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Interview: Contiki OS Creator On Building the Internet of Things
angry tapir writes "Last year Adam Dunkels, the creator of the open source Contiki operating system, launched a startup to build tools for the 'Internet of Things'. This week his company, Thingsquare, is releasing an evaluation kit that lets people test drive their IoT system. I caught up with him to talk about Thingsquare's plans and the hype around the IoT."
It's so hipster-ish or New Age-y. You know, and Internet... of Things! /pssst... this internet is already made up of things. Go find some coffee that cost less than $5 and come back to me.
I wonder if it's worth clicking the link, since the summary was content free, and doesn't really tell you a think about what they are talking about, or why it would be interesting to anyone.
Nah. Probably another slashvertisement.
What are his thoughts on the absolute saturation of the 2.4GHz spectrum and the increasing load on the 5GHz spectrum.
The internet of things sounds nice, but the amount of devices pointlessly WiFi enabled and broadcasting in my home is having a very negative effect on the usability of the spectrum for anything of value. Does he have any plan to mitigate this growing issue? Does he care at all about it or is he solely focused on funding and an early exit with a fleeting; 'I'm rich, bitch'?
The impression I get from reading the featured article is that "Internet of things" refers to giving each electrical appliance a microcontroller to connect to the Internet so that the appliance's owner can manage it remotely. This has applications in street lighting and traffic signal automation, industrial automation, and smart distribution and metering of electric power. So what's a better buzzword for that?
It'll probably remain a dream, since it will be impossible to keep all these little internet-connected devices secure. Or do they have a good plan for keeping these devices updated when vulnerabilities are inevitably discovered?
'nuff said.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Joe The Garage Door Opener Repair Guy finishes up his work and wants to connect my new garage door opener to the Internet, so that I can open the garage door from work or with my state-issued iDevice or some other bullshit I don't need to live my life, because the little remote clipped to the visor in my vehicle is no longer good enough for the job for some reason because everyone is a technology fetishist these days, and don't spend one second considering whether something that can be done is something that actually should be done.
Joe connects it to one of the switch ports in the NID on the side my house that AT&T "helpfully" started installing years ago, and against my wishes (but I don't own the NID, so what can I do?), thanks to the growing Internet of Things. The same switchports connect to all the things I actually WANT connected to the Internet, like my laptop. (Who am I kidding? I'll have to have a tablet with a shitty on-screen keyboard then because the technology fetishists will have forgotten why a standard keyboard is the fastest input device for text.)
So of course a security vulnerability is found in the garage door opener because it's just another device created by an Average Person in the Average World doing things in an Average Way, and so now I have to defend my home network from the goddamn garage door opener. I call up the garage door opener company and scream at the bored tech support rep about how I was finding vulnerabilities in TCP stacks before they even knew what the Internet WAS, and since I'm 65 and an ancient, useless relic, no one cares, and I descend further into madness.
I do not have a positive view of the future I helped create.
Nice marketing plan. Thingsquare will provide software for all the little devices as an open-source reference design (hyped as "Open Source" everywhere on their web site), which will encourage companies to use it (and then likely close it, being BSD) for devices they manufacture. This will provide Thingsquare with a large collection of compatible devices with little effort on their part. On the other hand, it is all useless without a server to manage everything, which of course is provided by Thingsquare and closed source.
All this is fine and well, but anyone expecting a truly open source network of devices should keep this in mind. For practical purposes, most everything may likely end up closed source.
That the software that manage it will be open source could mitigate some of the problems (lower odds of software backdoors pass unnoticed for much time), but as you can embed backdoors directy in hardware, that won't be a protection in all cases.
[...] I don't see a point to remotely control a washer or toaster over the internet.
There's a sort of blindness that people have when they see what exists and can't imagine it being different. The creator of Babylon 5 once described seeing an old SF movie (Flash Gordon maybe?) where the crew had to abandon a space ship. They grabbed their laser blasters (handheld), anti-gravity belts (little box ona belt), and the portable radio, a giant box that needed two people to carry it. Because nobody knew what laser guns or anti-gravity belts look like, they could imagine science making them arbitrarily small, but everyone knew what a radio looked like (tubes and all) and couldn't conceive of the science that could shrink it into, say, a $5 item that you can lose in a purse.
Phones are a good example of how they can change so much, it won't be long before "phones" of the past won't even qualify as what anyone understands a phone is (it's already happened once - even if you think of a phone as something with buttons or a dial you use to connect a voice circuit to someone, older "phones" that did nothing but ring an operator who you talked to used to be the standard for decards, but wouldn't qualify if you went to buy one).
As for washers, toasters, fridges, etc., don't think of them as they are now. Think of a future where displays cost about what a laminated decal does. You could look up washing instructions on the washer lid. For that matter, the washer could look up washing instructions for clothes based on microscopic RFID tags (like how those "Tassimo" coffee makers read bar codes from coffee packets now). The fridge could display a recipe - yours or one you looked up - in an app with checkboxes you tap when you've taken an ingredient out, used it, or need it (links to a shopping list on your phone). The toaster? Same recipe - if displays are nearly free and you have a dozen, why not use them all? Heck, put displays on your coffee cups, for no other reason than you can tap it and tell your coffee maker to start a new cup before you walk over to it - and display someone's picture on the mug meanwhile.
Every day I see things that are awful that people accept as normal. Mostly device controls and interfaces, but other things. Like a digital monitor. It has it's own display memory, so why does the computer send the same image to it 30 times a second? Worse, the same image! Evenin a laptop! Something's fundimentally wrong about that very concept.
There's no end to things that need improvement. And as technology gets cheaper, I sure hope that'll finally happen.
..You just reminded me of it.
In your garage, or wherever you park your car, you could have mirrors opposite the "four corners" of your car so that you could easily check your lights directly from the driving seat.
They wouldn't have to be big, expensive mirrors. And if you can't see, it means it's dark and none of your lights are working at all.
Stick Men