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Report: Apple To Unveil "Smart Home" System
An anonymous reader writes "According to a report Apple will be unveiling a new smart home system at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference. The system will allow users to control security systems, appliances and lighting with their iPhones. A "select number" of device makers will be certified to offer products that work with Apple's upcoming system, according to the report, which didn't name any of the manufacturers."
Apple's track record? Apple is actually pretty agnostic about open standards, they don't seem to have a pathological case of NIH syndrome or anything; but with two important caveats:
1. If the existing standard doesn't suit them for whatever reason, their implementation will be a variant of that standard and their only concern will be interoperability will first party and (to a slightly lesser extent) officially-blessed third party stuff. They won't reinvent the wheel just for kicks; but if they decide that their needs are somewhat different, their implementation will be as well, and it's just too bad if that's an issue. (It's not unlike the degree to which Microsoft 'based' Active Directory and Domains on, LDAP and Kerberos.)
2. Crypto: Unlike the old days, when you could only be proprietary by keeping your obfuscated binary protocol or your weirdo connector one step ahead of the reverse engineers, now you can have it all in the open and still nearly useless unless it's signed and blessed. Apple's "Facetime", for instance, is based on a lovely, standards-tastic, collection of standards; but important parts of setting up a connection involve mutual certificate verification between an Apple server and an Apple device, so that's effectively irrelevant to 3rd parties.