The Home as a Node on the Internet

Humility writes "EETimes, a weekly trade magzine for electrical engineers, has a story about the integration of networked computers into domestic residences and artwork. This is a little more far reaching than just wiring up your home with a bunch of MP3 players and speakers. I think it's quite interesting." Fully networked houses on display at The Museum of Modern Art. Sweet! I wonder if this guy's place qualifies? It should.

Comments

"No internet in 88"?

[Tom Christiansen]

"At the time, there was no Internet, the term '24/7' had yet to be coined and it was unheard of to get proprietary information from the client's employer - an investment bank - piped into the home," Daniel Rowen, who designed the apartment with fellow architect Frank Lupo, told EE Times.

No internet in 88, eh? I suppose Bill Gates and Al Gore hadn't invented it yet.

Sigh.

I wonder what that thing I've been on since the very early 80s really is? I'd swear that it was the internet. Has the media truly forgotten where this all came from?

And by 1988, I certainly had internet from home, including a private link into my employer's inner sanctum of customer and engineering data. And I from there was able to tap into our clients' own private systems as needed when I was doing customer service. Now, it wasn't the clients' business info we were getting, but still.

Has the mass media ever gotten anything right?

artists can see these trends...

[EEEthan]

This stuff just reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. He has a real mind for currents in our culture, and I think that the world is going to be eerily close to his vision of it. Marshall McLuhan, in his book, Understanding Media, says that artists are able to see changes in media...this article, in light of Mr. Stephenson's work, proves that. I think the people who have the best idea of what is going to happen are sci-fi novelists and the geeks who pay attention to them, and keep their nose to the net, as it were.

Linux makes it happen...

[Skeezix]

Indeed home networks are on the rise. People are beginning to realize that you don't have to have expensive equipment to have a network, nor do you have to be a company to benefit from one. Home networks allow you share resources such as the internet connection and file and print services with computers of varying platforms such as Win95/98/NT, and Mac. Linux Makes it trivial to set up a router that might otherwise cost you a bundle.

--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org

Re:Linux makes it happen...

[the_tsi]

As much as I love linux and credit it for all sorts of things, there are better deals out there than using linux as a router. Granted, I'm sitting on a rh6 box right now that's behind a lrp firewall connected to the internet, there are dedicated boxes for about $100-150 you can get that have three ethernet ports and a modem built in and that do NAT in hardware. It's very slick. It's what I use to connect Mom and Dad to the 'net. They can share a line and both surf at the same time. As great as linux would be for this, if there's ever a power failure, and I'm not around to fix the thing, there's no problem -- since it doesn't have any filesystems mounted, it's just an XXXk eeprom, it just starts back up where it left off. A linux box would take 30 seconds to boot up, get to the fsck failure and wait for input. At which point my parents would be stranded without internet access till I came home from school.

Plus, these boxes are about the size of a mini hub and take the same amount of power. Even though I can get a pretty darn small 486 case, it's still going to be sucking a bit of juice and some serious closet real estate.

I've had a network in my house since circa 1991 (thanks, Invisible Software!) and as extensively as I use linux, it doesn't have THAT much to do with the home networking revolution. If anything, I credit the OS vendors moving networking into the OS (gag...).

When I had to install personal netware on top of all our machines running DOS 4 and 5 with Win3.1, it was a non-trivial task to get files shared. When Win95 allowed point-and-click network browsing with almost ZERO configuration, it became alot easier. Of course, Macs have had this since very early on (and kudos to apple for integrating network hardware, however incompatible with the rest of the world ).

Linux *will* however play an important role once it makes plug-and-play, near-zero-configuration, point-and-click setup the norm. It's close, but not quite.

This isn't a pro-MS post. It's just taming your Linux over-advocacy. Sorry, but nothing personal. I'll never run anything but Linux on my home network servers (well, that free solaris deal is looking better and better....)

-Chris

Brings a whole new meaning to Home Security

[MAXOMENOS]

I can see it now.....homes wired to the hilt, including lights, garage door, security system... all maintained by a small, inexpensive box with some sort of free UNIX, commercial UNIX, or MS system running on it. The whole thing can operated through command line interface or though an X-based interface. Wonderful!

But what if your home security is as weak as most corporate network security? Next thing you know, your home system is infected with a virus (especially if it's MS based)......some cracker uses a buffer overflow exploit to get root, allowing for easy break-in, or worse, the haunted house from Hell...your house gets ping-flooded and shuts down for as long as it takes for your friendly neighborhood HomeOnTheNet(tm) representative to come by and reboot...some stupid script kiddie uses a downloaded executible to open the bathroom/bedroom curtains when your self/wife/sister/daughter (or husband/son/brother) is nekkid...there are all kinds of analogues to stupid computer security goofs. What are you gonna do, call in an expert to keep it secure? A lot of the so-called experts can't keep boxes secure today, as the archives on attrition.org should demonstrate.

What will save most people is the fact that their lives are just too boring to pay attention to. As for everyone else, they'll have to be on their toes, all the time, to avoid far more annoying cyberpranks than ever before. At minimum they'll need a secure firewall; if they're a celebrity, they'll need to hire a trusted system administrator who's an expert in maintaining secure systems -- and those aren't exactly easy to find. All in all, it makes me wonder who would want their home system on Internet in the first place.............

Like I need my house to be hackable...

[ryanr]

Instead of the usual family picture in the hallway, will all of the LCD panels read:

"d00d! y3r h0u53 B3 0wn3d by th3 Oreo Cr3w!"

Re:Like I need my house to be hackable...

[Signal 11]

Yeah.. just wonderful. I s'pose my fridge will have been taken over by the pop'n fresh man too. We won't even discuss what happened to the toilet...

--

...

[Signal 11]

The Automated Home of the Future will not be complete until my toaster runs linux! Now if you'll excuse me, my oven just BSOD'd and incinerated my cassarole... stupid driver conflicts.. I knew I shouldn't have installed ActiveLights 2003.

--

We're here...sort of...

[Ricochet]

There are quite a few of us out there playing with such technology right now. We are experimenting and some have kept it within limits (to keep the SO happy and live within budgets) but we are playing with the technology. So far I have control of various lighting (using X10) and I have expermental I/O (I/O = switches, variable resistors, LEDS and DMMs) that I can control. I am able to monitor the weather and pull back information from the internet (news, weather, etc). I'm also able to post various info from my systems to the internet, though I must wisely choose what to post as too much info can be dangerous in the wrong hands. And I have voice synthesis output for certain info. Others have more elaborate systems (Bruce Winter's Mr.E House (MH) for example).

There are problems with this technology; cost, reliability, accuracy, redundancy and standards are not really up to expected consumer qualities. But for the most part they do work. Some of the fancier stuff such as the mirror with the built in display is pricey. But thanks to new technologies such as ethernet on a chip, smaller microcontrollers can be used for control and monitoring. Of course you can still use these devices without the network hook ups. This technology will help get the pricing down and allow more items to be centrally controlled by the MCP.

Now this of course begs the question do we really want so much being controlled for us? Or is the energy management and possible conviences worth it? Those are questions I can't yet answer. I don't really put a whole lot of faith in technology and sometimes prefer the old ways of doing certain things. Now ain't that a real kick in the pants.

--
Linux Home Automation - Neil Cherry - ncherry@home.net
http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only)
http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lig htsey/52 (Graphics)

...as I have mentioned this before, my apartment..

[Alex Belits]

...is here: http://phobos.illtel.denv er.co.us/~abelits/apartment.php3.

My home IS node(.com) on the internet

[Ungrounded Lightning]

My home IS "node"(.com) on the internet - and was (and still is) "node" on the UUCP flat address space before the domain addressing coup. That it is a "good" four-letter sitename should give you some idea how long it's been around.

"Node" was my second choice - I'd wanted "home", so I could have the email address "@home". B-) I missed getting "home" by a few days - during the several weeks it took the sysadmin of my first UUCP connection to get me the registration form.