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Why the Internet Needs Cognitive Protocols
An anonymous reader writes "We keep hearing that the 'Internet of Things' is coming – that day when we'll all have not just smart phones but also smart refrigerators, smart alarm clocks, and smart roads and bridges. A new article in IEEE Spectrum magazine makes the argument that this won't happen unless engineers do some serious rethinking of how the Internet's basic routing architecture works. The author, Anthony Liotta, offers some interesting solutions based on two networks in the human body: the autonomic nervous system and the cognitive brain."
Serious rethinking is what people who think they want smart toasters need to do.
I really don't feel the need to see every device under the sun attached to the internet. And I certainly don't want my car being tracked by smart roads and bridges. It's bad enough that they're already using license plate cameras to track us all.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I'm sorry, nobody can tell me why I need these things. I know what is in my 'frig, I put it there. I don't need my stove connected to the net, nor my washing machine, etc.
Is this why he's a professor teaching networking and not a network engineer?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The last thing I want to worry about is security vulnerabilities overflowing my toilet. I really don't want my refrigerator, toaster, coffee maker, and microwave on line.
when the machines rise against us our fridges and bridges will destroy us all
It is a very real concern.
I do not want random people attacking Things.
We already have enough problems with "smart homes" where random people are figuring out how to look at cameras (to identify the home for robbery) and unlock doors remotely.
As more devices are added, how many small exploits are people going to find? Will we hear about the occasional house burning down because some skript kiddie ran the equivalent of: for(every toaster, stove, furnace, grill, etc in the world) { start cooking; }
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I can just picture it now.
"I'm sorry, Spluggies Brand Bread did not renew their agreement with your Anus 11 Brand Ultratoaster. This toaster does not authorize the toasting of Spluggies Bread."
"Your milk carton has been determined to come from Canada. The Sphincter X73 Megafridge will not permit you to insert it, as there is no cross-licensing agreement with Canada."
I can just see sites dedicated to rooting your shower so you can use European shampoo and conditioner.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"You have not licensed your replicator to produce chicken soup. Please select either 1. Mealworm-flavored protein muffin or 2. Twinkies"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I want my fridge to know what I have so that I literally never have to think about buying food again. It tracks what I use an orders more. Someone drops it off at my door and I put it back in the fridge. I *can* do all of that manually, but there's no benefit to my participation so I'd rather have the free time and brain power to spend on something else. And the fridge can actually do it better than me, because it can look at use rates and determine if an order for more milk is required today or if it could wait until Thursday when I'll also be out of bread.
And that's just one example with one appliance; I could sit here all day and name more. It's fine if you don't want to do those things, but it's ridiculous to pretend that no benefits exists, and that no one else is interested. Your lack of imagination and/or interest does not define society.
They forgot to use "Software Defined Networks" in TFA. That'll hurt their SEO scores.
Offload as much bulk traffic as possible to content-addressible networking. Use packet switching for specific-destination time-sensitive communications, and hash-addressed caches for the 'want this, don't care where from' things like static content. With an IP fallback, in case none of the nodes in range have the requested data.
There. That's just greatly reduced the traffic the internet needs to route, added considerable redundency and greatly enhanced the experience for mobile use by allowing for much more effective caching of static content. Two parallel networks, each doing what they are best at. Packet-switching for low-latency 1-to-1 communications, and CAN for dissemination, static content and publication.
Now I just need to find someone with a few hundred million to invest in new infrastructure to support this thing.
Put another way, "It's 2013, damnit, how can it be I'm sitting here without toilet paper!"
Yeah, it's a dumb article. Who's to say today's routing protocols aren't "autonomic"? I say they are. Anyways, the Internet is far too mature for fuzzy analogies to have anything useful to say about it. If you are serious, allow us to benchmark your implementation and then we will see whether it is a good idea.
Waste of electricity? I'd argue the opposite. Modern home automation technologies are largely very power efficient and can be used to set up power-saving routines that are only possible by having a greater awareness of the user's proximity and other environmental factors.
The issue right now is that there are several competing "standards" out there, such as X10, Insteon, and Z-wave, the latter two of which are wireless protocols that are more power efficient than wifi, while making some concessions that largely don't matter for what they're being used to do, while the first one sends small signals over your existing electrical lines. Besides those, Bluetooth Low Energy is increasingly being used to recognize the proximity of the user to other devices (e.g. unlock the door as I approach), and cellular signals coupled with wifi allow the phone to detect when it has crossed virtual geofences that can act as triggers to disable devices you accidentally left turned on at home (e.g. turn off my entertainment center that I accidentally left on when I had to rush out the door).
And I'm just talking about stuff that's doable right now with relatively cheap components. IfThisThenThat (ifttt.com) acts as some awesome glue to make various components such as your phone, your Belkin WeeMo devices, your Phillips Hue lights, or other such accessories play nice with each other. But others don't even need that glue, such as the Canary security device, which is designed to disrupt the home security market (side note: it's in the middle of it's Indiegogo funding, so you can get in for a cheaper price than retail still, despite the fact that it's almost been funded 10x over at this point).
As for the contents of your fridge, I agree that it doesn't matter if you know what they are, but imagine if your fridge could use less electricity by directing cooler air to specific compartments where it knew you had food that needed those temperatures? Many condiments don't actually need to be refrigerated, so it might direct less cool air at them, while directing more of it at the vegetables that you want to keep crisp. I'm a bachelor who hates going grocery shopping and eats out a lot, so I have a near-empty fridge and a freezer that's been empty for a few weeks now, yet it never even occurred to me until I was writing this post that I could have changed the settings of my fridge to save a decent amount of energy.
And turning off lights at the press of a button on your phone is overrated, as you said, but what about doing it automatically? We're not too far away from stuff like Star Trek's ubiquitous, "Computer, lights!" becoming a reality here, not to mention the automated proximity based signals that I mentioned earlier. You can already hack stuff like that together for yourself on the cheap, and there are more and more devices being aimed at end users that are doing things along these lines.
And the Nest? Come on, don't tell me you think that it wastes electricity compared to the majority of alternatives available out there. It knows when you're home or gone, can be set remotely from afar, and has loads of other smart features built into it.
We're in the future now, and as we have more devices collecting more data in the home, we can be putting it to work in being less wasteful with what we have while also providing us with a more home that is as responsive as we expect our software to be. It's a win-win, and it doesn't involve being able to see a list of everything in my fridge at any moment. :P
One of the major problems with "smart homes" is that they aren't a commodity and there isn't a standard method of communication or authentication and they aren't subject to wide scrutiny (also that most current versions are not in fact very "smart"). Many of those problems would be worked out if such systems were more common.
Take, for example, early automobiles. They all had different controls in different places. They required different pre-start, start, driving and shutdown procedures. They ran on different energy sources with different requirements and limitations. But as cars became more popular they became standardized, safer, more secure, cheaper, etc. Today cars all have the same major controls, the same security interfaces, etc. There's no reason to think the same process wouldn't apply to "smart" appliance design. (It has already been applied to regular appliance design -- ovens used to vary quite a bit in the arrangement of their doors, heating elements, controls, etc. and just like cars now they're all nearly identical).
Some say by 2020 or so, food, energy and water are not a problem anymore. It will be dirt cheap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEWLjVmweoE
And others said that by 2000, we would have flying cars.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Put another way, "It's 2013, damnit, how can it be I'm sitting here without toilet paper!"
You are supposed to use the three sea shells.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Why would I let my appliance choose my grocery provider?
The problem with my cable and wireless providers is mostly related to their monopoly, and to a lesser degree to the capital costs of running such a business. Neither of those applies to grocery providers; there are currently 3 separate provides in my area that offer online ordering and delivery.
But more broadly, if you want to sit here and come up with ways this could be terrible, I'm not going to argue with you. It certainly could be terrible. Look at all the terrible things cars have done for us -- accidents, traffic, pollution, etc. On the whole though, I'm glad cars exist, and I suspect I'd be glad that smart appliances existed as well.
Exactly what part of having groceries automatically stocked would prevent any of the things you listed. Eating out? Trying new food? Enjoying eating? How does having rice delivered to you automatically prevent you from doing those things?
Does having water delivered to you in pipes prevent you from trying new beverages or enjoying an afternoon on the lake?
Why would I let my appliance choose my grocery provider?
Because, based on current tech trends, it will be totally locked down and unable to order from anyone else? Or, at least, it will take a 30% cut of everything you buy.
I find it telling that Liotta (the author from TFA) is not mentioned in any IEEE RFCs, except in RFC 5345 to say that he makes claims with no real-world measurements. But that's just appealing to authority.
The most troubling part of his proposal, I think, is the elimination of Postel's Law. The Telco-oriented people have been telling the Internet community people all along that what we need is an intelligent network that provides QoS guarantees. The Internet community rejected that, with the result being an Internet that grows in speed and adapts to countless unforeseen applications. Liotta uses the human autonomic nervous system as metaphor, but the fatal flaw is that the human autonomic system has only one brain. The Internet doesn't work with a single controlling entity.
Likewise, his illustration of the Youtube clip is not entirely accurate. Companies like Google and Netflix are making colocation deals with a bunch of the Internet Service Providers, so that most videos don't have to travel through the backbone, Time Warner Cable aside.
There are problems with the current Internet and projects to redo the basis of networking, but Liotta's proposals remind me of those fantasy "cities of the future" fiction that I used to read when I was a kid.
Have a nice time.
I'm surprised that this is what you think having a net connected fridge will do for you. If you actually go look into all the people proposing smart grids and smart appliances, these connected devices are connected so that the central planners can turn your shit off during "peak" usage periods.
Or in a sealed baggie in the tank. You wouldn't want a random house guest to leave you without TP.
Rhapsody in Numbers
My 'dumb' router is never going to decide my fridge needs to route through china to send my grocery list to my phone.
Actually, it might. The quick and easy smart device schemes I have seen require that all communication between devices route through an external server. If hosting starts migrating to China and local infrastructure to to short circuit these paths doesn't become pervasive in the mean time, you might very well find that your fridge talks to your phone via China.
What is this? The 1980s again. Didn't the failure of 'semantic' OSes and file-systems teach anything? Semantics should be imposed top down by 'applications', NEVER bottom-up.
The worst aspect of modern Computer Science is how applications are discouraged to the point of being BANNED from informing the underlying OS and resource managers exactly what use of resources would be optimal to the application. Instead, the underlying layers- following the same cretinous logic as this article- have to pretend they are 'psychic' and second guess the needs of any running application.
Trust the system memory-manager, you are told. Trust the OS scheduler. And yet, only the application can truly know how and why it needs to use the memory and CPU processing resources.
There is NO SUCH THING as AI. There is Human intelligence, and the rule sets Humans program into computer applications. So-called AI is nothing more than specific uses of Human derived rule-sets. An NO, having a Human rule-set cause an algorithm to search for specific rule patterns in a database does NOT constitute true AI either.
This does not mean there cannot be algorithmic improvements in the routing of Internet traffic- of course all systems tend to have room for improvement. But dribbled 'ideas' along the lines of "copy the brain- it 'thinks' so that's the ultimate solution" were cretinous in the 1950s, and are just as cretinous today.
PS the PS4 console from Sony, released later this year, allows as much 'to the metal' coding as possible, where the applications (ie., games) DO get to tell the underlying systems exactly how to behave. Top down semantics will allow this hardware to still be competitive in 5+ years time. The 'second guess the user' bottom up pseudo 'AI' semantics that will be controlling memory and thread scheduling on our ordinary computer devices in the same time period will need many times the computer power to even draw equal in performance.
Likewise, at the lowest level, a network should be clean, simple, elegant and neutral. Moronic hacky low level gimmicks designed to target whatever data flow is currently 'trendy' would ruin the network, but for obvious reasons there will always be morons who lack any understanding of the layer model, and propose such changes. Packets should NEVER care what kind of data they are carrying. The rules that control 'frequency' and 'priority' should come from semantically aware higher levels. Higher levels that never need to change the underlying physical design of the network in order to change how the network functions.
The physical aspect of a net should be entirely concerned with more packets at more speed with more reliability. Mechanical syntactical concepts only. And this, of course, is the current state of the Internet There is no value, despite the idiot claims of the author, in choosing to move certain packets 'slowly' (such packets should be issued slowly at higher layers, obviously). And as for bandwidth stealing packets like video, well only the improvement of total network bandwidth can help here, obviously.