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The Missing Piece of the Smart Home Revolution: The Operating System

Posted by samzenpus on from the one-code-to-rule-them-all dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this story about who will lead the IoT revolution, and whether it will follow in mobile's footsteps. "As these technologies sense and and react to changes in your environment, there are obvious parallels to computer operating systems, which receive input and return output. What does the 'operating system' for the smart home of the future look like? Alex Hawkinson is trying to help answer that very question. The founder and CEO of IoT company SmartThings is not only a leader in the market, he’s a consumer. He suggests there won’t be a singular, cohesive operating system for your home, that this stuff isn’t one-size-fits-all. 'I think it’s up to everyone to determine their own bits,' Hawkinson said. 'Some people love cameras in house, my wife wants none. It’s up to your preferences.'”

5 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Not so sure about this... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Networks run by professionals can't keep the hackers out, and I want my home to have an operating system? I'm not intereested in my appliences sending me text messages, and my furnace is already on a fairly sophisticated timer. For me, at least, the answer is "no" - for the time being. I really don't see any show-stopping need beyond "wow, my house is wired!"

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Not so sure about this... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think that you underestimate the role of the private sector in the process.

      The crowning genius of free-market surveillance states is how much of the (otherwise expensive, arduous, and likely to be resented) work of surveillance can be left to private sector self interest to implement and market, with the state needing only to subpoena up the results and do relatively small amounts of supplementary spying(even this often accomplished in no small part just by buying the access).

      Data provided by 'smart homes' will end up with the feds, in due time; but it'll be picked clean by every scumbag marketing weasel in the business first. Best of both worlds!

    2. Re:Not so sure about this... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Can you explain exactly what is wrong with smart meters?

      I work in the water industry where such meters are used. Water companies like them because they reduce costs - no need to send people out to read a little display any more. The regulator has forced the water companies to pass on the savings to the consumer.

      There is a privacy aspect, but anyone who understands how the water network works will realise that the concerns are overblown. The smart meters report back very little information, because if they all used up a lot of bandwidth there wouldn't be enough to go round (M-BUS/433/868/915MHz) or would cost too much (GSM/3G). Typically they just report back the current meter reading, or at most a few data points per day. The companies don't need more because they already have monitoring equipment installed on every pipe and facility in their network. If one street starts using more water than expected they will know about it within hours and send someone to find out if there is a leak. Typically 30-40% of the clean water in the network is lost to leaks, so fixing them is a pretty big deal.

      Even if they could tell when you are flushing your drugs down the loo, the metering system isn't real-time and there would be no way to know you were not just taking a dump. Their only interest is billing you.

      Electricity is similar. They could try to monitor you with the smart meter, but it would be a lot easier to just install something at the sub-station or point a thermal camera at your house.

      Can you point to any practical uses for or attacks on smart meters?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. I'm at a loss. And I RTFA by Harlequin80 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a terrible article. Seriously it is a press release for this company and it says NOTHING. Not only does is say nothing it is full of blatant crap.

    Since when does your light bulb and your sensors in ANY WAY contribute to what you OS is?!??!?!?

    I'm really at a loss of where to go for what Slashdot used to be. Soilent news isn't there yet. I must be dumb because I can't figure reddit out.

    I still come here and every now and again there is something good. But it's getting less and less.

  3. UBOS by jernst · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We're building a new Linux distro called UBOS for this. It's pronounced You-Boss :-) because there are no backdoors, tie-in's to somebody else's cloud strategy etc. For users, it focuses on making it a lot simpler and less labor-intensive to run web apps at home, and for application developers, it becomes a lot easier to deliver web apps to their users who may not have time (or knowledge) how to provision a database or configure a web server or re-installed apps every time they get updated -- because if we can do that, we don't need somebody else's cloud, and we can be independent netizens doing "indiependent IoT" in our homes http://ubos.net/