is, the fixture always has power and the "switch" just communicates to the fixture via network) sounds unsafe and probably illegal.

One IP per fixture/bulb sounds ridiculous though. Have a protocol that lets a device enumerate the number of bulbs .. and toggle those individually. In other words, if you have 4 lights connected to a switch.. that switch has an IP and it's protocol lets you say "dim light 3 by 20%".

Also, this is just more fuel for the upcoming IPv6 NAT phenomenon.

Re:Wrong place

[cayenne8]

You know...I'm thinking that there might be a good black market demand for good old fashioned, incandescent light bulbs...no IP addresses, nothing to monitor your use with....and good nice lighting that is pleasant on the eyes.

Hmm...wonder what it would cost to make a few of these on the side?

Re:Wrong place

[VGPowerlord]

There also isn't DHCP with IPv6, hence the sarcastic comment...

Yes there is, defined as RFC 3315. Do your homework next time.

Re:Wrong place

[tool462]

A more practical solution for existing fixtures would be an attachment that screws into the socket, and then the bulb screws into that.

Of course it doesn't negate the general silliness of the entire thing, but it is a little bit more sane.

Re:Wrong place

[hoggoth]

Yeah, motion sensor lights are just great.

A few weeks ago I was sitting on the toilet in a stall in the church bathroom. I was taking longer than usual; After about 10 minutes the lights shut off. So there I am sitting in complete pitch black. I called out lightly, but no one heard. I was too embarrassed to yell. I reached my hand under the stall door and waved it around trying to activate the motion sensor, to no avail. I reached up and took my light jacket off the hook on the door and started whipping my jacket over the top of the stall door, again to no avail. Then I was getting pissed. I partially stood, wiped as well as possible in pitch darkness, and pushed the stall door open, but still nothing. Then I waddled a couple of steps forward and started waving my jacket around towards the entry door hoping it would break into the motion sensor's area of view.

That's when the door opened, the lights snapped on instantly, and a little boy stood staring in shock at the nut case waddling like a penguin with his pants around his ankles waving his jacket in a circle over his head.

Yep. Love motion sensors.

Re:Wrong place

[R0UTE]

My bad, wrong phrasing. It was not part of the original spec however, as it was replaced with autoconf. It was defined 5 years later...

Re:Wrong place

[Lumpy]

Not many people I know lick their fingers and jam them in the socket when they change the bulb. IF you cant avoid that temptation when you change your light bulbs, I suggest hiring a helper to make sure you can keep your fingers away from the contacts.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed the bulb is the wrong place, but don't agree that the fixture is the right place, at least in practical terms. Say you put the logic at the fixture - how does the connected switch know whether the fixture dims or not? Now you've not only added intelligence to the fixture, but you must also add intelligence to the controller (switch). Both will draw power because they need to be "on" all the time since the switch will need to know what the current state of the fixture is and the fixture must be "awake" for commands. While putting the intelligence at the switch may not be ideal, it's probably the most cost-effective and practical.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad that the donotwant tag isn't with this story.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your missing one of the points of V6?

You wouldn't need DHCP. The Bulbs would address themselves from the router advertisements..

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent up

Re:Wrong place

[Lumpy]

I want the cheap bulb that I can control from anywhere. That's why I bought a lighting control system for my home instead of being the typical idiot homeowner and blowing all the money on marble countertops and stainless appliances.

Re:Wrong place

[sjames]

If you don't NAT the NATed NAT then an evil 5 year old hacker in Russia might turn your reading lamp off just as you are about to find out who done it!

Re:Wrong place

[wagnerrp]

Each IPv6 address consists of a local segment and a global segment. The first 64-bits are the address assigned to the house or service customer. The second 64-bits are generated locally, optionally from the 32-bit MAC address. You could have billions of lightbulbs addressed in this manner, and still only consume a billionth of the usable address space. IPv6 is the very definition of overkill. Even with foolish use of it, we're not going to run into problems until we become a large interstellar society.

The only people who would even consider running NAT in IPv6 are those who don't really understand what NAT does. Namely, that if you have the available address space, it provides no advantage over a dumb firewall set to block everything.

Re:Wrong place

[Lumpy]

That's because the wanna-be electrician the church had volunteer to help for that installed it wrong. If your church did not cheap out and use real occupancy sensor for the task you would not have had the problem.

But they wanted instead to use free labor and use a $29.00 home depo motion switch instead of a $150.00 proper occupancy sensor from wattstopper and an electrician that knew what he was doing to install it.

Re:Wrong place

[brainboyz]

Not really, I've got a 900sq ft place and I have 6 bulbs in my garage (opener + illumination), 6 tubes and 3 bulbs in my kitchen (overhead + stove hood + oven), 2 bulbs in the fridge (freezer + fridge), 7 bulbs in my living room (5 rarely used in the ceiling + 2 niche lamps), 2 in the laundry closet, 1 in the hall, 2 in the bedroom closet, 2 tubes and a bulb in the bedroom, and 4 tubes in the bathroom. That's 35 bulbs and tubes for an apartment, though at the moment I rarely use more than 2 of those for anymore than 30 seconds.

Any stand-alone home could easily have 50 bulbs with extra bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, hallways, and exterior lighting.

If you're shutting off bulbs as you should be, that's just extra wattage being used. If you have lights you like to leave on, replace them with LED and save yourself the wattage. My reading/desk lamp, which is normally the only one on in the place 4+ hours a night, pulls a roaring 3W and lights up my entire area.

Re:Wrong place

[blueg3]

I'm not sure you understand what power factor is.

Re:Wrong place

[operagost]

You've just conceived of the scenario where the possession of a simple incandescent light bulb could be grounds for a charge of treason and punishable by death.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Blasphemy. You were given an opportunity to think about the hardships our fellow blind citizens have to go through and you threw it away waddling like a penguin with your pants around your ankles waving your jacket in a circle over your head.

Re:Wrong place

[Dog-Cow]

That's not so big. I live in a 2 bedroom apartment, and I have... 5 in the living room, 1 in the dining room, 2 in the kitchen, 3 in the master bedroom, 1 in the computer room (other bedroom), and 6 in the 1.5 bathrooms. That's 20. Throw in the 2 lights in the downstairs storage/laundry room and I have 22. And that's all off the top of my head. I don't have a full basement, a 3rd bedroom or any outside lighting to worry about.

Re:Wrong place

[tj2]

Okay, I have to know. What, exactly, does light add to the process of wiping? Do you crane your neck over your shoulder to watch, or do you look between your legs? I'm actually curious because I've had a light time out like that as well, but it didn't make me flail about. I finished my business and exited the stall, at which point the lights came back on and I washed up and left.

Or is this simply the story you came up with when the kid's dad wanted to know why you were in the middle of the restroom with your pants down?

Re:Wrong place

[Belial6]

Speaking of safety. This would be the time to switch to DC power for everything on the inside of the breaker box.

Re:Wrong place

[bames53]

Can you imagine? Your ISP decides to give you a new prefix and you'd have to program it into your switches so they can talk to the right lightbulbs again.

You shouldn't be accessing them by IP address. You should be accessing them by service instance name, and that's under your control (and has reasonable, human readable, factory set defaults). Zeroconf takes care of the details of figuring out the hostnames and IP addresses for you.

Re:Wrong place

[mcmonkey]

50 bulbs? really? big house.

Anyways, let say your bulbs are 10- Watts.
That means if you use 1 of your 50 bulbs for 15 minutes less per day, you break even. Everything else is a gain.

Big house? Not really.

A quick mental count of bulbs in my 4-bedroom, 1400 sq ft house came up with 45 bulbs. Oops, forgot the basement.

There's 50.

Re:Wrong place

[bames53]

You don't need NAT to prevent that. Either use a firewall or just make sure access to your home automation uses authenticated access.

Re:Wrong place

[drinkypoo]

X-10, Z-Wave and Insteon are all also equally incorrect in that they generally put the control at the point of the switch, instead of the fixture.

X-10 SocketRocket, X-10 Pro inline soft start module
The former puts the control at the fixture in janky old X10. The latter is what you would put inside a fixture to make it X10 Pro. I found lots of references to Z-Wave certified fixtures, which sound like they would have the module built in. You can definitely get them for Insteon.

The reason the stuff in the store installs at the switch is that with new home construction you have time to order out for what you want from a catalog; the store is more likely to sell equipment for a retrofit than for new construction, and the switch is designed to be easy to service, making it the logical place to make changes in such a case.

Re:Wrong place

[Widowwolf]

Did he look at you and say , What the hell priest first now the parishioners too!

Re:Wrong place

[www.sorehands.com]

If you put it into the fixture, you can't have the CIA/FBI/MPAA/RIAA swapping bulbs out and being able to directly access the bulbs for bugging purposes.

How will I play practical jokes by swapping out a bulb on someone and then playing with their light from my computer?

Re:Wrong place

[AO]

The switch IS the right place. I want to be able to control the light (and fixture) from my phone, but what happens when I have guest in the house? If the control is in the fixture/light, then I must either give the guest access to my automation or turn it on/off for them. When the control is in the switch, I can control it either at the switch or through my phone!

Re:Wrong place

[Anrego]

no advantage over a dumb firewall set to block everything

There are a few. The biggest advantage to me of NAT is it seperates out the external (ISP, out of your control) side and the internal side. What if your ISP suddenly changes that first 64bit number .. or what if you switch ISPs? Does an IPv6 have a graceful way of handling this, or do you have to re-address everything (seriously asking, I don't know the answer).

The other advantage I see is that while NAT isn't a firewall, it does act as a layer of protection. If your firewall mucks up or is configured incorrectly, those addresses are now not being blocked. As some consumer routing hardware actually has these functions as seperate chips, in some situations you can actually have a router lose it's firewall capability while still keep working.

In IPv4 with traditional NAT, this is no issue, because being non publically routed addresses they won't make it out of your segment .. with IPv6 it's suddenly public. As originally stated, NAT in this case acts as a second layer.

Re:Wrong place

[Sectoid_Dev]

Maybe some fiber in your diet would help with your taking longer than usual.

Re:Wrong place

[zach_the_lizard]

Can you imagine? Your ISP decides to give you a new prefix and you'd have to program it into your switches so they can talk to the right lightbulbs again.

Wouldn't they automatically be updated when your ISP gives you your new prefix? I thought that was the beauty of IPv6 autoconfig. Myhome router certainly can do this when it gets a new prefix; I'd imagine enterprise level gear would be capable of the same.

Sure you can assign more IPv6 addresses to ensure that your home server is always FC00::100, but having to know all the IP addresses of each machine when diagnosing things just gets to be a pain.

You could use mDNS to alleviate that pain. Set up the host name, and that's all you have to remember.

Re:Wrong place

[afidel]

Uh, the real power that needs to be generated by power plant will be twice as much because the cheap power supply for these components will be made as cheaply as possible resulting in a power factor of ~.5. I work in the datacenter world so I'm well aware of what power factor is and the impact it has on the power generation side of things. Power factor is one of the reasons that CFL's aren't quite as green as their label power would lead you to believe, the real load they generate is about twice as high as the label wattage.

Re:Wrong place

[Anrego]

Why would this be safer? I've always heard DC was considerably more dangerous?

This isn't a snarky reply... I really am curious. I've heard a few people mention this over the years... but never heard the actual reasoning behind it.

Re:Wrong place

[StikyPad]

Presume I have 50 bulbs in my house. At 10mW, we're talking 2.5W of always-on baseload draw.

Uh, no, 50 bulbs * 10 mW/bulb = 500 mW, or 0.5 Watts for the SI challenged.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever happened to wireless power?

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you smell like roses.

Re:Wrong place

[Kreigaffe]

Good for you.

Now for a scenario out of left field.

Somehow, something has happened and shattered the light bulb as it is screwed into the socket. You have no bulb to grasp on to, AND ALSO you're not sure if there's still a current being supplied to the socket. Remove and replace.

Everyone's gotta do that at least once in their life, and you'll be glad for clear on/off switches at that point. That, and potatoes.

Re:Wrong place

[Bengie]

"Can you imagine? Your ISP decides to give you a new prefix and you'd have to program it into your switches so they can talk to the right lightbulbs again."

You probably wouldn't want each light/fixture to have a public IP, just private. Let the control unit in your house have a public IP.

"One of the benefits of NAT was the internal network was separated from the external - changes to the external IP addresses didn't influence the internal ones"

At least with Vista/7, each machine gets 3 IPs by default. A private IP, a static Public IP, and a random public IP that changes avery few minutes and refuses incoming connections. You don't need to worry about your private IPs changing, just your public IPs. No biggie.

"Sure you can assign more IPv6 addresses to ensure that your home server is always FC00::100, but having to know all the IP addresses of each machine when diagnosing things just gets to be a pain"

Thank god for name-to-IP protocols that have been standard for the past 2 decades.

The transition will be annoying, but once we get use to IPv6, it will be easier.

Re:Wrong place

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Jee-zus! Jee-zus! Sorry, I had a RWJ moment at how geeky you two sounded... then I had another when I started wondering if we need routers in our electrical panels.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this "TV" you speak of? ...yeah yeah, getting off your lawn now...

Re:Wrong place

[Pharago]

roflmao

Re:Wrong place

[hoggoth]

Hahaha!

He yelled out "We got another one, here in the bathroom!" and a church crew quickly came in, wrapped me in a tarp, tossed me into a van, and relocated me to a church in a far-off parish.

Re:Wrong place

[icebraining]

Just set up a VLAN for the home automation system and don't let it talk to the outside world.

Re:Wrong place

[hoggoth]

How many wipes does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie-roll?

tj2 may never know.

Re:Wrong place

[Muad'Dave]

X-10, Z-Wave and Insteon are all also equally incorrect in that they generally put the control at the point of the switch, instead of the fixture.

The control point is at the switch because that's where a human can most easily interact with the device, and that's where always-on power is located (legacy wiring). I agree that the best of all worlds would be power wired only to the fixtures and that any human switches are ZigBee/Z-Wave/whatever and can be stuck on the wall with velcro(tm)/carried around/etc. The savings in copper alone would be huge.

Re:Wrong place

[CraftyJack]

Okay, I have to know. What, exactly, does light add to the process of wiping?

This is a widely used method. In short, you have to see the paper to know when you're done.

Neither I nor anyone else is interested in hearing about your alternative method or the reasoning behind it.

Re:Wrong place

[sjames]

whoosh!

Re:Wrong place

[cdogg4ya]

Agreed. Even with SLAAC to get an IP, you wouldn't be able to tell where the device was. Additionally, the waste of putting the electronics in every bulb would be ridiculous.

Re:Wrong place

[amliebsch]

Be careful! Unless you are absolutely certain that everything is to code, that switch in the wall doesn't guarantee to cut off power to the fixture, only to break the circuit. That break should be in the hot leg of the circuit - but it isn't always!

Re:Wrong place

[joocemann]

Architecturally, this is the wrong place to put uniquely addressed devices. The addresses should be in the fixtures, to avoid the maintenance headache of readdressing bulbs every time they are replaced. If I want the lights in the room to dim, I don't want to tell the bulbs, I want to tell the room that I'm sitting in. The room contains the fixtures. The fixtures contain the bulbs. How the room talks to the fixtures and the fixtures talk to the bulbs are different questions, but individually addressable bulbs is a maintenance disaster waiting to happen.

Just because they're conveniently end-user replaceable doesn't make it a correct choice, just slightly more practical. X-10, Z-Wave and Insteon are all also equally incorrect in that they generally put the control at the point of the switch, instead of the fixture. Again, the user's ultimate goal is not to control the switch but to control the room's lighting, which is defined by the fixtures and their locations within the room.

Who the hell has money for this kind of crap? Not a single person I know is talking about networked lighting in their home.

All this just sounds like its made for the top 1%, and even among those people you've got to find the subset that would care at all about this stuff.

I'm not trying to say I don't care, but rather that the economy in general, and the wealth disparity, are big factors pointing at how useless this technology is right now as a whole. If the lower 90% of earners had the extra 30% of wealth that they used to have in the 70s and before, maybe our middle class would be interested in networked light bulbs.... but as it stands, they're paying medical bills, upside down mortgages, overpriced capitalist insurance, and ever-rising gas prices (despite OPEC stability over the last decade+).

FYI, rising oil prices do not match OPECs prices at all.... Oil prices are being used to engineer social-political response.

Re:Wrong place

[Adam Appel]

Get it accepted (gps in everyone's hand and/or car) - wait - mandate tracking via law. Repeat for effect and control.

Re:Wrong place

[gr8_phk]

I thought X10 put the control in the fixture and the command in the switch. I know people with X10 that has all the regular house switches, but also a panel next to the bed with zone-specific controls and an all-off button which also send commands (I think) to the fixtures. Computers with the appropriate add-in could also control things in parallel with the normal house controls. I suppose some devices may put the control in the switch, but that's because it's easier that putting it in the fixture.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a Hubbell LightHawk Multi-Technology (PIR+US) for $100 or so. The point is that you need both the passive IR (body heat) and ultrasonic (stuff moving around) to have a reliable sensor for anything beyond simple home use.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

"An ultra-low-power standby supply controller with 10mW no-load capability"

So we want to go from having the switch disconnect power to the lights, to adding 10mW for EVERY lightbulb in existence...how the HELL is this part of a 'Green Wave' in helping me manage power consumption in my house?

Presume I have 50 bulbs in my house. At 10mW, we're talking 2.5W of always-on baseload draw. Multiply that times 75 million (rounded down from the 75.11 million Wolfram Alpha gave me): 2.5 * 75,000,000 = 187,000,000W of 'IDLE' power drawn so I can 'make the most of energy savings in the home.'

HA!

Source:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=houses+in+america
(It gave a 2009 count of owner-occupied housing units)

Your math is completely wrong, and your claim is too. You're a dumbfuck.

Re:Wrong place

[blueg3]

Not at all. You only have to produce real power; reactive power is transient and returned to the system. Reactive power causes higher currents (and thus higher losses) on the wire, so it can result in some lost power. Power companies use capacitor and inductor banks to alter the system so that it's close to all real power with no reactive power so that they *don't* have to produce the transient power.

Re:Wrong place

[Jeff DeMaagd]

A milliwatt here, a milliwatt there can add up, especially if everything you own now has some kind of network interface. There is already a lot of "phantom" energy consumption from devices that are turned off.

Re:Wrong place

[maxwell demon]

I'm sorry, but the whoosh protocol has not yet ported to IPv6.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter. The real world works like that, and if motion-sensor manufacturers don't, that's their fault. It's a piece of cake to install a damn switch, and it's very easy to tell when it's done correctly, and what to fix

Re:Wrong place

[NEDHead]

Two points:

While the fixture/lamp may be equivalent in some sense, that ignores the billions of existing fixtures. Second, there are illuminated light switches that rely on a low current through the bulb even while the switch is in the OFF position. Not really dangerous if you touch it, unless you are on a step ladder and startle and fall (don't worry, I'll be fine).

Re:Wrong place

[plover]

I assume the GP is talking about low voltage DC, which is safer for humans than house voltage AC. In general, a 120 VAC shock is thought to be less dangerous than a 120 VDC shock because the 120 zero crossings per second gives the muscles periodic chances to relax, theoretically allowing the victim to collapse, which might let him or her fall away from the electrically charged component. High voltage shocks are never healthy, however, and neither AC nor DC should be considered "safe".

The problem with low voltage is that wire losses are resistive, which reduce voltage, yet the current capacity of the wire remains constant. If you reduce 10 volts by 1 volt, you get 9 volts. If you reduce 100 volts by 1 volt, you get 99 volts. At 1 amp, the 10 volt system can deliver 9 watts. At 1 amp, the 100 volt system can deliver 99 watts. Proportionately, the same wire that would cause you to lose 10% of the power in a low voltage system would cost you only 1% of the power in a high voltage system.

Let's say you wanted to run 5VDC throughout your house from a single centralized power supply. (And who among us hasn't thought about exactly this idea?) 14 AWG wire, like the stuff you probably have carrying your 120VAC 15A service today, has a resistance of 0.25 ohms on a 100 foot run. That's 50 feet out and back, which we'll call typical for a small house average run. At 5VDC that's a voltage drop of 2.5% to a barely usable 4.9VDC. Any run longer than 50 feet would not be delivering a usable voltage. 20 AWG, which is the thin stuff you are familiar with that comes from a typical wall wart transformer, has a resistance of 2.6 ohms over the same distance, and would have a voltage drop of 25%, meaning you'd be delivering a definitely unusable 3.75VDC to the load.

Re:Wrong place

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Same goes for the nat. IPv6 does do nat, these days. "Security benefits", in case you're wondering.

Re:Wrong place

[wagnerrp]

There are a few. The biggest advantage to me of NAT is it seperates out the external (ISP, out of your control) side and the internal side. What if your ISP suddenly changes that first 64bit number .. or what if you switch ISPs?

Windows has WINS and OSX has ZeroConf (Bonjour) for their own local discovery. I had thought IPv6 had some local discovery mechanism that provided name support but I can't seem to find it. IPv6 capable consumer routers will likely begin offering local DNS services, using the router discovery protocols to automatically update themselves. There will certainly be some naming mechanism. Remembering IP addresses in IPv4 was annoying, but remembering IPv6 addresses is downright painful.

As some consumer routing hardware actually has these functions as seperate chips, in some situations you can actually have a router lose it's firewall capability while still keep working.

In IPv4 with traditional NAT, this is no issue, because being non publically routed addresses they won't make it out of your segment .. with IPv6 it's suddenly public. As originally stated, NAT in this case acts as a second layer.

I don't understand why they would even have a separate firewall, much less one on a wholly separate chip. NAT inherently behaves as a stateful firewall by its very operation. I can't thing of a reason why you would want to add a second stateful firewall outside of that, unless that's to protect its own external interface. Even then, that shouldn't need any protecting, since nothing should be listening on it.

NAT is a stateful firewall. My complaint was that NAT adds features that are nothing more than a work around for a deficient service provider. At best, it provides obscurity on top of existing firewalling behavior, which as the saying goes should never be confused with security.

Re:Wrong place

[Firethorn]

I wouldn't necessarily say that you'd need an electrician to install it - just somebody who understands the differences between sensors and the proper choice for the area in question..

As one AC mentioned, for an indoor sensor you're going to want infrared, and for something with stalls, you're going to want something that can detect movement within said stalls, or at least the entire restroom.

Re:Wrong place

[blair1q]

It gets worse when you consider that every LED in an LED-lit device is a "bulb".

It's not inconceivable to construct, say, a jumbotron using bulbs to which you send sequencing instructions via IPv6...

All those trillions of addresses are going to get soaked up in a hurry if this is the sort of thing people are going to do with them.

Re:Wrong place

[blair1q]

I think LED light bulbs should come with pronged connectors so you can use them with simple extension cords. No sense keeping the pointlessly fiddly screw-base.

Re:Wrong place

[Firethorn]

Are you serious? You couldn't pull your pants up in the dark? I might fumble around a bit in such a situation with finding the toilet paper and such, but I'm fairly sure I could complete my business in such a case and at least be decent when walking up to the door. Why waddle around the bath waving the coat around? Wouldn't it have been easier to buckle back up and, even if you fumble a bit, walk back to the door? In my experience most doors aren't sealed so tight that you won't have a light to walk to.

Fixes in your case: 1. Use a better sensor - one that uses sound as well, maybe. 2. Position the sensor differently - to better cover the room(sounds like it was locked on the door) Putting it up on the fixture pointing down might of worked. 3. Increase the time the lights are on from ~10 minutes to ~20. While this might result in the bathroom lights staying on most of Sunday, for most churches doubling the time the lights stay on wouldn't increase energy use all that much.

Bad sensors call for replacement with better sensors, flawed deployments generally calls for fixing the deployment, not tossing the idea.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Whereas hoggoth apparently uses a mirror (camera maybe) to check progress. Also, why the heck didn't you use your phone for light, like a 'normal' person?

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm.. So how will the fixture power itself if the user flips the switch off?

Of course, the same problem exists when you put the control in the bulb too... Somewhere the switch _has_ to be modified to send a signal rather than cut the power.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what she said

Re:Wrong place

[Firethorn]

Funny enough, I've been wiping my bum for enough years at this point that I generally know when I'm clean by touch. The TP drags different.

I've had to finish my business and even wash my hands completely in the dark before. It's not that hard. Blind people even do it all the time. ;)

Re:Wrong place

[CCarrot]

Then again, there was a time we had to get up off the couch to change the channel, too. Imagine the lazy people of today even thinking of such a thing or knowing where the controls were on the damn TV.

I'm pretty sure I get more exercise hunting for the damn remote than I ever did changing the channel manually...now if they'd only put a 'locate' beeper on them like they do for cordless phones, I'd be in couch-potato heaven!

Re:Wrong place

[plover]

I used to do this all the time. I'd replace light fixtures, fans, whatever, just by shutting off the switch. For "safety", I'd throw a piece of tape on the switch so family members wouldn't accidentally help me by turning on the lights. I also would try to treat the hot wire as hot, leaving a wire nut or tape to cap it while I was working on the circuit. No sense tempting fate, right?

Keen observers will note the key phrasing above is in the "past" tense. One day I found out at my mom's place that the genius who wired a ceiling light in her basement switched the NEUTRAL wire instead of the hot wire. I was taking a broken light fixture down and *BAM*! I shorted the hot to ground, and made all the hurty things in my hand and arm have a really bad day.

If you're sticking your fingers, a screwdriver*, or a pair of pliers into the remains of a shattered bulb, PLEASE don't trust that the butt-head who wired my mom's house didn't also wire yours. Use the breaker to disconnect the power. It's what you're supposed to do, and for a very good reason. And on a bus system like this would require, it's the ONLY safe solution.

* By the way, if you don't have insulated pliers with you, a wide flat blade screwdriver with a plastic insulated handle makes a pretty good tool for removing the base of a shattered bulb.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

> You couldn't pull your pants up in the dark?

In this thread: a lot of skid-marks.

Re:Wrong place

[hoggoth]

My head is mounted on a pivoting cylinder giving me the ability to "turn and look" obviating the need for the advanced rear-view camera technology that you apparently employ.

Re:Wrong place

[kcbnac]

Oops, that's what I get for attempting math while still without caffeine. Still, not an insignificant baseload, regardless...

Re:Wrong place

[wasabii]

First, your ISP probably won't randomly give you a new prefix. There's no need. You'll probably have a static one assigned. Because there are enough prefixes for every one of their customers to just have on assigned.

Second, manual configuration of IPv6 addresses is almost completely unnecessary, since addresses can be statically assigned within a prefix based on the hardware address of the device. The router gives out the prefix, the device will always have a predictable address underneath it.

Second, you'd probably access these devices using some sort of multicast discovery protocol anyways. A UPnP profile for lighting control already exists, for instance.

Re:Wrong place

[SnarfQuest]

Not many people I know lick their fingers and jam them in the socket when they change the bulb. IF you cant avoid that temptation when you change your light bulbs, I suggest hiring a helper to make sure you can keep your fingers away from the contacts.

We used to have an electric fence when I was young (to keep in the cows). Many people got a thrill by touching what they knew to be electrified, and many many grasshoppers were sacrificed to that fence to watch their legs pop off. If they were willingly touching something designed to shock their ass off, why would you think that they would respect a puny light socket?

Anyway, changing a light bulb should not require sticking your fingers into the socket if you are doing it right. If you're doing it wrong, then think of it as evolution in action.

Re:Wrong place

[Relayman]

I thought with IPV6 the prefix was registered to you independent of your ISP.

Re:Wrong place

[wasabii]

Last second = third.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Put the address in the fixture? Seriously?? That sound's like an electrical union's Utopian dream.

No, you put them in the bulbs so you can easily upgrade today's infrastructure.

It's the responsibility of your "dimming app" to group addresses and hide from you the complexity of ipv6 and changing addresses. This is an implimentation detail and it can be solved a million ways.

Besides, if you're going to swap out the lighting hardware... why have bulbs at all? The point of ANY bulb is to retrofit existing hardware. If you design a new fixture exclusively for LEDs, you would not use bulbs because you will be able to exactly position the LEDs where you want.

I would be concerned about circuits becoming disposable, and hopefully real-world LED lifespans gets better, but tossing millions of light fixtures in the trash would be like tossing millions of TVs in the trash. (Oh wait, we did that)

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Wireless gadgets almost invariably consume less power than the wired ones that they replace. The take less energy to produce as well. Even if you make a laptop out of aluminium it still takes less energy to produce that laptop than what it takes to produce a desktop computer and a monitor.

Wireless routers and cellphone towers don't consume enough power to make up for the difference.

Re:Wrong place

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> Architecturally, this is the wrong place to put uniquely addressed devices. The addresses should be in the fixtures, to avoid the maintenance headache of readdressing bulbs every time they are replaced.

Wouldn't it make sense to allow either? Logically, it should not matter where the address is. Why not design the system so that it can accept it in light-bulbs or light-bulb extenders (for low cost use in old houses or fixtures) but new houses (or old houses where people want to replace fixtures) can have them in the fixtures?

Re:Wrong place

[Tighe_L]

I am all set, I won't need any of those bulbs: http://www.tighelory.com/2008/08/screw-environment-or-not.html

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

For an easy transition to IP controlled lighting it might be the correct place - if the network connections was done over the mains. A consumer could install their own system by just installing IP controlled lightbulbs and a mains - wifi bridge - all this without changing any of the house wiring. That has got to be attractive.

However, yes, logically the fixture is the thing to control. But having to change the fittings themselves is a bar to adoption.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that the power savings more than offset the mercury emissions, right? Over its lifetime the additional power used by an incandescent results in more mercury emission from burning coal than if you just broke all your CFs.

Re:Wrong place

[xaxa]

A few years ago when I worked for the summer at Philips they had a module to add to an office strip light. It included a light sensor and a dimmer, and dimmed the light depending on how bright the room was.

In my office, if some clouds drift over someone turns on the light. If the clouds drift off no one ever remembers to turn the lights off again. With this sensor, the lights would be dimmed automatically, maintaining a constant light level regardless of the sun.

Re:Wrong place

[BlueStrat]

You've just conceived of the scenario where the possession of a simple incandescent light bulb could be grounds for a charge of treason and punishable by death.

The incandescent light bulb ban might have a secondary benefit; it might increase border security with Mexico.

If "contraband" incandescent bulbs are being smuggled in at the Mexico/US border, the EPA and Progressives will have anti-personnel landmines laid, missile-equipped Predator drones patrolling, and automated gun turrets installed at the border before you can say "mass graves".

Strat

Re:Wrong place

[plover]

I want the cheap bulb.

If you're that cheap, you obviously want the 7 watt LED, which will cost you $33+$15.40=$48.40 over its 20,000 hour life, as opposed to buying 10 60 watt incandescent bulbs that will cost you a total of $0.50*10+$132=$138.00 for the same amount of illumination over time. That's all based on electricity costs remaining fixed at today's rates, by the way. If the price of electricity rises at any time during those 20,000 hours, you'll save even more by having the LED bulb.

That's not accounting for the reduced risk of fire by not having the white-hot glowing filaments in your house, or the risk of electrical shock by having a hot fragile glass bulb being the only insulation in case of an accidental impact, or the risk of falling off the ladder 9 extra times when changing them. Nor is it accounting for the reduced burden on your air conditioner by emitting less heat in the summer months. Admittedly, it's also not accounting for the increase on your winter heating bill by not adding the heat contributed by the incandescent filament.

Or are you one of those people who doesn't understand the direct relationship between the light bulb and your electric bill, and thinks that saving money on a light bub today is a bargain?

Re:Wrong place

[Tighe_L]

Ahh, but the government isn't telling me what to do! And maybe my home is solar and wind powered!? You don't know! :-P

Re:Wrong place

[xaxa]

This is a widely used method.

Woah -- three squares, multiple times, then two squares, at least once, then one square, at least once, then a wet wipe? That guy should sort out his diet.

Most of the time I use two squares, consecutively, and the second is clean.

Re:Wrong place

[afidel]

Ok, the watts aren't doubled but the VA is, which is still a problem for the distribution system. I'd need almost twice as large a PDU or UPS to feed a given wattage of these "smart" bulbs as I would say PSU's with a .92 power factor, that gets very expensive very quickly.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

I would wonder if your switch when off doesn't draw a similar amount of power. I am aware that the switch should be infinite impedance but remember that 10mW at 120VAC is 1.4MOhms, which wouldn't be all that implausible.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Google 'heat lamp'. Incandescent room heaters that 'unfortunately' emit light as a side effect. There's no ban on them. Incandescents won't be going away anytime soon, thanks to the wonders of capitalism.

Re:Wrong place

[hldn]

ipv6 provides 2^128 addresses.

that's 340282366920938463463374607431768211456.

that's 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456

that absolutely dwarfs the number of stars in the entire observable universe (one septillion is a high estimate.)

i think we'll be okay (at least for a little while~)

Re:Wrong place

[westlake]

I'm thinking that there might be a good black market demand for good old fashioned, incandescent light bulbs...no IP addresses, nothing to monitor your use with....

Except the radiant heat of the bulb - and the fact that you are drawing down 300 watts instead of 30 to illuminate the same amount of space.

"What does your garden grow?"

Re:Wrong place

[parens]

The spectrum of LED lights is all off. Same for CFLs. Incandescents are the closest to "natural" light , and also happen to be far, far cheaper than the "green" alternatives.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

You want an heatball: http://heatball.de/en/

Re:Wrong place

[mjwalshe]

you could even give someone susceptible to flashing lights an epileptic fit - actualy that would make a cool CSI episode (any one know if they take spec scripts)

Re:Wrong place

[CPTreese]

Okay, I have to know. What, exactly, does light add to the process of wiping?

If you have to ask that question I'll bet your whitey tighties have got some pretty awesome racing stripes. You might want to take a class in hygiene. There are some good videos on YouTube, and you don't even have to leave your parents basement!

Re:Wrong place

[linatux]

But if the bulbs are wireless...

Re:Wrong place

[wagnerrp]

LEDs are diodes. They require DC current to operate (unless of course you want them to flicker at 60Hz). You are already going to need that DC power supply to make them work.

Re:Wrong place

[Moryath]

You're forgetting the cost (money, energy, and environmental) of producing, and disposing of when worn out, multiple metric fuck-tons of batteries.

Re:Wrong place

[wagnerrp]

Each internet subscriber gets allocated their own /64 block. That's some 18 septillion addresses for you to do with as you please.

Re:Wrong place

[nurb432]

But it tracks your usage of the light bulb.

Also what the hell are we doing giving out addresses to nearly inanimate objects? I want my lights to turn on and off, not report back how much they were used to some external entity.

Re:Wrong place

[Carnildo]

Quick mental inventory of my 1000-square-foot condo:

Entry: 1 single-bulb fixture
Dining area: 5-bulb chandelier
Pantry: 2 fluorescent tubes (originally designed as a bar)
Living room: 3 freestanding lamps (4 bulbs total)
Balcony: 1 single-bulb fixture
Kitchen: 2 single-bulb fixtures, one vent-hood fixture
Computer room: 1 single-bulb fixture, 1 freestanding lamp, 1 desk lamp
Walk-in closet: 1 single-bulb fixture
Master bathroom: 1 single-bulb fixture, 4-bulb vanity
Hall: 2 single-bulb fixtures
Bathroom: 4-bulb vanity, 1 night light
Bedroom: 1 single-bulb fixture, 1 freestanding lamp, 1 desk lamp

Total: 33 bulbs and 2 fluorescent tubes

This does not count the garage (2 bulbs), the front door light (1 bulb) or the staircase (2 bulbs), as those are owned by the condo association.

Re:Wrong place

[mattack2]

Phantoms and vampires? Wow, your house must be scary.

(just kidding -- not actually a nitpick -- the term vampire energy is also used a lot.)

Re:Wrong place

[plover]

Apparently, you haven't been studying the spectra of any light sources. Sure, you may have a personal bias towards the familiar incandescent spectrum (most people do), but you'd be surprised as to what colors the various technologies of lamps are emitting these days. LED lights are being manufactured with phosphor coatings that can modify the color spectrum dramatically.

First, you have an incorrect notion that incandescents are not the closest to "natural" light. They're further from sunlight than just about any other common lighting technology, apart from candle light. They have a more red spectrum than other artificial light sources, and the balance is uneven. However, we humans do find their color pleasant and comforting (probably because they're close to firelight.) A mix of 3300K and 4000K fluorescent tubes comes surprisingly close to incandescent, provides a broad wash of bright light, and you would probably find them similarly pleasing. LED lighting, depending on your need, is available in a range of colors. Epistar, Cree, and Bridgelux LED chipsets are available in colors ranging down to a warm white 2700K that are very similar to incandescents. At that color they're less efficient than the whiter or bluer chips, but they're quite pleasant and well balanced. They also offer "true white" 5700K chips in arrays powerful enough to be used for street lighting. Their color balance is much closer to sunlight than any other common artificial light sources. I find them too "blue" to be comfortable, but my orchids love them!

And stop thinking incandescents are cheaper - they are NOT cheaper. The bulb is only a small fraction of the price you pay for the lighting. Unless your mom is upstairs paying the electric bill for you, you are paying 3 times as much for incandescent lighting.

CFLs are definitely the cheapest way to go today, but LEDs are not far behind them, and they consume only half the power of CFLs. LEDs offer other benefits: cooler operation; instant on; shock and vibration resistance; lower operating voltages; much longer lamp life and a lamp life that is not degraded by power cycles; and no hazardous materials requiring fragile item handling or special recycling. If you want to save money, switch to CFLs today, but keep your eye on LEDs. Once the prices drop to around $10 or so for a 60W equivalent bulb, they'll be the cheapest light source you can buy.

Re:Wrong place

[bwalzer]

In general AC at the 110/220V used for residential power is way more dangerous than DC at the same voltages. That is because the 50/60Hz used in these systems is close to the optimal frequency that can cause your heart to go into fibrillation. A nice solid zap with DC current can fix this (defibrillator) but most people do not have access to such a current source at home. The AC current required to mess up your heart can be quite low. I have heard 10mA quoted as a lower limit. The trick is to not get the AC current through your chest. That is what the suggestion that you should put one hand in your pocket when you are messing with the guts of something that is plugged in is based on. During the AC vs DC wars the DC faction used to like to show how easy it was to electrocute animals with AC. Edison once famously electrocuted an elephant with AC current and filmed the result.

Re:Wrong place

[plover]

Controllability is the key to saving energy. Turning the lights off when you don't actually need them anymore is a huge opportunity.

The real problem with this idea is that today's houses and light fixtures are not wired to use them well. If the wall switch is off, the light fixture is dead. You can't remotely turn it on, no matter how hard you press the button. If you leave the wall switch on, even when you're occupying the room you have to hunt for a remote control to turn the lights on and off - major usability fail!

The only way to make this work in a usable fashion is to fix the infrastructure. That means we need to bypass all the light switches in a house to provide 24x7 power to the light fixtures, and convert all the existing wall switches to RF remote control switches. That's a huge expense.

My prediction is that some people will install these bulbs, get frustrated that they can't make them work right, and the industry will have screwed itself for decades to get over the public perception problem they're creating for themselves today. As for the bulbs themselves, they'll become niche devices, probably suited only for commercial installations and home automation fanatics.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why you should consider carrying a tiny light on your key chain. Look online for photon and fauxton.

Re:Wrong place

[mattack2]

Use rechargeables, then at least it's a much lower quantity of batteries.

Re:Wrong place

[russotto]

Except the radiant heat of the bulb - and the fact that you are drawing down 300 watts instead of 30 to illuminate the same amount of space.

Darkness: The New Standard.

(roughly adapted from the canonical Microsoft lightbulb joke)

Re:Wrong place

[russotto]

Apparently, you haven't been studying the spectra of any light sources. Sure, you may have a personal bias towards the familiar incandescent spectrum (most people do), but you'd be surprised as to what colors the various technologies of lamps are emitting these days. LED lights are being manufactured with phosphor coatings that can modify the color spectrum dramatically.

Yes. What they can't do is provide a decent approximation of a blackbody spectrum.

First, you have an incorrect notion that incandescents are not the closest to "natural" light. They're further from sunlight than just about any other common lighting technology, apart from candle light. They have a more red spectrum than other artificial light sources, and the balance is uneven.

It's true that they have more red than other artificial light sources. The balance, however, is not uneven. They have a color rendering index of 100, on a scale of 0 to 100.

However, we humans do find their color pleasant and comforting (probably because they're close to firelight.) A mix of 3300K and 4000K fluorescent tubes comes surprisingly close to incandescent, provides a broad wash of bright light, and you would probably find them similarly pleasing

It's not the color temperature that's at issue. It's the color rendering index. Our eyes tend to adapt to different color temperatures. But bad CRI means things under fluorescent lights look weird; their colors aren't right. A mix of 3300K and 4000K fluorescent tubes is quite far from incandescent. First of all, typical incandescent light has a color temperature from 2800 to 3000K, so your warm fluorescent is already too cool. Second, mixing bulbs light that does sometimes fill in spectral gaps, but it also causes odd multicolored shadows and the bulbs themselves look blue and red.

Re:Wrong place

[blueg3]

For the power company, it's a concern, but not an unknown problem. There are already tons of reactive loads on the electrical system.

Now, when you're managing your own power supplies, like having UPSes, lower power factor is going to wreak havoc on them unless you have ones that can do power factor correction.

Re:Wrong place

[blueg3]

Not really; you just put a bridge rectifier in the LED lamp.

Re:Wrong place

[parens]

Call it what you like - incandescent light fills the room in a more uniform nature, and with a more visually and psychologically pleasing mix of color.

Perhaps I, and others, equate incandescent with "natural" light because the brightness is at least closer to sunlight than the weak output of either CFLs or LEDs. I've used both alternatives at various points in their technological evolution, and I remain unimpressed with the results.

I use a single CFL bulb in my home - in the garage. It's remained lit for going on 3 years now, and it serves that function well. Garages aren't meant to be visually pleasing; I don't read there, for example. But in places where I do read, sunlight or incandescents are my only viable option.

You say incandescents aren't cheaper - but they are. I can buy a 24 pack of type A's for the price of two or three CFLs, and maybe half a decent LED fixture. I've found the difference in electricity costs is minimal.

From a technological standpoint, I'd love to advance my lighting needs past burning metal filaments, but aesthetically, I just can't.

Re:Wrong place

[jroysdon]

Only if your RIR's policy allows. For ARIN you have to have justification (just wanting to multihome may not be enough) and it is US$1,250 up front for an IPv6 netblock, plus US$500 for an ASN, and then US$100/year. With all of that, you can then have PI (provider independent) space. Otherwise, you get a global prefix from your provider. If you change providers, you change global prefixes.

Re:Wrong place

[jroysdon]

Unless you move to another location with a different ISP POP, or even change ISPs, and then you'll get a new global prefix from your ISP.

Re:Wrong place

[jroysdon]

You'll want to use two prefixes, actually. One prefix will be your global prefix that your ISP assigns and you can expect to change if your ISP renumbers, is bought, you move, you change ISPs, etc. The second prefix, which you mention, is the ULA address space, and you can use right now even if your ISP has no IPv6 support. The nice thing is that you can run both address space at the same time. Further, when your ISP does change your prefix, you only tell your routers, and all the devices learn it. Program your internal DNS to use your ULA address space and forget about using the global address space (unless you want external access, in which can put that in your external DNS).

Plan on your global prefix changing. Don't do foolish things like statically assigning those addresses anywhere other than your routers, which you'll have to touch if you change anyway. Use ULA addresses for static.

I've changed prefixes 3 different times (SIXXS -> HE -> PI) and it took me minutes. I have all my router configs stored and only had to do two edits - one to add the new prefix - wait so all devices learned it - update DNS - remove the old prefix from routers. They only delay at all was letting the RAs and DNS caches age out.

It's not hard, really. I manage a 200k+ node enterprise network with 99.5% of the devices with only IPv6 addresses.

Re:Wrong place

[Dan541]

What, people want to do it anyway?

It's called security.
NAT is a good thing.

Re:Wrong place

[Dan541]

Nobody has firewalls.

I have never seen a firewall outside the corporate environment and software based firewalls are easily turned off by the user.
NAT routers are protecting most home users today, and hopefully in the future.

Re:Wrong place

[nemesisrocks]

that's 340282366920938463463374607431768211456.

that's 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456

that absolutely dwarfs the number of stars in the entire observable universe (one septillion is a high estimate.)

Can you please express that in multiples of US debt? That's what, around 10 times?

Re:Wrong place

[one cup of coffee]

..."and a little boy stood staring in shock at the nut case waddling like a penguin with his pants around his ankles waving his jacket in a circle over his head."

Shocked you say? I take it you don't go to a Catholic church.

Re:Wrong place

[ilyag]

The Beacon of Truth speaks on how large the number of addresses is:

http://xkcd.com/865/

Re:Wrong place

[arkane1234]

Well, I realize you didn't get the subtle techie joke... there is internal addressing with IPv6. (fe80::) That's about as close to NAT as IPv6 comes, and it's vaguely equivalent to RFC1918.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as many as it sounds like, the way they are encoding information in those addresses, and breaking it out in large parts. Yes, it's a big number... but I can come up with schemes to use that entire thing, no problem.

Re:Wrong place

[kmoser]

Death by electric chair, of course.

Re:Wrong place

[Merls the Sneaky]

This is when you should shut off current to the entire house.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

50 bulbs? really? big house.

Unrelated to your main point (to which I agree), but 50 bulbs in a house doesn't require a mansion. I have about the same in my 3 bed, 2.5 bath. Not small, but not big either. Master bathrooms, kitchens, living/dining rooms can take multiple bulbs to light up the area. Much different when I was living alone in a studio. Had about 6 bulbs then.

Re:Wrong place

[bames53]

Or maybe NAT could be replaced by firewalls on consumer routers.

Re:Wrong place

[Dan541]

That would work so long as it became standard practice.

Personally I think everyone is just going IP crazy for the sake of it.

Re:Wrong place

[sumdumass]

Maybe they just don't want their light bulbs exposed to the interweb.

-so a would be attacker couldn't turn your lights out with his google app before entering your home and attacking.

Re:Wrong place

[sumdumass]

Isn't there a historical lighting exemption too?

I think all the ban is doing is allowing the light bulb manufacturers charge more for the same product dressed up as the same different things.

Re:Wrong place

[Neil Boekend]

+ 0.5 watt for a complete house is insignificant. A TV in standby often consumes more. If this makes 1% more people switch to CFL bulbs faster (it's NXP, they don't like incandescents) the overall efficiency will increase.

Re:Wrong place

[Neil Boekend]

Let's say you wanted to run 5VDC throughout your house from a single centralized power supply. (And who among us hasn't thought about exactly this idea?) 14 AWG wire, like the stuff you probably have carrying your 120VAC 15A service today, has a resistance of 0.25 ohms on a 100 foot run. That's 50 feet out and back, which we'll call typical for a small house average run. At 5VDC that's a voltage drop of 2.5% to a barely usable 4.9VDC.

That depends on your current. Assuming you have a 200 watt device on 120V, you are drawing 1.7A, with a voltage loss of I*R=1.7*0.25=0.4V. Not a major problem. The same 200 watts from a 5V line would draw 40 A (not remotely safe with normal 14 AWG wire, it is only rated for 5.9A). The voltage loss over those 0.25 Ohms would be 10 V (this is not impossible. We are calculating with the voltage supplied to the device, you'd need 15 V at the "source end" of the cable. You can't draw 40A over a 0.25 Ohms resistance at 5 V, so even a short circuit wouldn't let that sort of current flow).

Disclaimer: I am an electrical engineer, although I am by no means immune to very stupid mistakes.

By the way: do you really use only 14 AWG (= about 1,6 mm diameter) for houses? What kind of circuit breakers do you use? We, in NL, usually use 2,5 mm wires (between AWG 11 and 10) with a 16A circuit breaker, so a short will always trip the breaker before it starts a fire. We do not have fuses or switches in our outlets.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and let's not forget to make things real easy for burglars...
ping! . . . Host unreachable, go rob the stupid f***er.

Re:Wrong place

[plover]

Houses here are usually required to be wired according to the National Electric Code which specifies 15A breakers on circuits run with 14 AWG wire, and 20A breakers on 12 AWG circuits. We also do not have fuses or switches in outlets. The NEC also specifies various additional protections on certain circuits, such as Arc Fault Circuit Interrupters for bedrooms and Ground Fault Interrupters for wet locations like bathrooms, kitchens, and outdoors.

The link you provided gave unrealistically conservative numbers for power transmission, and it even states as much. I think one difference is that the 14 AWG wire we run also has to meet additional standards for insulation, installation, termination, etc., and when the right wire is installed correctly, the risk of fire is minimized. 14AWG wire does indeed get warm when carrying a 1700W load, but it does not melt the insulation or catch fire.

So in your example above, if we ran 5VDC over 14 AWG, we'd still need a 15A circuit breaker, and simply could provide no more than 75W. Even then, the voltage drop would render it useless. I think we both agree that a centrally located 5VDC power supply would be completely impractical without superconductive house wiring (which is itself completely impractical.)

Re:Wrong place

[AmiMoJo]

Because there are enough prefixes for every one of their customers to just have on assigned.

That would be possible today if they wanted to do it. Back when everyone was on dial-up you could get away with fewer IP addresses than users because not everyone would be connected at once, but since broadband came in everyone is now on-line permanently. I think the only reason they don't assign static IPs is that it is simply easier to DHCP, or perhaps they just like to charge business customers a premium for one.

Re:Wrong place

[StikyPad]

What do you think a DC power supply is?

Re:Wrong place

[jon3k]

AS number is not required for portable address space. Only if you want to peer directly, yourself. You could easily just take your address space with you and provide the next ISP with an LOA to announce the address space for you via their AS.

Re:Wrong place

[jroysdon]

You'll not get PI space if you're not going to multihome. To multihome you need an AS.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

"Architecturally, this is the wrong place to put uniquely addressed devices. The addresses should be in the fixtures, to avoid the maintenance headache of readdressing bulbs every time they are replaced. If I want the lights in the room to dim, I don't want to tell the bulbs, I want to tell the room that I'm sitting in. The room contains the fixtures. The fixtures contain the bulbs. How the room talks to the fixtures and the fixtures talk to the bulbs are different questions, but individually addressable bulbs is a maintenance disaster waiting to happen."

They want to put them in the lightbulbs because it is easier for first-time users to get on-board with a lightbulb rather than forcing people to replace their fixtures.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

they'll probably end up in the fixtures as well i would have thought.. for the time being though they need to be retrofit items as proof of concept.. btw these aren't any old chips that they're using .. they're ultra low power devices that are able to go to sleep and wake up on demand. As one poster pointed out, it would be 'fun' to go and turn off everyones lights wouldn't it.. so that is where the clever part of the software is.. making sure that you cant/dont

Re:Wrong place

[dave87656]

True but if you put the IP address in lightbulbs and you add a little microphone to the little circuit board in the cfl bulbs you can record every conversation and send it back to the ministry of truth via the internet connection in your power lines.

You read it here first folks.

Re:Wrong place

[plover]

Home automation switches don't have the same physical sync issues that you're associating with mechanical switches. They're all Decora form factor switches that are either push-on / push-off, or push-top-on / push-bottom-off, depending on brand and configuration. The Leviton transformer dimmers I've had are annoying, because they're push-bottom-on / push-bottom-off, and are inconsistent with everything else, including their ordinary dimmers that are push-anywhere. In every case, though, there's no mechanical lever that remains up or down. The GE switches have a little LED in them that can be configured to tell you if the switch is on or off (useful for an inside switch controlling outdoor lighting, for example, or for finding the "on" switch in the dark.)

Safety in working on the wiring comes from shutting off the breaker prior to doing any wiring. It is the ONLY approved way to do it regardless of how the switches are wired. Trusting the switch to keep you safe while working on the wiring is hazardous, because the buildings are sometimes not wired in the way you might expect.

Does bulb-at-a-time controllability always make sense? I don't think so, especially in the case of a chandelier type fixture with multiple low lumen bulbs. But if you have an existing set of ceiling cans, or a series of spot lamps, all wired into the same toggle switch, I can easily see situations where you only want one light on (over a reading chair, for example) The existing wiring is too coarse, and fixture-by-fixture control would be better.

Re:Wrong place

[plover]

Putting addresses in the bulbs means you need to configure your system. Unless the bulb adds a GPS chip too :-) it won't know which room it's in or which switch should control it. Dumb sockets and fixtures can't help there, so if the fixtures have to be upgraded anyway to provide the configuration, then just do that and leave the bulb out of it.

Today's fixtures don't have to be trashed. An add-on module could be wired in, hidden in the junction box. it could be wired as a switch replacement (like Z-wave or Insteon) but that doesn't give the fine grained control that you'd get with the bulb-by-bulb setup described in TFA.

Re:Wrong place

[Ultra64]

It's called security.
NAT is a good thing.

Nope.

The security you are thinking of is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateful_firewall, which is a side effect of NAT but can be implemented independently of NAT.

Re:Wrong place

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the show in philly, and I was thinking the same thing... but the cool part is what is stopping anyone from using the NXP chipset for anything else? I would love to have a dynamic HTML5 page on my webserver tracking my coffee maker usage. Write a script to text me if I am going over that caffeine limit!

Re:Wrong place

[jon3k]

First of all, I didn't know that was a requirement, link? Second of all, you don't need your own AS to multi-home. You can have two carriers announce your address space for you.

Re:Wrong place

[jroysdon]

What good is it to multi-home if you are not announcing your address space to your ISPs? If they announce it, what occurs when your link to them goes down? Sounds like you're going to be in a split-brain situation with all your traffic that goes their way not making it to you until you get their BGP engineers on the phone and have them remove the prefix.

Sounds like you're talking off the top of your head with no practical experience.

Re:Wrong place

[jon3k]

peer using a private AS with your ISP(s) and announce your address space to them. (RFC1930 in section 10)

Re:Wrong place

[jroysdon]

Private AS is fine for non-Internet connected services (MPLS, B2B private connections, etc.), but what ISP will let you peer with them? Every ISP I've ever deal with requires a global AS.

Re:Wrong place

[jon3k]

Lots of ISPs, just give them a call and ask.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_(Internet)

Originally, the definition required control by a single entity, typically an Internet service provider or a very large organization with independent connections to multiple networks, that adhere to a single and clearly defined routing policy, as originally defined in RFC 1771.[2] The newer definition in RFC 1930 came into use because multiple organizations can run BGP using private AS numbers to an ISP that connects all those organizations to the Internet. Even though there may be multiple Autonomous Systems supported by the ISP, the Internet only sees the routing policy of the ISP. That ISP must have an officially registered Autonomous System Number (ASN).

more 'efficiency' absurdities

[countertrolling]

This has become an OCD of the worst kind, and only makes the entire infrastructure even more brittle than it already is. And each connection to the net is just another attack vector, and probably subject to some secret executive order mandating that microphones and cameras be installed.

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you have to mandate the installation of cameras and microphones? Laptops, cellphones, tablets, and Kinects already have that covered.

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[Anonymous Coward]

Not too many of those things are regularly used in the bathroom.. Gotta remember the regulators are a bunch of pervs and psychos

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[Relayman]

The voices in the room cause slight variations of the current in the bulb. These slight variations, although in nanoamps, can be converted to digital transmissions and sent via TCP/IP to a listener far, far away.

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[chemicaldave]

So don't expose your home lighting network to the outside world. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice to control my home's lighting from my phone.

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[Anonymous Coward]

This has become an OCD of the worst kind, and only makes the entire infrastructure even more brittle than it already is.

You're just noticing the OCD aspect of environmentalism?

Imagine you're a person who has never heard of the environmental movement. To you, you switch off the lights because electricity is expensive. You reuse stuff because it's perfectly good stuff and ma and pa told you not to waste things.

Now imagine you meet your neighbor who is carefully sorting his trash. You ask him why on earth anyone would sort their trash, and he starts going on about mountains of trash. So maybe you point out that it came out of the ground, all that's happening is it's going back in, but, hey, it's a free country, sort your trash if you like.

Your neighbor isn't satisfied that no one else wants to sort their trash. So he goes to the city council and convinces them to force everyone to sort their trash into neat color coded receptacles. Normal OCD makes someone want to touch all the light poles. This is some kind of mass OCD-inspired lunacy.

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[Stewie241]

What is a smart phone or tablet for if not to play games while you're on the toilet?

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[dnahelicase]

Hello support? I think my lightbulb has a problem?

Have you tried turning it off, unscrewing it, waiting 30 seconds, screwing it back in and turning it on again?

Yes, but it won't turn on

Bypass the router and plug your lighting system directly into the cable modem

Surely you don't think it's the router?

If it's not the router I cannot verify it is a hardware problem. There must be a virus or some other software problem, which are not covered under your support warranty. Would you like me to transfer you to software support?

No thanks, I always take my lightbulbs to a local kid. He's a real wiz at this kind of stuff, and much cheaper

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[LilGuy]

I read the executive order which your linked article talks about and it really doesn't confer any ability on INTERPOL to overrule the US Government. I'm not even sure how the author came up with that nonsense.

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[Viol8]

Woo yeah, controlling a lightbulb from a phone - thats like so totally l337 and k00l!!

Or you could just get off your fat arse and flick the switch, And no , you couldn't do that if you weren't in the house - but then you wouldn't need the lights on in that case dumbass.

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[chemicaldave]

I'm referring to controlling the lights from my phone inside my home using my own network. Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?

Woo yeah, controlling a lightbulb from a phone - thats like so totally l337 and k00l!!

Or you could just get off your fat arse and flick the switch, And no , you couldn't do that if you weren't in the house - but then you wouldn't need the lights on in that case dumbass.

Woo yeah, watching a movie/reading a book/playing a game from a phone - thats like so totally 1337 and k00l!!

Or you could just get off your fat arse and walk to the videostore/library/sports field.

Re:more 'efficiency' absurdities

[Viol8]

Woah , like controlling lights from your own network! Woo! 7337 dude!

Do you realise what a sad lazy basement dwelling loser you sound like?

And books, music and video games are by their nature portable. However its unlikely you'll want to take your home lighting system with you when you go out unless you live in a caravan.

Will this finally shut up

[jra]

all the people who say that the desire for NAT in a native IPv6 environment is broken, and surely you can't want that, much less will we give it to you?

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

if the earth was a ball made of only sand particles 1x1x1mm (no mantle, crust, oceans or core, just sand), 2^128 is the number of sand grains in 300 earths.

why do we need nat? explain. i'd like to know.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[darth dickinson]

It's not *always* about address space conservation.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Cerium]

Better question: Why do you need to know every detail about my internal network (See also: Why would you WANT to)?

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Hatta]

NAT is *always* about address space conservation. That is all NAT does. Any other function you believe NAT implies can be provided with a stateful firewall and no address translation.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Verteiron]

Simple. IBM and whatever's left of AT&T Bell Labs will claim the first earth, the DoD and military will claim the second one (for national security!), leaving 99% of the third to be divied up between DEC, Xerox, and Ford.

We'll all have to use the last 1% of sand grain earth 3, so NAT will be an absolute necessity.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

Obfuscation.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

what about the other 297 earths? I said 300, not 3.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hoggoth]

Because God can't even afford a router that can keep 2^128 routes in it's memory.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

I wouldn't, if you knew how to properly set up a firewall. You obviously don't know. Hint: NAT is not for hiding things, firewalls and internal addressing are.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[QuantumRiff]

Because some people think NAT=Firewall. They don't seem to realize, even with IPv4, you can put internet routable IP's behind a firewall, and block access to them. They seem to think NAT is some sort of magical seperation between the networks, when it is not.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

Finite resource is finite (even for very large values)

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

That's why ipv6 is more efficient at routing. Also, your comment is stupid.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

Stupid comment is stupid. That's why you post anonymous, because you know you're being a hardass.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Hatta]

I don't. You don't need NAT to hide your internal network. Just a properly configured firewall.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[wagnerrp]

Unless your provider charges you per connected machine, I don't see why it would really matter. I can't believe it makes any real difference in terms of security.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Lumpy]

No it's about controlling your own ip adress space.

I can change ISP's and all my internal IP addresses will not change.

You might like running around and changing things, I have better things to do.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Quince alPillan]

So that our nanobot army won't run out of addresses, of course.

http://xkcd.com/865/

Re:Will this finally shut up

[sjames]

Why would this change my mind? The correct answer is to filter the packets, not re-write them. It's really very simple to everyone but cargo cultists.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[blueg3]

NAT is also a finite resource, unless you use NAT within an already-private network to create two-tier NAT. If every public IP address had a NAT network behind it, there'd only be (less than) 2^56 addresses, which is less than the number of IPv6 addresses. Practically, though, you want every connection out of a NAT gateway to have a different port number, so in practice you want much less than 2^16 machines behind a single public IP. (So, less than 2^48 machines.) In practice, the number of machines with arbitrarily deep NAT is still finite, because we have a finite quantity of stuff to make computer memory out of, and running NAT takes computer memory.

Fortunately, the number of addressable entities is also finite, if you require they be real objects.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Dog-Cow]

A firewall does not prevent mapping of an internal network. It only prevents one method of mapping (trying to reach hosts on the other side). It's still possible to map IP addresses that are reaching out through the firewall.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

But the GP was talking about *every detail* of the network, wasn't he?
Also, IPv6 has privacy extensions, disposable addresses you can easily change.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

Can a stateful firewall prevent Comcast from charging you for the extra IP addresses? Because they won't stop charging you for additional IP addresses just because of an IPv6 switchover.

NAT will be with us until the Earth goes careening into the sun.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Verteiron]

Sorry, I thought that went without saying; HP.

Okay, so I somehow misread your original comment. Just pretend it was funny, okay?

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

To keep private devices private behind a firewall.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

It gets funnier: Someone just told me it's 300 MILLION. Good Lord!

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Hatta]

That's what DNS is for.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[icebraining]

We have automated systems for that. If Slashdot changed its IP, would you have to do anything?

IP configuration in IPv6 is just your subnet + MAC address of the device. Simple. Zeroconf takes care of assigning meaningful names to each device.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[modmans2ndcoming]

Then you're an idiot. You don't need NAT to filter packets, just a firewall.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[mark-t]

DNS isn't very practical when you are doing low level administration, and need to refer to specific machines by IP. If their IP changes when you move them to a different provider, it's something of a PitA to go through and figure out what they all are again.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

Because my ISP isn't going to give me 1,000+ ip addresses for my home, which I'll need if every friggin light build, switch, appliance, fan, remote control, toilet, and/or any other device in my home will need if this 'innovation' keeps up.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

As a quick one, because maybe you don't want you're inner network to be visible to the outside world in a way that direct addressing would allow? or a further measure to prevent direct external connections a computer?

Re:Will this finally shut up

[sjames]

Read more carefully! I stated quite clearly that filtering is correct and NAT is for cargo cultists.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

why do we need nat? explain. i'd like to know.

Because it is already here. Ad-hockery. Inertia. Momentum. Resistance to change. Laziness. Stubbornness. The same reason we need anything else :) What any and everything boils down to anyways :)

Re:Will this finally shut up

[wagnerrp]

IPv6 isn't very practical when you are doing low level administration, and need to refer to specific machines by IP.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

A standard (and recommended) allocation is a /64, which gives you 2^64 available IPv6 addresses.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[hjf]

Your inner network shouldn't be visible if you set up a firewall (which you have to do either if you're using NAT or not).

As pointed earlier, someone could map your internal network, but this is simply a non issue with IPv6: your LAN database server, or SAMBA server, or Domain Controller will be protected by the firewall. If it needs to fetch something from the internet, it can use a disposable IPv6 address. You usually get assigned a /64, which is 2^64 addresses.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[arkane1234]

I can't believe I'm having to say this one a tech site....
DNS is only for name serving, it has nothing to do with IP addressing.
*facepalm*

Re:Will this finally shut up

[arkane1234]

What you said is the same with IPv4. It's only that most people don't want nor need their machines directly accessible by every Tom, Dick, and Hamed on the internet. Since most people would need to know about firewalls, NAT is considered a quick-and-easy segmentation where firewalling can be added to thoroughly protect.

But you knew that, right?

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Lumpy]

No because slashdot is not my printer.

Sorry but you are suggesting I now need to run a figging NAMESERVER? for my printers, XBMC players, RokU Boxes, toaster and furnace? That's flat out retarded.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[waerloga01]

How is it retarded?

IPv4 addresses were fairly easy to remember. just four blocks of up to three digits. But IPv6? 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 is not a number I'd want to bother remembering for my gadgets.

Hell even with IPv4 and fiddling with devices it got annoying remembering the numbers and setting up the ip address again. A router with DHCP server and name services installed made it laughably easy to just call my devices by their names be it manufacturer supplied or one supplied by the dubious grace of the owner.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[Hatta]

If you have more IPs than computers, then no you absolutely do not need NAT. A simple firewall would be more effective and cause fewer problems.

The only reason NAT is common today is that there are more devices than ip addresses.

Re:Will this finally shut up

[icebraining]

No. I'm saying that devices should support Zeroconf, and your RokU box already does (it calls it Bonjour, since it's the name Apple gave it), and so does any modern networked printer.

It's basically a system where instead of having a single server, the queries are made to broadcast on the LAN and each device replies with its own name and IP.

Zero configuration networking (zeroconf), is a set of techniques that automatically creates a usable Internet Protocol (IP) network without manual operator intervention or special configuration servers.

Zero configuration networking allows devices, such as computers and printers to connect to a network automatically. Without zeroconf, a network administrator must set up services, such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Domain Name System (DNS), or configure each computer's network settings manually, which may be difficult and time-consuming.

"Don't be evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but they never said anything about "Don't be stupid!"

That old joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Phone Support: I realize your computer won't turn on so I'd like you to look behind your desk to see if it is plugged in properly.
User: I can't see anything back there, it's way to dark!
Phone Support: Can you turn on a lamp?
User: No! Durn power has been out for over an hour due to the weather.

Now, lack of lighting will no longer be a useful sign of a power outage. Either the power is out, or you got hacked.

Privacy policy and EULA?

[bazmail]

I love tech as much as the next slashdotter but this just seems like tech for tech's sake. This also surely has privacy and usage rights issues that I we haven't even thought of yet.

Re:Privacy policy and EULA?

[Illy-chan]

Yeah. I mean, it sounds nice, shiny and fun but I wouldn't be comfortable using something like that. Governments, hackers, evil ex-boyfriends... They haven't even implemented https everywhere, no way this is going to be secure.

In ten years.

[www.sorehands.com]

Ten years from now we will have a push to IPv8 addresses as there will be a shortage of IPv6 addresses.

Everyone will want an IPv6 address for the lights on their Christmas trees and house displays.

Re:In ten years.

[danlip]

There are over 10^28 IPv6 addresses for every person. So even if you individually address every Christmas tree light you won't run out.

Re:In ten years.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are enough IPv6 addresses to for every ATOM on the surface of 100 Earths. I don't think we'll be running out any time soon.

Re:In ten years.

[idontgno]

I'm pretty sure that there are Christmas exterior displays in my neighborhood which have been continuously up longer than most Internet sites. By simple longevity, they probably deserve static persistent network addressing more than, for instance, Zynga.

Re:In ten years.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, ARIN will just make more money :)

Re:In ten years.

[Anonymous Coward]

that's before we meet with the populous race of Gliese 581d...

Re:In ten years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that in that 2^128 address space, there are 48 bits that are determined by the MAC address of the interface.

Re:In ten years.

[hjf]

2^128: think a planet, the size of earth, made of only sand, 1 cubic mm grains. now think 300 planets. that's 2^128 grains of sand.
do you get the picture now?

wanna calculate? calculate the volume of a 40.000km circunference sphere, in cubic milimeters. divide 2^128 in that. result? roughly 300.

Re:In ten years.

[hjf]

The number is almost 5x10^28 actually. 5 times more.

Re:In ten years.

[danlip]

Thanks, that makes a big difference :)

Re:In ten years.

[udoschuermann]

Damn right! We should have everything with IP addresses: I want my shoe laces to have IP addresses, and my shoes should be wireless routers, so that I can be alerted on my cell phone when my shoe laces are untied, or when I've stepped in dog shit, or the soles are starting to wear thin. But why stop there, I want IP addresses in each slice of cheese, too, so that I can monitor its nutritional value as it slowly decays in my refrigerator. And my soap dispenser needs to alert me when the soap is running low. And the floor boards in my house need to alert me to moisture content and progressive warping issues as I walk on them. And, ... and, ...
 
/groan

Re:In ten years.

[Lumpy]

And you will be the first to bitch that the Milky Way is NAT connected to the Galactic Internet because we are the backwater still using IPV6

Re:In ten years.

[glwtta]

You're a little off:

(40000/2/pi)^3(4/3)pi = ~1.0 x 10^12 km^3
10^12 km^3 * 10^18 = 10^30 mm^3
2^128 / 10^30 = 340,282,367

It's not 300 planets, it's 300 million planets.

Re:In ten years.

[jonescb]

Isn't that what they said about IPv4? 4 billion addresses ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:In ten years.

[NatasRevol]

You might want to check your numbers.

40000 km circumference sphere is only about 6,000 km radius or 6 000 000 000 mm

4/3*pi*r^3 ~= 9*10^29 sq mm

2^128 ~= 3.4*10^38

which means it's enough for (3.4e38/9e29 ~=) 376,000,000 earths worth of 1 sq mm grains of sand.

Re:In ten years.

[wagnerrp]

Actually, they said 4 billion addresses out to be enough for the small handful of military and research operations that will ever be on the internet. They had never planned it would be opened to the public at large.

Re:In ten years.

[Electricity Likes Me]

The funny thing is, nothing that you said sounds like a bad idea to me outside of having stuff constantly alert me about itself. Why shouldn't all those things have some form of networked intelligence built into them?

I'd very much like my soap dispenser to automatically add an item to my shopping list when it's running low.

Re:In ten years.

[Ant P.]

2**128 addresses is more than can theoretically be allocated using the resources we have left on this planet. Since we used up all the fuel murdering each other instead of finding a way off this rock, it really is enough for anybody now.

Re:In ten years.

[plover]

Ten years from now we will have a push to IPv8 addresses as there will be a shortage of IPv6 addresses.

Everyone will want an IPv6 address for the lights on their Christmas trees and house displays.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

A buddy of mine (not the guy in the article) went and bought a couple sets of these lights (on sale after the holidays) just to do exactly that. It's serially controlled via an Arduino, so it's not IPv6, but his heart's in the right place. :-)

Re:In ten years.

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv4 would be sufficient to us even right now if we wouldn't be so wasteful with addressing.

It's our nature. I'm fairly we'll exhaust it, especially when we have the attitude that we never will.

Re:In ten years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory XKCD.

Re:In ten years.

[Neil Boekend]

So war is just a protection, they wanted to prevent us from running out of IPv4? Seems like we need more war, stat!

Re:In ten years.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't NAT and create a Xmas tree subnet?

Please give one to every LED in my OLED screen

[Lord Lode]

It's 480x800 pixels. Does it use 3 LEDs per pixel for colors? That'll be 1152000 IPv6 addresses please. Thank you.

Re:Please give one to every LED in my OLED screen

[geekoid]

we could. However they wouldn't give them to you, but to the manufacturer.

Re:Please give one to every LED in my OLED screen

[Lord Lode]

So should I be blowing glass bulbs and putting metal wires in it to receive them myself then?

Re:Please give one to every LED in my OLED screen

[hjf]

And we have enough IPv6 to make 2.95x10^32 screens.

Re:Please give one to every LED in my OLED screen

[geekoid]

That's a weird way to make an OLED screen.

Negligent use of the IPV6 Space

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't we learn from IPv4 that we need to be more responsible with how we allocate IP addresses?

Hint: if you get a big $75000 bonus at work, don't go out and frivolously spend $75000. Sure, go nuts within reason, but save some of that money for an emergency when you'll need it most.

PS: why the hell would you want to give a lightbulb enough processing power to operate a full TCP/IP stack? That's wasteful considering they're designed to be cheap and replaceable. This is stupid. Like the FP said, if you really want to do it right, give the fixtures addresses and make the lightbulbs depend on the fixture.

Re:Negligent use of the IPV6 Space

[TheBig1]

128 bit addresses make for amazingly large address space -- it has been said that "This address space is probably sufficient to uniquely address every molecule in the solar system! " (http://www.garykessler.net/library/ipv6_exp.html, among others). It will last for at least a couple more years...

Re:Negligent use of the IPV6 Space

[MischaNix]

But is it sufficient to uniquely address every elementary particle in the universe? No! That's where we must start (and we also have to have a quantum-state addressing submask).

Re:Negligent use of the IPV6 Space

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not disagreeing with the notion that there are more IPv6 addresses than we would ever need on Earth, but let's treat this new system as if it's supposed to last us forever.

That said, I know it would be cool to give a butter knife a globally routeable IPv6 address, but does it really need it?

Re:Negligent use of the IPV6 Space

[MozeeToby]

You're right, it's time to cut out the problem all together and jump straight to 256 bit addressing. With 10^77 addresses, we'll be able to assign a unique address to nearly every atom in the universe and never have to have these arguments again.

Re:Negligent use of the IPV6 Space

[wagnerrp]

We did learn from IPv4, which is why IPv6 was designed with such an ungodly large address space that we do not need to be responsible. These are not intended for the standard incandescent bulb you have to replace once or twice a year. They are intended for the LED bulbs that you install once and then never touch again.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... in this scenario?

Now let's wait for someone to hack them

[FumarMata]

Who will be the first to sync the lights of an entire city with Lady Gaga's last song ?

Re:Now let's wait for someone to hack them

[oldmac31310]

Her 'last' song? Does this mean she has retired? Surely that is to much to hope for.

hmm

[synapse7]

So an IP address does not equal a person but it does equal a light bulb, interesting...

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

You think it's funny now, just wait until you get sued by the *IAA because your light bulb's IP was found downloading pirated recordings.

dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

I propose we go back to using a simple torch.

Re:dumb

[Lumpy]

What netmask are you using for your torch?

How many sysadmins

[Ukab the Great]

does it take a change a lightbulb?

Re:How many sysadmins

[geekoid]

Zero, it's a hardware problem.

Unless it's a router table error, in which case, 7.
1 to do it and 6 others to grumble about it on /. because the ;stupid user' doesn't know even the most rudimentary ways to use some obscure design.

Re:How many sysadmins

[Megahard]

does it take to change the IP address of a lightbulb?

Re:How many sysadmins

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends. If the NIC of every lightbulb has a little status lightbulb it's ...HEAP OVERFLOW

Re:How many sysadmins

[Dekker3D]

If it's running Linux, it'll need only one sysadmin.
If it's running Windows, it'll need only one to change it but millions will chip in, clamouring for it to be changed faster.
If it's running Mac OS X... well, you won't be able to change it without sending it in to a Mac store, but at least it'll be user-friendly! Ish..

Re:How many sysadmins

[Anonymous Coward]

Change? Why change? Have you tried rebooting yet?

Re:How many sysadmins

[Anonymous Coward]

None right now,
we're waiting for the next great version of windows for lightbulbs.
Oh wait, we,ve already got windows.

IP

[MischaNix]

IP stands for internet protocol. Unless your lightbulbs are serving or downloading internet content, I don't see any point to addressing them with their own IP addresses.

Re:IP

[AmigaHeretic]

You would be able to control them...wait for it...over the Internet! Using IP to tell them to turn on and off, or get bright or dim. If you were out and you forgot you left the lights on at dinner, you could then turn them off from your phone or something I guess by communicating directly with each bulb (light socket).

Not saying it's a good idea or bad. Just saying, that yes, they are indeed talking about hooking your light bulbs to the Internet. Do they need there own IPv6? Could you have one device that hooked to a router then used a different protocol inside the network to run the lights? Sure, sure, but could you give a unique IPv6 to each light socket? I guess. Would you want to?

Re:IP

[MischaNix]

Well, I suppose you saw my point regardless--it's entirely frivolous to use a protocol as relatively advanced as IP for something as simple as changing the statuses of light-bulbs. Although, there is a critical point where using little IP-supporting microchips that are mass produced in tandem with a software solution is less costly than using a proprietary hardware solution... We'll see, I guess.

Re:IP

[Drooling Iguana]

So screwing in a lightbulb will finally be patentable? Awesome!

Re:IP

[Anonymous Coward]

And internet is short for inter-network, which doesn't imply content. I hate that word, it's become yet another empty example of marketing speak.

Have a Nice Day.

Re:IP

[MischaNix]

"A Method for the Installation of Network-Aware Filament Containers (NAFCs)"... We'll be billionaires, soon, buddy.

Re:IP

[Attila Dimedici]

The reason to have an IP address for your lightbulbs is so that guy down the street with the really distorted sense of humor can turn them on and off randomly,

Re:IP

[Relayman]

Oh, no, we're not just changing the status. Every light bulb will have a Web server where we can monitor how long the bulb has burned, how many watts it's used (with and without the Web server), when it was installed, and, of course, a place to change the light bulb's password so that not every person with a browser and Google search can control our light bulb. Then we will have those /. users who will want to root their light bulbs and run their own software as well!

Re:IP

[Neil Boekend]

A friend of mine had a script running that let others control his christmas tree, his TL (filtered against fast switching) and some other lights, he had a webcam on it to show the data. We tried to mess with him, but he redirected us to some cheesy pron site. His girlfriend asked him to point the webcam somewhere else than the bed.

In 10 years this will appear on a list

[Tridus]

And I don't mean a list of great ideas. This will be on one of those "top 10 stupid Internet ideas" lists.

There is no upside here. We take something that is simple and works, and make it complicated. We make it FAR more expensive to build. We open it up to attack where it previously wasn't. We use more energy in the process. And we get nothing of value out of it.

The only way this has any hope of succeeding as an idea is if they can convince the government to make a law requiring it in the name of "green energy" or "safety" or some other bullshit reason that governments like to use to create stupid laws.

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[hedwards]

On the upside, if the lights go out you'll have to hire an electrician and a network administrator to fix it.

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[Tridus]

Well, that'll be one way to get some job security.

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[geekoid]

If you have a desire to control your lights remotely, then buy them, otherwise don't and don't make shit up.

I It would be kind of neat to get an alert telling which lights are on at different times of the day.

Like when my daughter gets up a 2AM to read for 3 hours.
G

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[kehren77]

And I don't mean a list of great ideas. This will be on one of those "top 10 stupid Internet ideas" lists.

And the story right after it will be "When will people start using IPv6?"

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[wagnerrp]

How much more expensive? Once in mass production, a SoC with a microcontroller, network controller, powerline modem, and relay capable of 10-20W should be doable for a couple dollars. Considering the total operating cost of a LED bulb, that's only going to be a couple percent of its lifetime cost.

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[Attila Dimedici]

You do realize that unless there is fairly large consumer uptake of these, they will be significantly more expensive than lightbulbs without this feature? and the odds of significant consumer uptake is somewhere between slim and none?

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[Mashiki]

It would be smarter to allow control at the end of the circuit instead of at the end of the device. This is needlessly complicated.

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[wagnerrp]

You do realize that LED bulbs already have a DC power supply and micro-controller in them to operate, right?

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[wagnerrp]

Putting control at the end of the circuit means you need a dedicated circuit to each device. This allows you to just run one circuit for all your devices.

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[Mashiki]

You should be using dedicated links in all circuits now according to CSA and NEC. Unless each outlet is low draw.

Re:In 10 years this will appear on a list

[Shabazz Rabbinowitz]

Remember, kids: before installing your new IP6 light bulbs, make sure to memorize the location of the electrical plug for your router so that you can cycle the power in the dark!

ISP;s will love this $5/m per bulb / ip!

[Anonymous Coward]

ISP;s will love this $5/m per bulb / ip!

Bring in the law makers

[l0ungeb0y]

FFS, this idea is so bad it boggles all comprehension. Perhaps these "greenies" didn't take into considering that running the required hardware to support an internet accessible service on every light bulb would dramatically INCREASE power consumption world wide? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

If they want to track light bulbs, then a simple RFD and a cheap USB wand-reader device to be used by interested parties is enough.

Re:Bring in the law makers

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's first assume that you have a light bulb without wireless connectivity that consumes 10 W when it's running at max power (it's a low energy LED bulb). If you have it on full power for 4 hours a day it will consume 10*4*365 = 14600 Wh per year.

How much power do you think that one of the wireless light bulbs would consume in standby mode? 1 W? 100 mW? 10 mW? 1 mW? I'm going to assume 100 mW. (The EU is about to start to regulate that products must consume less than 100 mW in standby, so anything that consumes more will be a hard sell in the future.)

So your light bulb is going to consume a baseline 0.1*24*365 Wh per year. That's 876 Wh. But thanks to your automatic lighting control app your ligh bulb will now automatically ramp up gradually in the morning, giving you a pleasant gradual increase in light and ramp down gradually at night, preparing you for bedtime. Instead of 4*10 Wh it will consume something like 5+10+10+5 Wh, where the 5 Wh are the hours that the lap dims up and down. That means it will consume (5+10+10+5)*365 + 876 = 11826 Wh per year.

The wireless function will help us save 14600 - 11826 = 2774 Wh per year. If the bulb lasts for 10 years we will have saved nearly 28 kWh, which is probably enough to make of for the amount of energy that it takes to produce the wireless bulb compared to the normal bulb. Your savings will be even greater if you dim the light bulb more.

900 mhz

[maxrate]

What Google 900Mhz announcement? Please, don't tell me to 'Google it' ....

Re:900 mhz

[afidel]

Google's Android @home initiative.

Re:900 mhz

[silverglade00]

Whatever you do, don't Google it. Using a search engine to search for information is ridiculous.

Re:900 mhz

[Uhyve]

Does that have anything to do with the 900Mhz spectrum? I mean, yeah, it's using wireless, but why couldn't all that be done over wireless a/b/g/n? Or am I missing something really simple?

Re:900 mhz

[geekoid]

So you know a way to get your answer, instead took the more labor intensive way and posted the question in /. in hopes someone would give you some summary?

Re:900 mhz

[afidel]

They want to be able to control it without needing you to setup a network is my assumption.

Re:900 mhz

[geekoid]

OMG, he has villain hair.

Re:900 mhz

[mcmonkey]

So you know a way to get your answer, instead took the more labor intensive way and posted the question in /. in hopes someone would give you some summary?

No, the OP does not a way to get a quick answer.

If you googled "Google 900Mhz announcement" you'd know that. The first page of results all start, "Hot on the heels of Google's 900 mhz announcement, Green Wave Reality..." That is, they all point to this story and not the 900 MHz announcement.

'Just google it' is not always an appropriate answer.

Re:900 mhz

[Anonymous Coward]

Google it.... ;)

Lights bulb on standby

[tmpsantos]

Great idea, now every light bulb will consume some energy even when they are off, or more precisely, on standby.

But it makes law enforcement easier!

[Anonymous Coward]

I *need* the IP address to identify a light bulb, not a fixture, so when I catch that light bulb copying data I can sue it into permanent impoverishment!

Steven Wright

[ThatsNotPudding]

Soon his joke about randomly flipping a light switch and getting nasty letter from some guy in Germany willl come true JUST AS THE PROPHECY PREDICTED.

Re:Steven Wright

[Meddik]

Bravo

Re:Steven Wright

[circletimessquare]

it was some woman in germany. and she called him, she didn't write a letter /steven wright joke snob

Re:Steven Wright

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard it. I looked it up and its a phone call from a woman in Madagascar. Though your idea sounds more plausible somehow.

WTF

[Beelzebud]

Can anyone explain, in a logical manner, why exactly we need IP addresses assigned to light bulbs?

Re:WTF

[afidel]

It's part of a broader home automation effort by Google called Android @Home. It will allow easy home automation through open source libraries, standard protocols, and reference implementations.

Re:WTF

[berashith]

to run a beowolf cluster on them...

Re:WTF

[itsenrique]

Why of course! We need them to sell people crap so we can make more money than we did last (year, quarter, whatever). Oh, wait, you mean why do we the consumers need these?............

Re:WTF

[AdamThor]

Why IP Address Lightbulbs:

To give script kiddies something to do
To create jobs for unemployed IT workers
To generate youtube videos of lights doing crazy junk
To facilitate the construction of holiday building-wide window-light christmas trees
To push people to move off IPv4
So Google can track your movements within your house and sell the info to advertisers
So the Government can use them to control your thoughts
So mighty USA can crush the manufacture of cheap Chinese light timers
So the Japanese can create Tamagotchi lightbulbs (turn it on every day to keep it happy!)
So that it can automatically phone home for firmware updates

AND FINALLY:
IT'S PURE SCIENCE! YOU WOULDN'T ASK WHY THE SPACE SHUTTLE, WOULD YOU? YOU KNOW WE GOT TEFLON FROM THE SPACE PROGRAM!!!eleventy!1!

Re:WTF

[ArsonSmith]

can anyone explain, in a logical manner, why exactly we need light bulbs?

Isn't it just a fancy new expensive oil lamp?

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

It's part of a broader home automation effort by Google called Android @Home. It will allow easy home automation through open source libraries, standard protocols, and reference implementations.

Everything about the wasp except why! We know what it is, we just can't figure out why the illuminating fuck anybody could possibly want a lightbulb with an IP address (from an engineering perspective it's stupid).

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't.

It is simply one of the most absurd ideas I have ever heard of, in every respect.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

The notion that this might be "needed" began with some nerd at the MIT Media Lab, who
was trying to justify his pathetic existence by coming up with something cool. IIRC the
guy's name was Gershenfeld or something along those lines. Sorry, I cannot be bothered
looking this douche up, he has already wasted enough of my time.

As for actual 'need' : uh, no, the world can get by just fine without this bullshit. But
it does present various advantages, such as being able to control your home lighting
when you ought to be paying attention to what's happening in front of you instead.
And of course the potential for these widgets being (mis)used as a surveillance tool
cannot be ignored.

Part of me hopes that the 'end of the world' predictions are true. I have been around long
enough that I am very tired of the bullshit in this world, and part of me would enjoy
laughing while it all collapses.

So many possibilities

[ideaz]

I can already imagine your neighbor hacking into your network to turn the lights on your bedroom when you forget to dim the blinds while you're at it

Re:So many possibilities

[slackzilly]

DOS on your neighbour woohoo!

Cloud computing light bulbs

[Relayman]

Can I then have light bulbs that are powered from the cloud?

Overdesign

[Animats]

Remote lighting control has been around for decades. X10 has been available for a long time, it's inexpensive, and you can buy the gear at any Home Depot.

The next generation system after that was Echelon LONworks, which is a bidirectional power-line network for home control. That system really does give every device a unique address, set during manufacture, like Ethernet addresses. It's only 78kb/s, but that's enough for lighting control. It never caught on for home control, but it turned out to be useful for subway and railroad trains, because it has extremely good noise immunity. It's used on trains to control lights, HVAC, destination signs, doors, and other auxiliary equipment. Some office buildings use it, and it's sometimes used in semiconductor manufacturing plants.

Full Internet connectivity for each lighting device is a bit much. Do you really want to bridge that data to the outside world?

Re:Overdesign

[Nimey]

I'm still not wanting to do business with X10 after their marketing campaign several years ago with pop-unders and "OMG SHOWER SPY CAM!!!1eleventy" ads.

Re:Overdesign

[geekoid]

X10 sucks, and it doesn't do what this has the potential to do.

Imagine having a game that control the lights in the room.
Or gte a notice on your phone when an motion sensitive light turns on?

Or not. In which case don't buy them.

Re:Overdesign

[sean.peters]

Imagine having a game that control the lights in the room. Or gte a notice on your phone when an motion sensitive light turns on?

Or not. In which case don't buy them.

Thanks, I won't. Seriously, that's the big draw? Games that can turn your lights on and off? And dude, I have motion sensitive lights at my place - if the light started texting me every time it turned on I'd be shutting that feature off in about 1 second.

Re:Overdesign

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the power-line version of LONworks is only 5.4Kb/s. The 78Kb/s version uses twisted pair, though a DC current can be put on the bus to power devices. And its layer-1 is pretty robust indeed.

Re:Overdesign

[Relayman]

Then you can't use Netflix either. Every time I close browser windows, there sits the Netflix ad.

Re:Overdesign

[Nimey]

Not the same: X10 had that ad campaign on a lot of different websites. They were actually one reason why I fiddled with my hosts file back then, when I didn't simply stick with lynx.

Re:Overdesign

[Anonymous Coward]

If I have a choice in what protocol to use, I usually end up going with open source implementations. I am glad to finally have a choice in RF mesh networking that uses something like IP and 6LoWPAN that is standard, proven, and familiar. I was disappointed to hear that Google has implemented something proprietary.

The bulbs themselves use SNMP and have a MiB for controlling state and reading variables. Again, another IETF standard that I think serves the purpose of building/home automation well.

As far as the network itself, the user has the choice whether or not to bridge it to the outside world. The concern for security is totally warranted. I can imagine walking down the dim basement stairs, only to have some war-driving teens blast out a multicast 'lights out' on my network. The dude at the booth said both the NXP chipset and Greenwave Gateway MCU have on-chip peripherals dedicated to crypto acceleration. Lets just hope people take advantage of it..
Then again, The VCR at my parents house is still blinking '12:00' over and over :-(

Coercive Government

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait until governments like California use this to turn off my lights when they don't think I'm sufficiently green enough.

Re:The world is running out of IPv6 addresses

[spun]

Dude. No. Trillions are chump change. A trillion times a trillion is chump change compared to the number of IPv6 addresses. 2^128 is a very big number.

Smart Grid Privacy Intrusion here we come!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is entirely a bad idea. As long as a possibility exists for this to enable dumb grid technology, it is a bad idea.

Expensive

[Nkwe]

Excellent. Now instead of paying less then a dollar for a perfectly good incandescent light bulb, and instead of paying $50 for a light equivalent LED "bulb", I can now pay $55 for a light equivalent LED light with network connectivity. Sure over time the costs will go down, but I bet that adding the network connectivity will always cost more than the original incandescent bulb would have.

Re:Expensive

[IrquiM]

If you don't want the IP connectivity, buy one without?

Re:Expensive

[wagnerrp]

When you consider that LED bulb will last 20-30 times longer than an incandescent, that network connectivity is only a fraction of the cost of the incandescent bulb.

Re:Expensive

[wzzzzrd]

If you don't want the IP connectivity, buy one without?

Maybe they are outlawed by then? The EU tried to ban the sale of a certain type of light bulbs some time ago, because of power consumption and other "greeny" stuff. Funny enough, it did hold a while, and only new style bulbs were sold, until someone found a hole in the law.

Copyright lawsuits?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait for someone's lightbulb to get sued by mistake for downloading copyrighted content. That should be entertaining.

Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like a surveillance system to me.

omg!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the recent IPv4 debacle taught us anything it's that these strings of numbers are not infinite! When the IPv6 barrel bottoms out, where will we go? This grievous misuse of a precious commodity sickens me and I hope it's never gone through with.

control lights from your phone

[aapold]

No longer will you need a lousy LED flash on your phone camera. Just tap to brighten all lightbulbs in the area. Or if you're into being dark and mysterious, a constantly running app that dims all lights within 50' of your GPS location... people will know when you're coming...

Re:control lights from your phone

[not-my-real-name]

Or if you're into being dark and mysterious, a constantly running app that dims all lights within 50' of your GPS location... people will know when you're coming...

There was a Space: 1999 episode something like this. But now I'm dating myself...

Re:control lights from your phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Hagrid or Dumbledore already have one of these?

Re:control lights from your phone

[gmhowell]

Or if you're into being dark and mysterious, a constantly running app that dims all lights within 50' of your GPS location... people will know when you're coming...

There was a Space: 1999 episode something like this. But now I'm dating myself...

Just as well. If you're on slashdot, there's no chance of you dating another human being.

Tracert teh-overhead-light

[cultiv8]

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\windoz>tracert teh-overhead-light

Tracing route to teh-overhead-light [3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf] over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 6 ms 7 ms 8 ms microsoft.com [65.55.12.249]
3 11 ms 8 ms 9 ms google.com [216.239.51.99]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 17 ms 16 ms 16 ms facebook.com [69.63.189.16]
6 19 ms 16 ms 18 ms nsa.gov [12.120.186.8]
7 16 ms 16 ms 15 ms teh-overhead-light [3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf]

Trace complete.

Hmmmm ....

[gstoddart]

So, is it going to cost more to make the individual bulbs addressable ... or to build in the home automation which makes it all go? The sheer amount of extra crap and infrastructure required to make sure I've got the wireless network of lightbulbs is staggering -- and, seems pointless. Why does everybody want every object I own to be internet enabled?

This seems to be a common condition of people who envision the "house of the future" -- we're going to plan for a tremendous amount of infrastructure which will never be affordable, or widely deployed. Most people don't care about it. But, dammit, we're going to envision it anyway.

This just seems like one of those "solutions in search of a problem". Microsoft has been envisioning the "house of the future" for what seems like at least two decades -- we're no closer to it, most of us don't want it (or even care about it), but people are spending millions on it to tell us that's what we'll be having soon.

I'm sorry, but short of a Star Trek like revolution in our energy economy where we can rebuild from scratch with cost not being a barrier -- most of this stuff falls into the category of purely speculating just because we can. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to buy stocks in this company either.

This is something that people who are rich or eccentric will play with, and the overwhelming majority of us will continue about our lives without being impacted by this. The last thing I want is for my house to get a virus. :-P

Re:Hmmmm ....

[amliebsch]

This proposal at least has the advantage of not requiring all that much infrastructure replacement, always the biggest hurdle due to sunk costs. Communications should be possible over the existing power lines, with only a single EOPL gateway, so all you'd have to replace is the replaceable bulbs themselves, and optionally the fixture.

Re:The world is running out of IPv6 addresses

[Anonymous Coward]

commodore64 will in the future start the 10BaseT-Party who will campaign for and elect politicians that will reign in this massive and excessive number of bits for each IP. In this 20 years that he mentions they hope to bring it back to a manageable 2^33 or 2^34 and in 30 years down to 2^16. We can't keep expanding bit spaces forever! No more expand-and-allocate addressing!

What a waste!

[Ezzer]

If the recent IPv4 debacle taught us anything is that strings of numbers are not infinite! Where will we go when the IPv6 barrel bottoms out? This is a grievous misuse of our precious commodity and it sickens me deeply on several levels.

Re:What a waste!

[Laxori666]

We have enough to give every person currently alive 10000000000000000000000000000 different IPv6 addresses. I think we'll be OK.

Re:What a waste!

[panikfan]

We have enough to give every person currently alive 10000000000000000000000000000 different IPv6 addresses. I think we'll be OK.

And with stupid ideas like this one, we're going to need 'em. Also don't forget that the world population is always increasing.

I dont want it to have an ip address

[Anonymous Coward]

I want it to make the area around it brighter. Thats it. Thats all it needs to do.

My microwave, refrigerator, stereo and even my tv doesn't need one either.

Lightbulbs?

[digitaldc]

Now they're just too damn hard to operate properly. Try a candle.

Fifth Light

[tundra_man]

This has proved useful at an industrial level http://www.fifthlight.com/ . Kind of neat when combined with the capability to dim florescent lights.

Re:Fifth Light

[kehren77]

There are FOUR LIGHTS!

Amateurs!

[Darth Snowshoe]

"Begun these lighting wars have!" That's the line! Say it! Say it!

Not in my house.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see them give an ip address to my CANDLES. HA HA HA HA HA

Re:Not in my house.

[Relayman]

Because candles don't have DRM, they will become illegal. Your light bulbs will be able to detect candles and report you to the authorities.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people use their brains anymore or do they just do shit like this? Oh, we have IPv6 with 340 undecillion addresses, lets put one in every disposable item we can think of!!!

Next every square of toilette paper will have an RFID and IP address, just for shits and giggles too.

People at Green Wave Reality should be forced onto a "worlds dumbest people" list so that everyone can ignore the crap coming out of them.

Fixture is wrong place too

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think that everything should be contained in the circuit breaker. That way you are controlling areas. No need to hit each light switch, you can shut them off by the area of the house at the breaker and eliminate any electrical drains as well.

You'd also be resetting your clocks quite a bit...

Re:Fixture is wrong place too

[Anonymous Coward]

Disagree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFqnDjyDI9o

Probably should RTFA before spouting off but...

[guspasho]

Why? This sounds like a horrible idea. This would require a network connection for every lightbulb (or fixture), and for what?

And if there is an actual good reason behind it, why use IPv6? Why not use a unique, lightbulb-specific addressing system? Why rely on Wi-Fi/Ethernet to do the job? Have you ever tried putting a square peg in a round hole before?

And finally, are you *trying* to exhaust the IPv6 space as quickly as possible? Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

Okay, I'm going to go read the article now and see if it answers any of my questions.

Re:Probably should RTFA before spouting off but...

[wagnerrp]

If you think this can exhaust the IPv6 space in anything like the near term, you clearly don't understand the sheer scale of IPv6.

Re:Probably should RTFA before spouting off but...

[guspasho]

Remember how 640kB should be enough RAM for anybody? When something is in abundance it will get burned through until a scarcity is generated. We see this with hard drive partition and system RAM limits all the time. I suspect that it doesn't much matter if the IPv6 space is 128 bit or 256 bit, it will still be burned through in the same amount of time. I'm not saying that it will just be light bulbs, people will come up with ways to use or hoard the addresses. But if someone is already talking about putting them in light bulbs then it's likely that every electronic device will have one soon enough, and not just the things we have now, but the things that have yet to be invented, things that will likely be mass produced by the billions like cell phones and RFID tags, maybe more than billions. And on top of that, how are companies buying blocks of the space? One reason for the IPv4 scarcity is that a handful of companies bought up 25-50% of the addresses in large blocks before anyone realized what it would mean in the year 2011. Did/will the same happen with IPv6? I'd guess not, but I'm arguing from ignorance, presuming that some form of hoarding will occur as well as waste.

Re:Probably should RTFA before spouting off but...

[wagnerrp]

Remember how everyone always uses that quote to the exact opposite of what was actually said? Gates was talking about the deficiencies of MSDOS, and how quickly it became apparent that 640KB would not be sufficient in the long term.

With standard IPv6 allocation, each subscriber would get their own /64. That means you personally have a globally addressable space on the order of four billion times large than the entire IPv4 space. You could address every atom in your house and have plenty to spare. Large companies can request up to a /48, and while that may appear to take up a significant portion of the address space, they can hand out some 250 trillion of these. Each of those original founding companies that were allocated a /8 would now get one of these instead. A large tier 1 ISP might be allocated a /32 at a time, allowing up to 16 thousand of these large businesses, tier 2 ISPs, or billions of individual subscribers. We could still allow for some four billion tier 1 ISPs with such large allotments, of which we currently have maybe a dozen.

Before APNIC ran out, we were going through addresses on the order of 20M per month. Lets say we go nuts, stop using NAT, and add all sorts of networked gadgets and do-dads, those companies that get a /48 will never in a thousand years be able to use up those 300 sextillion addresses. Even if the realities of branched networking mean they might want another block from another ISP in another geographic location, it's not going to be noticeable.

I understand what you're saying that we shouldn't be wastefully consuming these addresses, but the reality is that the address space is so large, we could be wasteful, and still have plenty of breathing room until the communication latencies make a unified internet no longer a viable option.

Oh Net neutrality!

[Palmsie]

I'm sorry, the new NN laws don't apply to your bathroom light bulbs since they provide peer-to-peer support for your whole family. As a result, we have decided to throttle their wattage to the candlelight equivalent until you switch to our new bulbs which allow for single-user compatibility.

Thanks for choosing Comcast.

distributed denial-of-lighting attack

[circletimessquare]

DDoL

you heard it here first

Does this mean

[Vahokif]

Does this mean you'll be able to hack someone's toaster, like in the movies?

Re:Does this mean

[Nkwe]

Does this mean you'll be able to hack someone's toaster, like in the movies?

No, but you will be able to make the lights overhead explode and emit showers of sparks at dramatic moments.

Re:Does this mean

[StormReaver]

Does this mean you'll be able to hack someone's toaster, like in the movies?

Only if your toaster is running Microsoft Toast (commonly known as just, "Toast" in keeping with the Microsoft's need to usurp common words as trademarks), which has the nasty side effect of burning down parts of your house twice a day. But don't worry, because the antivirus you'll need to pretend you're secure will make your toaster so slow that you won't have time to actually make toast. It won't actually keep out the hackers, but it will save your house.

Re:Does this mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Aah, so you're a waffle man!

Re:Does this mean

[O-Deka-K]

Heard sometime in the future:

"There was this one time I thought my house was haunted. Every night at midnight, the lights would start to flicker randomly. Sometimes they would dim or even turn off in the room I was in. When I went to the basement, the lights went really bright and exploded! I eventually got an exorcist to come in, and he turned out to be an exorcist-slash-sysadmin. Turns out that my firewall went down and someone hacked my lights and security system."

Exorcist/Sysadmin -- Job of the Future

Re:Does this mean

[Anonymous Coward]

If by toaster you mean lightbulb.

Re:Does this mean

[Anonymous Coward]

It means you'll be able to write your slashdot messages from a vacuum cleaner.

Re:Does this mean

[William-Ely]

Not if the toaster has Norton Internet Security Small Kitchen Appliance Edition 2012!

Not in MY house they don't

[Anonymous Coward]

If you cannot see how the potential costs outweigh any potential benefits,
you need to think on it some more.

Such devices invite abuse by all sorts of entities, ranging from burglars to
the government.

If you invite such devices into your house, you are a fool.

Re:Not in MY house they don't

[arkane1234]

EXACTLY!

This ranks right up there with backdoors in Windows for the NSA, or obligatory kill switches in cars so the police can disable the "offending" vehicle...

There's absolutely no upside (outside of programmed light strobes), and a horrible epileptic flash movie-length montage of things that can and would go wrong.

EVERY light?

[operagost]

What about the LEDs in my devices? Should the device running the network stack for my device LED also have an LED to indicate it's functioning? If so, do we also give that LED an IP address? If so...

better way to save energy

[hilldog]

Off switch. meh.

Re:better way to save energy

[wasabii]

Off switch that works without remembering to hit the off switch will probably save more energy.

Re:better way to save energy

[arkane1234]

Which is a paradox in itself since it's slowly draining energy while monitoring the energy.
After all, if it's turned off by software, it has to be a soft-switch.

Re:The world is running out of IPv6 addresses

[wagnerrp]

Technically, its only 2^64. The first 64-bits define a single subscriber on the internet. The second 64-bits are auto-generated to uniquely identify a machine or device, the improved version of the 48-bit MAC address.

Begun the lighting wars have

[drrck]

If you're going to get that close at least do it properly.

Do Not Want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Last thing we need is to encourage governments to have energy tzars and Power Police.

Wth?

[GarryFre]

How typical to treat a limited resource as an unlimited one. I can just see me installing lighting security by Microsoft... ! "To turn off bulb, hit the On switch." ... Click! Error! "You must turn the bulb on before you can turn it off!" Wth? ... Click. Error! "You must turn the bulb off before you can turn it on!" Wth? ... Click! Computer powers down. Argh!!! They hooked the computer to turn on the system TO the system! Argh!

Drive by epileptic seizures?

[WaffleMonster]

These would certainly be a hit at defcon but pretty lame and wasteful otherwise.

Seems like ridiculous overkill

[sean.peters]

For one thing, I almost never need bulb-by-bulb (or fixture-by-fixture) control of lighting. The few exceptions to the rule are pretty easily solved by... wait for it... a switch on the fixture itself (for reading lights or whatever). The only thing being able to do this buys you is the ability to remotely control your lights, and the only use I can see for that is to check whether you turned off all your lights after you've left your house.

The bottom line is that I don't consider this all that compelling of a feature. Not absolutely useless, but it would have to be just about free or I wouldn't buy it.

I'm not getting this

[sean.peters]

Where does the surveillance part come in? Unless the light is fitted with some kind of sensor (microphone, camera, or whatever), it would seem that the absolute most anyone could find out would be whether the light's on or not - which doesn't seem all that interesting. And even that would require someone crack your light bulb (so to speak).

Re:I'm not getting this

[Anonymous Coward]

In flashlights. Wireless flashlights with 3G and GPS built in. I do imagine that these lightbulbs will have wireless built in, to make them backwards compatible with old fixtures, that don't have network drops in them.

Re:I'm not getting this

[GameboyRMH]

I assume he's thinking it will be possible to see how many bulbs are in your house and their on/off state, so it might be possible to see if the house is occupied or if you're running a grow op (as "smart grid" tech already does with large appliances). But I'd only use well-secured OpenBulbs myself.

Re:I'm not getting this

[sumdumass]

Well, think about what kind of useful information can be obtained here.

Let's say I monitor your home and notice that ever night, between a certain 15 minute segment, the some lights are turn off and others are turned on momentarily. Let's also say that on certain days, one of those lights is to the laundry room. So I show up and look through the window at that specific time and find you start a load of laundry just before going to bed on a certain night. I come back on the next scheduled time, break in and rob you blind while you sleep and the sound of the washer covers my efforts.

But let's go further. Suppose every three weeks, I notice the lights in your garage come on at a certain time and the flood light in your drive way. Oh, so the man of the house works the swing shift. Now I come over when your all alone either just before he gets home or just after he gets home.

Of course there are alarms which is likely to be present in an automated home. Out prison is full of criminals who didn't care about them too. And I'm sure there are some who got around that problem.

I have to say I have the same question

[sean.peters]

What exactly do you need to look at during the operation in question?

Amen

[sean.peters]

It's more or less the same reason we "needed" blu-ray, and we will be "needing" 3d TV.

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Begun, the lighting wars have.

Amen! This is the wrong place

[mschaffer]

Honestly, an IP address for every bulb?!! Retards.
What's next? An IP address for every piece of toast? But ignore the toaster.
Besides, imagine the potential for mischief (accidental or intentional).

So If they shut down the internet....lights go out

[Anonymous Coward]

So If they shut down the internet....would the lights go out? If I use a flashlight, do I have to get an Internet provider? Do I have to apply to get permission for birthday candles? Whatever happened to simple worries like letters from Nigeria and "AOL Update" emails.....?

Re:The world is running out of IPv6 addresses

[LilGuy]

340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456.
Courtesy of WolframAlpha.com

And dead bulbs?

[Qatz]

Will we have to resubmit their ip's for reuse?

GREAT idea!

[SMTB1963]

One I'm sure Rube Goldberg would be proud of.

Really?

[CTU]

I fail to understand why a light-bulb would need an IP address. I did RTFA and saw why the think it is a good idea, but really? I for one hope this does not become the only option for buying a light-bulb in a few years as I'd rather not spend the extra money for something I would not want to use.

What do you do

[SnarfQuest]

But, what do you do when the power goes out? How will you be able to turn on/off your lights then?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Possibly vile.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not altogether unlikely that, given sufficient hertzage, and relying on eyes/nerve cells responsivity, moreover sending appropriate instructions to the bulb, one may remotely cause the exposed subject to `synthesize' such brain waves as he would think fit.

IT is the new Janitorial Staff

[Anonymous Coward]

We often joke about our place as Computer Janitors. Light fixtures with IP Addresses will bring that one step further.
With the administrative power and data control we have over infrastructure, we're often considered a part of management. What line must be crossed before an IT workers union becomes viable?

ISPs + Bandwidth Caps + Light bulbs?

[oDDmON oUT]

I'd hate to have a malfunctioning lightbulb eat up my monthly allowance for NetFlix.

until they take it from my cold...

[Anonymous Coward]

and dark fingers.

IPvB

[sgt scrub]

I thought that wasn't going to happen until IPvB or even IPvBs came out.

Wrong layer-1 protocol too

[Lorens]

Putting it in fixtures +1, something with an IP address just has to cost more than a LED

Wifi -1 ! Why should we worry about wireless security when we already have the wire? Ethernet over power!

Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

How many IP addresses does it take to switch a light bulb?

DISINFORMATION WARNING! WARNING!

[Cyberax]

Actually, the dirty little secret of IPv6 is that it provides only 61 bits of addressing.

The lower 3 bits are reserved (for now) and the upper 64 bits are 'reserved' for stateless autoconfiguration. You can use them, of course, but expect problems with a lot of entrprise-level gear that stores only /64 prefixes in routing tables. And to compound this, IETF policies initially were designed to give /48 to EACH client - so we have only 45 bits of useful routed address space.

So while the address space is certainly bigger than in IPv4, it's not THAT bigger in fact.

Re:DISINFORMATION WARNING! WARNING!

[jroysdon]

Yeah, but each IPv6 /48 (assuming /64 per VLAN) is approximately the same as an IPv4 /16 (assuming /24 per VLAN). Each has 8 bits of address space available to network with.

Further, you get a /48 for each site. For each site you have, you get a /48. That's a huge amount of address space. Further, ARIN (not sure on other RIRs) is very liberal with IPv6 address space. We asked for a /45 and they suggested we resubmit as a /44.

Re:DISINFORMATION WARNING! WARNING!

[loosescrews]

It doesn't really matter much. 2^61 = 2.305843009213693952 × 10^18 = 2305843009213693952 or 2 quintillion, 305 quadrillion, 843 trillion, 9 billion, 213 million, 693 thousand and 952.

I think that will still be enough for quite a while.

Re:DISINFORMATION WARNING! WARNING!

[Cyberax]

Not really. If everyone gets /48 with 3 reserved bits, then it's just 35184372088832 addresses. Sure, it's a lot. But IPv6 address space was initially designed to be sparse, but in reality it's not THAT sparse.

I recon that there's about 8 bits of 'sparseness' in it - we have about 2^31 addresses used right now with about the best possible density. Routed IPv6 space is 2^45 which gives us 14 bits of extra address space. Nice, but not THAT much.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Not going to replace our gut microbes with a p2p net of nanobots then, I guess

Anonymous to target lightbulbs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. That's right. You just wait until your lightbulbs are caught up in a DoS attack.

Botnets and Brownouts.

[Hylandr]

As if there weren't enough infected systems available to serve as a botnet member. I for one, do not relish the concept of having to reinstall and update whatever passes for an OS and interface on each and every lightbulb in my house.

And while the following idea is potentially hysterical, it could also be very dangerous to the elderly. Randomly flipping the neighbors lights on and off, at whatever time of the day or night. - And then not giving back control...

  - Dan.

Security flaw

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be unwise to open up lightbulbs for the internet, as you won't use them anyway when you are away. They could be connected to a home network though, but I personally prefer switches to network commands issued from a computer.

dwarfs the number of stars

[Anonymous Coward]

>"dwarfs the number of stars in the entire observable universe"

Dude, 2^128 dwarfs the number of fermions in the entire observable universe.

I was playing with this concept some months ago

[rodrigovr]

We (at Uni.) where playing with this concept some months ago.
I made those videos showing our "demo":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Mcul1-bt8w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MVgzJ2tGw8
(The audio is in portuguese.)
We did all the software/hardware project, from the web-server side to the microcontroler board.
Maybe NXP can hire us =D.

Like this?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L7DTMKekoU

Address tables

[currently_awake]

Ever tried calling someone without a phone book? Having all the numbers in the world is useless if you can't find the number you're looking for. IP6 will require some sort of phone book, and if you use up huge blocks with lights you're going to need a huge phone book- and that will take up massive storage space.

Re:Address tables

[Neil Boekend]

No. The sheer volume of IPv6 adresses means we can make simple tables. Start with x numbers for the continent, then y numbers for the country, then z numbers for the ISP and so forth.
If an American sends a request to Europe the American router only has to check whether the x numbers of the address are European to know it has to go to Europe. The European router can sort it out when it gets to Europe. This router only has to look at the y numbers to find out which country it should go to. The country router only has to look at the z numbers to find out which ISP it belongs to. You ISP doesn't even have to know every IP address you use, your in-house router should fix that. You have your own range of addresses and you can simply assign them as you wish.
This way the American router doesn't have to know who has the European addresses, for it can find out where to send it without even parsing the complete address.
Warning: heavily simplified to make it readable.
Disclaimer: IANANE

didn't see

[Anonymous Coward]

"A Beowulf cluster" of these....

You guys are slacking. Get with the program.

unnecessary

[kuzb]

Lights do not all need to be network aware. This is pure stupidity. Congratulations on more irrelevance slashdot. You get worse every day.

Control, eh?

[LongearedBat]

You could monitor, manage and control every light bulb from any Internet-enabled device – turning lights on and off individually, dimming or creating scenes from your smartphone, tablet, PC or TV

Ooh! Imagine how one could mess with people with something like that... !!!

The possibilities are endless

Wiser Home Automation/Control System without IP

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't they seen Wiser Home Control? Does the same thing in a daisy chain fashion without needing stupid IP addresses for each device and it is much cheaper since you won't need a fucking 500 port switch or high bandwidth wifi AP! http://www.wiserhomeautomation.com/

clownshoes? meet the new low

[Anonymous Coward]

clownunderpants

back in 1995

[georgesdev]

Netscape presented the idea of an IP address for every bulb in a round table presentation I attended in 1995.
As for me, I understand the idea of a MAC address for every light socket, but an IP address for a light bulb ...
Probably that's the benefit of IP V6
Anyway, let's see first the benefits of networking light bulbs, and also the costs.
Right now I'm happy with my dumb light bulbs. Even the incandescent ones, so networked bulbs will have to offer me something more ...

That's not "pervasive, ubiquitous surveillance"

[sean.peters]

Well, I suppose to the extent that your run of the mill burglar is going to have the tech smarts to crack your light bulb network, this is an issue (which is to say, not that big an issue). But that's not how I interpreted the first post in this series, which seemed to indicate that your favorite flavor of The Man was going to use networked lightbulbs to keep you under surveillance. And I still don't understand that one. I can't imagine why, say, the NSA would care about when I turn on my laundry room light - what would that tell them? And for my part, I wouldn't really care if they did know. As to the "grow op" issue - they can already tell that just from my whole house lighting bill. And even if they couldn't, I'm guessing that anyone intent on hiding a grow up could probably come up with internet-free light bulbs.

Re:That's not "pervasive, ubiquitous surveillance"

[sumdumass]

I dunno, I'm not an uber hacker or anything of the sorts, and I just used tools freely available on the internet to crack someone's wifi while talking to them in a meeting describing how Wifi is very difficult if not impossible to completely secure. Of course their IT guy was doubtful and denying how easy it was to crack into it until I printing it is easier then you think on the wireless hp right behind him.

I can tell also that I have seen crystal methane that was produced by a high-school drop out who knew enough about chemistry and the interweb to make it happen. I have seen all sorts of ingenuous ways idiots do what they want to do.

As for "the man" knowing, I'm not sure what they will gain from it outside of the cops who seem to be crooked in a lot of places attempting to use it against you somehow. "You weren't home at 8pm, you had no lights on in the house. Were where you really at?". But you have a point, it will only impact a small amount of people and then only really matter with those falsely accused. But they will all be guilty because they do not arrest innocent people.

RFC1606 on IPv9

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of the April 1 RFC on IPv9:

A Historical Perspective On The Usage Of IP Version 9
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1606.txt

Who controls which parts of your IPv6 address

[billstewart]

An IPv6 address has two-and-a-half parts - the network bits your ISP knows about (typically 56 or 48), maybe some subnet bits you control (typically 8-16), and the host bits on each subnet (64.) Sometimes the host bits are assigned by hand (your router might be :what:ever::1), or by DHCP, but they're usually derived automatically from the hardware address of your Ethernet card (48 bits of MAC plus padding, or 64 bits of EUI-64 which would be more likely for lightbulbs.) MAC and EUI-64 addresses have a manufacturer part and an individual-device part.

So if your lightbulb uses automatically assigned addresses, it's going to look something like :56-bits-ISP : 8-subnet : 32-mfr : 32-bulb:, and if you're running a lightbulb database, you can track the 64 bits that belong to the bulb just fine, regardless of how much renumbering you do with the network parts.

The original goals of IPv6 addressing were that it should all be hierarchical with Provider-Assigned addressing, because it keeps the Global Routing Table smaller and cleaner, instead of everybody in the world having to keep track of hundreds of thousands or millions of BGP address blocks, which has been a real problem as the internet grew faster than router translation tables did. In reality, that doesn't work - too many businesses need to be multihomed for reliability reasons, so they still need their address block to show up in the global routing tables, and they usually use Provider-Independent addressing to do it.