Slashdot Mirror
Netherlands Gets First Nationwide 'Internet of Things' (phys.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The Netherlands has become the first country in the world to implement a nationwide long-range (LoRa) network for the Internet of Things, says Dutch telecoms group KPN on Thursday. "As from today the KPN LoRa network is available throughout The Netherlands," KPN said in a statement. Phys.Org reports: "The rollout of a low data rate (LoRa) mobile communications network is critical to connect objects as many may not be able to link up with home or work Wi-Fi networks to gain Internet access. The LoRa network is complementary to KPN's networks for the 2G, 3G and 4G phones. KPN has already reached deals to connect some 1.5 million objects, a number which should steadily grow now that the LoRa network is available across the country. Tests are being carried out at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam -- one of Europe's busiest air hubs -- for baggage handling. Meanwhile in the Utrecht rail station an experiment is under way to allow LoRa to monitor rail switches."
...is the computer equivalent of the Darwin Awards.
I read that LoRa is phonetic pun on the local language for a word that means "all seeing eye" or "spy". And KPN sounds like the word for "creepy".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So, they got nation-wide internet access? Or what? It's just the fucking internet. I hate this goddamn fucking IoT buzzword so much. I bet this nationwide network of nonsense is also in the cloud somehow.
A country-wide interconnected Internet of things is exactly what hostile cyber warriors dream of.
In before the dDOS attacks start?
See you guys when they disconnect that shit.
I wanted to know about the technology, but besides a really stupid cookie wall --where neither the "accept" nor the "change settings in the "advanced" part work-- and woolly word salad press releases, their website didn't tell me what they were using. Just that you could give them money to solve this problem for you.
Which is par for the course for a telco --which KPN still very much is-- but it put a bit of a damper on my surprise that they'd went and done built this.
So, on another note, this infrastructure is both a boon and a disservice. The latter because it will inevitably give rise to entirely gratuitously em"smart"ened things full of security holes and privacy problems foisted upon unsuspecting customers of some company, like already happening with electricity. Which means we'll have lots of "fun" with out new interesting "internet of things" times. Yay.
And all 60 of them are solvable with a firewall. The only content that actually would get out from your network would be the content that *you* select.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Maybe not for those of the intelligence gathering kind.
An encrypted network with shittowns of devices sending around shitloads of data could be hard to surveil.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
I really hope you don't believe what you just wrote.
Let's say I have an IoT-enabled fridge. And let's say that I find its functionality useful. Say it lets me check the contents of the fridge using my smart phone when I'm on the go, so I can see if I need to buy milk and eggs on the way home. But let's also say that in order for this functionality to work I need to allow it to make HTTPS connections to the cloud.
Do you see where the problem arises? Because it uses HTTPS, and the functionality I want to use only works if it can make those connections, I have to allow this encrypted data to pass through my firewall. I can't even filter it, because I can't install my own root cert on the device.
Let us say that the fridge also includes a camera, and this camera takes pictures of my penis and my scrotum while I'm in the kitchen. Even if it doesn't send the picture, let us suppose it is able to using triangulation and trigonometry to estimate, with a high degree of precision, the exact length, width and girth of my penis and my scrotum. Because of how it uses HTTPS, I would be unable to block or filter the data it sends back!
A firewall is NOT always the solution!
This only works as long as not everybody is doing it. The moment that happens, the manufacturers will make the device broken unless you connect it to the internet all the time. The device will open one connection, only one: to the manufacturer. It'll be TLS encrypted and will use public key pinning. All the traffic the device will cause will go through that connection.
No firewall will help against that.
Oh wait you just did, except for: "At the port of Rotterdam depth sounders have been fitted with devices to connect them to the Internet of Things network."
and putting the rail switches on the cheapest lowest priority network sounds like a good idea, no? The network for things that can't connect to your wi-fi certainly sounds safe to me.
It's too much work to open the fridge door and look inside.
Instead, I will pay extra to have a "connected" fridge, then set up a firewall to only allow it to communicate with my iphone, reset the router, reboot the fridge, then finally when it's all set up I will say "hey siri, do we need eggs?" and she will say "no, you've got a carton in the fridge already".
Then I will get home only to realize that the carton is inside the fridge, but it only contains one egg.
CURSE YOU SIRI, and CURSE my lonely existence!
Great if you want to dump a bit of sensor data, forget about running a telnet session over LoRa.
The Internet of Things is creepy to the max and it sounds like it could be very invasive.
Yes thanks for sharing your personal thoughts with anonymous strangers on the internet.
Except they won't. This is a technology not unlike Television and the Internet. The IoT revolution in the personal space is about gathering your personal data, but guess what, no one is going to roll out a nation wide network so that someone can read your thermostat.
This is a good example of practical IoT, not this bastardised thing about lightswitches and toasters which the unwashed are convinced is all there is about it. We're talking massive amounts of useful sensor data that can now be connected just as before ... except without SIM cards, without taking up resources on local mobile phone systems and without the incredible battery drain and big solar panels that current devices have.
Before everyone freaks out about what an invasion of privacy this is, remember that IoT is just a rebranded way of saying "sensor network" and all those fancy new technologies behind them are nothing more than reading those sensors in a way that consumes much less power than before.
proof that low /. IDs have no correlation with competence or technical knowledge
this is more about putting wireless sensors everywhere to report back rather than actually remotely controlling devices. if they began connecting controls for things like railroad switches, welp... predictable disasters would happen.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
you mean harder than the internet which is essentially the same but with even more traffic to hide the IoT chit chat?
Did anyone else misread this this way when they first saw the article?
none of them are solvable since you do not control your devices access to LoRa but the devices are built to look and connect to LoRa without user intervention, by design they are not part of your local network or firewall. you have no control.
Did anyone else misread this this way when they first saw the article?
Short answer: No
Long answer: It's only a 2 hour drive.
Sounds Sweet.
I didn't say it wasn't connected to the internet.... I said it could be behind a firewall that controls what goes in and out.
Alternatively, you could put it on a local ip-range only subnet of your network, and have a transparent network-layer proxy which handles outgoing requests, and correctly routes any responses to them, but any actual incoming requests are discarded, behaving similarly to NAT.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The solution I was addressing assumes that such devices are dependant upon you to provide them with the necessary connectivity. If they are not, then obviously all bets are off. That's not a problem with the concept of having every kind of device being connected to the internet, in general... that's only a problem with the manner in which it might get implemented. Considering it would probably be more expensive to do it that way, I'd be surprised if it ever becomes particularly common or the norm.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because of how it uses HTTPS, I would be unable to block or filter the data it sends back! ... A firewall is NOT always the solution!
I think the point was that the firewall will quite efficiently block HTTPS traffic of your dick pics, which does seem to be the solution to your dick pics being sent places you don't want them to be sent. And even just the status of what's in your fridge, when you don't want it to be sent to the cloud for scanning by Google etc., can be blocked by the same firewall.
So yes, the firewall solves your concern about what information is being sent out about you quite well. I don't know what magic you think HTTPS uses that would avoid a firewall block.
You do realize that "cloud" isn't the end-all and be-all of IoT operations, I hope. You can have devices that you can query from your cell phone without having to send the data off to "the cloud" for management. A simple web interface works wonders.
A better solution would be to create an IoT manager device that sits on your network and communicates with all the IoT devices you want to have communication with, and then provides one outside portal for your cell or other access. Perhaps using a VPN for security. You configure the manager to allow what you want, to disallow what you don't, and to manage the communications twixt thee and thine. But that, of course, isn't plug and play, so Joe Sixpack couldn't use it, and the IoT would be crippled if it was designed so that it had to.
So that's why IoT is designed with cell modems and LoPa so that all the data can go wherever the manufacturer of devices wants it to go and you cannot stop it in any trivial manner. (And if you could just disable the LoPa chip there is probably a watchdog that will shut down the device completely, assuming a serious system failure.)
If the fridge transmitted untrustworthy data, you would use a firewall to block all of it... and probably not allow it to have a public-facing IP address at all. To allow remote access to information it might provide, you would use another local machine on your network that does have a public facing IP (or can otherwise be accessed remotely). Instead of querying your fridge directly, you would query that other machine instead, which could pass on a request to your fridge about its contents on the same network, but would only transmit the information about the fridge contents that you actually asked for. Any pictures of your crotch that your fridge wanted to transmit would stay inside of your network, and would never go anywhere else.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, this Neanderthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
You posted this before. You're repeating yourself and not listening to any rebuttals.
This list above could be used for "Computers", or "Internet".
Internet of things just means things that are on the internet, and it runs the range from this sort of LoRa to bluetooth headsets to traffic lights to whatever.
Um, you understand the concept of "wireless", right? This is not using your line/cable router. Or your ISP.
Already common, to the point of easy devkits: https://att.m2m.com/m2xkit/
As I said elsewhere, I was expecting that generall speaking you would have to provide the communication facility yourself. That it might use its own communication facilities instead of what you provide, and that being a potential privacy problem is not an inherent problem with connecting everything to the internet, but how such connectivity is being chosen to be implemented.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And what when the device simply refuses to function if there is no internet access? This is already the case for some "smart" meters that report the usage data in realtime.
Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote... I said that I never said it wasn't connected to the internet. If you are the one who provides the device's internet connectivity, then you can control and limit what the device sends or receives, perhaps using another device on your network as a relay point between the device and the internet at large, perhaps breaking end-to-end connectivity, but this can easily be done relatively transparently, as NAT currently does (although one does not necessarily need to use NAT specifically to achieve this), and without any participation on behalf of the end-point communicating machines.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
With due respect, I'm not sure networking works how you think it works.
If the devices (a) refuses to operate without a connection, and (b) uses strong encryption on the single datastream it uses, then you have exactly two choices at your firewall. You can allow it connectivity, in which case it can do what it damn well pleases, because your firewall cannot make heads nor tails of the encrypted datastream, or you can deny it connectivity, in which case it can refuse to operate. What you cannot do is pick and chose what it sends, due to the strong encryption, unless you also control the SW stack on the device itself, which can be made somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible.
You can't win this except by not buying the device to begin with. It won't be that bad in the beginning, but there is no theoretical reason why it cannot become that bad.
then you can control and limit what the device sends or receives
Not any more than my ISP can control what I sent over a SSH tunnel you can't. The choices is "allow the stream" or "don't". But "peek inside the stream" is not one of the options you have.
It comes from the French language, not Dutch. The Dutch have "klompen", not "sabot".
It doesn't matter if it uses a strong encryption if you know the protocol. Https, for example... instead of making https requests to outside, it can make https requests to a local machine, which because it was the destination machine as far as your device is concerned, would have access to the content of the message, and can, based on what that machine can know about the content, can direct the query as necessary to outside, if it is deemed appropriate. The local machine would then forward replies back to the originating device. It breaks end-to-end connectivity, but you can still control what content goes in or out if you really want to.
Of course, if it uses a proprietary encrypted protocol, then it gets a little stranger, but if it's going that far then it probably isn't depending on you to provide network connectivity in the first place either.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It totally does matter.
1) You give the fridge unfettered access to anything it wants.
or
2) You come home from work and your ice cream has melted and the milk's gone manky.
Those are the options when you have refrigeration as a service.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, this Whoosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoosh
Don't believe all this marketing crap. This is definitely not the first nationwide long range network IOT network. The French did beat the Dutch on this with their SigFox network (in early 2015. source). Sigfox is even rolled out nation wide in the Netherlands already. As is in Spain, Portugal and Ireland. And many countries will follow, like the USA, Brazil and Germany. Good thing is that Sigfox does not know about roaming, Sigfox will work no matter where you are as long you have coverage and your device is operating in the same frequency band. As Europe it operates in the 868 MHz and USA in the 902 MHz ISM band.
It doesn't matter if it uses a strong encryption if you know the protocol.
At this point you need to stop talking about things you don't understand.
I can tunnel a well known protocol over SSH. No one in the middle is able to see the content.
Wasn't Internet of things something of the 00's? Do we still care for this in the 10's?
And for what it's worth, if you control the gateway, it is always possible to make a machine behind it believe it has unfettered access to the internet if you know what the device is expecting to see. If you don't, then obviously you can't control it in the first place... and arguably, the device isn't even really yours, much like the smart meters in your home that measure electricity usage. But this lack of control is not what IoT is about.... it is the connectivity itself.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Klompentage, that sounds like something else other than sabotage...
Then I won't buy it and I will curse all the other ignorant stupid mother fucking sheeple who still keep buying that stuff so it won't die out...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
But you don't, do you? Or nothing that required a subscription service would work for more than three minutes before somebody hacked it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Dear team, you seem to be doing some great work and in really vast scales! Such warm words! Try launching a blog for all marketing-inclined people and get success! You can hire professional web-developers http://www.networkmarketingtra... and get promoted with marketing company - create cool stories, useful articles and share experiences locally! And just think about meetups you would hold! Think of it! :)