DeAshcroft writes "EE Times has a piece on progress with the four-year-old DARPA-conceived Smart Dust self-organizing sensor networks. Based on Berkeley's TinyOS and TinyDB open-source projects, the article reports several companies are demonstrating both military and civilian applications. Ars Technica adds background and commentary on issues not discussed in the EET article."
The dust I have is hard enough to get rid of. I don't want it to be smarter.
This is actually kind of scary. I mean, the advantage is that the enemy doesn't know their being spied on, right? So how soon until this is used for "civilian surveillance"? Next election I'm voting for Nadir.
"The idea was to sprinkle thousands of tiny wireless sensors on a battlefield to monitor enemy movements without alerting the enemy to their presence."
If the enemy ever did find out their presence, couldn't they use some kind of microwaves or something to disable the sensors?
And detecting their presence wouldn't be that hard. Simple electronics would notice a large ammount of radiation being emitted from an empty field.
Even simpler than that, I would image. If you've got thousands or tiny systems operating independently out there and chatting on the network, and they suddenly all fell silent, then you have a pretty good idea that something is going on.
Although, I suppose a really sophisticated army could capture all of the network chatter for, say, half an hour, then zap the sensors.
To fool the network, just play back the network chatter with updated headers on all of the packets with an updated time stamp.
Several points on this. By the time we see any civilian applications (Maybe you'll use them for motion capture of groups?) the military will be using them with point to point communications. Second, you could use the same laser/pickup combo for communication that you use for sensing, with infrared lasers. It won't work all that well during the day -- you'll only get a very short range. You can use them for point to point communication. This currently implies fairly sizable motes, however.
Also the more of them you sprinkle the less power they need to use because they are a mesh network, they only have to talk to their neighbors. I would assume that motes would always be operating in least-power modes anyway, so they will be using as little power as possible when sending signals. I suspect it will be less trivial to pick this up than you think. Using MEMS technology today and nanotechnology tomorrow (but tomorrow never seems to come) you will be easily able to construct positionable directional antennae enough to where motes could reasonably do point to point communication and be near impossible to detect without being within their area of effect.
It's another step toward The Mesh, covered very well in a Small Times cover package [smalltimes.com] last year.
Completely off topic, but I saw the following in the article:
Mike Horton, Crossbow's president and CEO, said the company tested the technology with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in March 2001 at the Twentynine Palms Marine base in Southern California.
I remember an old Robert Plant song called "29 Palms" [absolutelyric.com] . Reading through the lyrics it's mostly just a love/lust song, no military significance but it was kinda cool to see a parallel, even if there's no actual link.
Shape the motes like spiders... and give them simple commands like "kill Tom Selleck"
AUGHHH! Thanks! Thanks SO MUCH! My therapist thanks you as well! I had FINALLY blocked Gene Simmons' acting career from my head.. but when I read that, for some reason I got his character from that and the one from "Never too young to die" crossed, and Now im seeing the Hard Rock Divine going after Tom with robotic spiders in fishnets!
The surveillance power of this kind of thing is pretty damn scary, assuming they perfect it. Of course, it's got defense applications, so of course they're going to develope it.
If we had this tehcnology now, we could sprinkle a load over Iraq to detect chemical weapons residues and radiation above background levels.
One possible solution to protect against smart dust would to create military buildings with a high internal atmospheric pressure: people who enter the building who create a draft directed at the outside, which should be enough to blow away "smart dust".
At least I hope so... If you cross Total Information Awareness and smart dust you have one scary scenario... =(
And even "clean" (high internal pressure) buildings don't help military units in the fields...
One possible solution to protect against smart dust would to create military buildings with a high internal atmospheric pressure
This is already common practice. In most office buildings, the HVAC system is employed to maintain a slight overpressure. This has the benefit of making it less likely for foreign substances, including airborne chemical and biological agents, to enter the building from the outside. That's just a side-effect, though. The designed-in purpose is much more mundane. It's to keep ordinary dust-- the dumb kind-- out, to keep the buildings clean.
Anybody who's read Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky [amazon.com] is already familiar with the concept of sensor-equipped smart dust that has lots of uses. That was a great book, by the way.
So exactly what are the effects of a stiff wind on smart dust? It seems to me that even a moderate wind would wreak havoc on the survellaince attempts of dust, or am I missing something?
So exactly what are the effects of a stiff wind on smart dust? It seems to me that even a moderate wind would wreak havoc on the survellaince attempts of dust, or am I missing something?
Perhaps the motes could deploy little claws, to anchor themselves onto the first thing they bump into (a blade of grass, a tree, the seat of the enemy general's pants, etc.)
What about possible health impacts in the future? I mean, supposing that these things become ubiquitous and the military/government/corporations spread them around for various monitoring purposes, how do they get cleaned up? As technology advances and this "smart dust" gets smaller/finer, what are the implications of inhaling them? (Seems to me battlefields aren't so much of a worry; there are other things more hazardous to health on those. This would only really apply if SmartDust was used a lot for monitoring civilians.)
Not to mention the fact that privacy issues (as usual) rear their ugly head once more. What happens when I pick up a bunch of these on my clothes/shoes from walking around downtown and take them back home with me? Automatic distribution of the dust, deploying a sensor network to residential neighborhoods, collecting all manner of information as the technology develops. What, will I have to install an "EMP chamber" like an airlock in my home to walk through?:)
NOWHERE TO HIDE technology. There are a bunch of presentations archived in various and sundry places that talk about this sort of thing, as well as the other elements used.
The articles never mention the power source for these things. They mention the size will eventually be mere millimeters across, but what kind of battery can you put in something that small?
And if you are restricted to a small battery (or maybe small solarcell) how much power do you have available to broadcast to the other sensors so they can talk to each other.
The technoglogy won't mean much if these things actually become 'DumbDust' after a few minutes (seconds?) of operation.
We could now DDOS people with allergies. Jerry Seinfeld will have one more reason to be afraid of dirt. "It's WATCHING ME!!!". What happens if you ingested smart dust? Would they keep getting readings back through the whole process?
Okay... so basically, we're talking about particle sized sensors and a built-in networking capability. Sensors meaning heat, sound, light, and whatever else they need to orient themselves like GPS, orientation, etc.
So what's to prevent people from spreading this stuff in public washrooms/baths/changing rooms to spy on people while they undress?
What's to prevent this from being sprinkled onto unsuspecting passerbys and used to basically stalk them and their children?
What's to prevent this from being used on ATM machines or any other place where sensitive information needs to be kept secret from prying eyes and people who seek to commit fraud?
What's to prevent people from using this to gain insider information by spreading it in corporate meeting and board rooms while they are visiting, at production factories during a tour, or even at random hotel rooms for the heck of it?
What's to prevent the abuse of this technology?
I'm not saying the technology doesn't have great and beneficial uses. Military and Security uses come to mind. As does scientific research and observation. It can go a great way to help prevent spousal abuse and domestic violence, tell us when children ARE being abused or if fraud is being committed. It can even help to serve as an effective way of adding home security without all of the cameras. And help to monitor the weak and sickly who might otherwise not be monitored effectively through normal means.
I'm just left wondering whether or not this is a tool/technology which will essentially erradicate privacy.
I spent a little time wondering what it would be like living in a world with total surveilence - a world where someone could be watching or at least recording everything that happens. In some respects it doesn't actually look that bad.
No one would would be in any doubt about whether or not Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. No crime would go unsolved. No one would expect to get away with cheating on their spouse. Lying in general would become far less common. There just wouldn't be much to lie about which couldn't be verified by someone who wanted to.
Of course you would have to get used to the idea that six billion people could, if they wanted to, watch you take a dump every morning. But somehow I suspect that the excitement of voyerism would wear off if every act became a public act. Who knows, maybe we would all be happier if there was no longer any point in maintaining a public mask to cover our private lives.
I worried at first that total surveilence would lend itself too well to totalitarianism. "No crime would go unsolved" really just means that if you do anything the state disapproves of then it would not go unnoticed. But then it occured to me that totalitarianism would have a hard time getting established if eveything happens in the public view. Politicians could not cut deals behind closed doors, the military could not plot coups, the state could not lie to the people about what it is doing.
Living in a world like this would be really different from living in the world as it is, and it would be uncomfortable to people like us who are used to a good deal of privacy. But it wouldn't necessarily be bad - just very different.
Of course total surveilence is not going to happen any time soon. What will happen is an increase in certain types of surveilence by certain people. The way I see it, the problem with this is that we might wind up with a world where the state can watch the people, but the people cannot watch the state, or a world where the US knows exactly what Iraq is up to, but no one knows exactly what the US is up to. This kind of world really would be bad.
So here is a suggestion. Perhaps instead of trying to stem the tide of surveilence, what we should do is try to make sure that it washes over everyone evenly. If the state has this technology, then push for the same technology to be made available to private citizens. If the state wants more information about the people, then push for a more open government, so that the people will also have more information about the state.
You know what? Someone is watching. Someone is recording. His name is God.
I'm hardly a religious freak, but I think the world, especially the West, would be a much better place if people just took religion more seriously. If they took God more seriously.
Think about it. He's there, watching everything. We will all be held accountable for everything we've done.
It doesn't even matter what religion you believe in. As far as I know, all of the major religions have this as a basic tenet. It's part of being God. He get's to see everything, to know everything.
If people actually believed that there was an ultimate consequence to everything they did, this would be a better place.
Someone is watching. Someone is recording. His name is God.
I thought seriously about discussing this idea in my original post. A number of ethical theorists like Bentham and Locke thought that the idea of constant observation by God was a key part of moral consciousness. Religious people who take this idea seriously are always in a position of having to think about what their behavior would look like from God's perspective. Bentham actually proposed that prisons should be built, so that the inmates were literally under constant observation, in the hope that they would get into this habbit of thinking (his plan which he called the "panopticon" has actually be implemented in some places).
I am an athiest, but like Machiavelli I am willing to consider the possibility that religion might serve a useful social function even though it is strictly fiction. Still it seems to me that there are serious problems with the idea of grounding morality in religion. For one thing it is getting increasingly harder to maintain the fiction. For another thing, people who think that God is the source of all value are prone to forget that it is really individual human lives that matter. When that happens they tend to do horrible things even though they think God is watching.
Wouldn't it be better if we could really make it true that we will be held accountable for every action, and that it is our fellow hummans who will do the accounting?
I wonder what the potential for hacking these networks is? If they're running on low power, low performance devices, are they going to have robust encryption?
Even if you couldn't decrypt the signals, you could detect their presence.. which leads to a bunch of potential counter-measures: jam their communications with a bunch of RF noise, sweep a microwave beam to fry their circuits, the list goes on.
Interestingly enough, fairly low tech countermeasures could be used to combat this kind of high technology.
Nope, "A Deepness in the sky" by Vernor Vinge had a sensor net of free-floating chips used for surveillance.
In diamond age they had mites, microscopic robots that would decay into "toner", a dust-like pollutant. They had surveillance mites, but they were active robots, not passive sensors.
pixie dust (Score:3, Funny)
Imagine (Score:4, Funny)
Oh man (Score:3, Insightful)
This is actually kind of scary. I mean, the advantage is that the enemy doesn't know their being spied on, right? So how soon until this is used for "civilian surveillance"? Next election I'm voting for Nadir.
Re:Oh man (Score:3, Funny)
To get rid of smart dust, "the enemy", of course, will deploy dumb vacuum cleaners.
Which after that, having such a huge concentration of smart dust on board, will gain conciousness.
-- I walk through mindfields...
Re:Oh man (Score:2)
Re:Oh man (Score:3, Funny)
Your misspelling is highly appropriate
Re:Oh man (Score:2, Funny)
Didn't he win last time?
Smart Dust? (Score:4, Funny)
Smart Dust? I must have the world's most powerful Beowulf cluster under my bed.
Dusting of sensors (Score:5, Interesting)
If the enemy ever did find out their presence, couldn't they use some kind of microwaves or something to disable the sensors?
Re:Dusting of sensors (Score:3, Insightful)
-B
Re:Dusting of sensors (Score:3, Interesting)
Even simpler than that, I would image. If you've got thousands or tiny systems operating independently out there and chatting on the network, and they suddenly all fell silent, then you have a pretty good idea that something is going on.
Although, I suppose a really sophisticated army could capture all of the network chatter for, say, half an hour, then zap the sensors.
To fool the network, just play back the network chatter with updated headers on all of the packets with an updated time stamp.
Re:Dusting of sensors (Score:3, Interesting)
Also the more of them you sprinkle the less power they need to use because they are a mesh network, they only have to talk to their neighbors. I would assume that motes would always be operating in least-power modes anyway, so they will be using as little power as possible when sending signals. I suspect it will be less trivial to pick this up than you think. Using MEMS technology today and nanotechnology tomorrow (but tomorrow never seems to come) you will be easily able to construct positionable directional antennae enough to where motes could reasonably do point to point communication and be near impossible to detect without being within their area of effect.
No microwaves needed unfortunately (Score:4, Funny)
The enemy just needs to battle harden one of these [shoppingspreez.com] and clear the battlefield.
Parent
Part of The Mesh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Part of The Mesh (Score:2)
Completely off topic, but I saw the following in the article:
I remember an old Robert Plant song called "29 Palms" [absolutelyric.com] . Reading through the lyrics it's mostly just a love/lust song, no military significance but it was kinda cool to see a parallel, even if there's no actual link.Noooo... (Score:3, Funny)
Quick! Archive it for posterity!
Twice.
Re:Noooo... (Score:2)
But could we... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But could we... (Score:4, Funny)
AUGHHH! Thanks! Thanks SO MUCH! My therapist thanks you as well! I had FINALLY blocked Gene Simmons' acting career from my head.. but when I read that, for some reason I got his character from that and the one from "Never too young to die" crossed, and Now im seeing the Hard Rock Divine going after Tom with robotic spiders in fishnets!
AUGHHH!
Parent
That's kinda frightening (Score:5, Interesting)
If we had this tehcnology now, we could sprinkle a load over Iraq to detect chemical weapons residues and radiation above background levels.
Roomba it away (Score:3, Funny)
Clean Room parade? (Score:5, Insightful)
At least I hope so... If you cross Total Information Awareness and smart dust you have one scary scenario... =(
And even "clean" (high internal pressure) buildings don't help military units in the fields...
Re:Clean Room parade? (Score:5, Informative)
This is already common practice. In most office buildings, the HVAC system is employed to maintain a slight overpressure. This has the benefit of making it less likely for foreign substances, including airborne chemical and biological agents, to enter the building from the outside. That's just a side-effect, though. The designed-in purpose is much more mundane. It's to keep ordinary dust-- the dumb kind-- out, to keep the buildings clean.
Parent
A Deepness in the Sky? (Score:5, Informative)
Anybody who's read Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky [amazon.com] is already familiar with the concept of sensor-equipped smart dust that has lots of uses. That was a great book, by the way.
And earlier... (Score:2)
Hmm, I sense a pattern here.
Re:And later... (Score:2, Informative)
w00t (Score:4, Funny)
Sooner than Duke Nukem?
What, no photo ? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What, no photo ? (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, one of the techs sneezed, and "blew away" the prototype.
Pixie Dust (Score:2, Funny)
Wind (Score:2)
Re:Wind (Score:2)
Perhaps the motes could deploy little claws, to anchor themselves onto the first thing they bump into (a blade of grass, a tree, the seat of the enemy general's pants, etc.)
Re:Wind (Score:2)
I'm still laughing at the visual that that created.
"Men, deploy the Butt Mote!"
Sometime in the not-too-distant future... (Score:2, Funny)
Health impacts? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention the fact that privacy issues (as usual) rear their ugly head once more. What happens when I pick up a bunch of these on my clothes/shoes from walking around downtown and take them back home with me? Automatic distribution of the dust, deploying a sensor network to residential neighborhoods, collecting all manner of information as the technology develops. What, will I have to install an "EMP chamber" like an airlock in my home to walk through?
Re:Health impacts? (Score:3, Informative)
Nah, nudism is your friend. Then, all you need to install is a water-filled tunnel into your home (to wash off any dust).
Re:Health impacts? (Score:2)
EMP would work for awhile (until they switch to optical circuits). But not if you ever take work home.
Re:Health impacts? (Score:2)
how do they get cleaned up?
anti smart dust smart dust.
Do a google search for (Score:3, Informative)
Even if the technology doesn't work... (Score:3, Funny)
How long to they live? What about batteries? (Score:3, Funny)
And if you are restricted to a small battery (or maybe small solarcell) how much power do you have available to broadcast to the other sensors so they can talk to each other.
The technoglogy won't mean much if these things actually become 'DumbDust' after a few minutes (seconds?) of operation.
-Dubya
ItsyBitsyTeensyWeensyOS (Score:2)
ides that come to mind (Score:2, Funny)
Sample civilan app (Score:2, Interesting)
We're from Berkeley, man. While sensor networks can be used for killing people better, that's not what motivates me in this research.
Complete loss of privacy and safety? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay... so basically, we're talking about particle sized sensors and a built-in networking capability. Sensors meaning heat, sound, light, and whatever else they need to orient themselves like GPS, orientation, etc.
So what's to prevent people from spreading this stuff in public washrooms/baths/changing rooms to spy on people while they undress?
What's to prevent this from being sprinkled onto unsuspecting passerbys and used to basically stalk them and their children?
What's to prevent this from being used on ATM machines or any other place where sensitive information needs to be kept secret from prying eyes and people who seek to commit fraud?
What's to prevent people from using this to gain insider information by spreading it in corporate meeting and board rooms while they are visiting, at production factories during a tour, or even at random hotel rooms for the heck of it?
What's to prevent the abuse of this technology?
I'm not saying the technology doesn't have great and beneficial uses. Military and Security uses come to mind. As does scientific research and observation. It can go a great way to help prevent spousal abuse and domestic violence, tell us when children ARE being abused or if fraud is being committed. It can even help to serve as an effective way of adding home security without all of the cameras. And help to monitor the weak and sickly who might otherwise not be monitored effectively through normal means.
I'm just left wondering whether or not this is a tool/technology which will essentially erradicate privacy.
A world without privacy. (Score:4, Insightful)
No one would would be in any doubt about whether or not Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. No crime would go unsolved. No one would expect to get away with cheating on their spouse. Lying in general would become far less common. There just wouldn't be much to lie about which couldn't be verified by someone who wanted to.
Of course you would have to get used to the idea that six billion people could, if they wanted to, watch you take a dump every morning. But somehow I suspect that the excitement of voyerism would wear off if every act became a public act. Who knows, maybe we would all be happier if there was no longer any point in maintaining a public mask to cover our private lives.
I worried at first that total surveilence would lend itself too well to totalitarianism. "No crime would go unsolved" really just means that if you do anything the state disapproves of then it would not go unnoticed. But then it occured to me that totalitarianism would have a hard time getting established if eveything happens in the public view. Politicians could not cut deals behind closed doors, the military could not plot coups, the state could not lie to the people about what it is doing.
Living in a world like this would be really different from living in the world as it is, and it would be uncomfortable to people like us who are used to a good deal of privacy. But it wouldn't necessarily be bad - just very different.
Of course total surveilence is not going to happen any time soon. What will happen is an increase in certain types of surveilence by certain people. The way I see it, the problem with this is that we might wind up with a world where the state can watch the people, but the people cannot watch the state, or a world where the US knows exactly what Iraq is up to, but no one knows exactly what the US is up to. This kind of world really would be bad.
So here is a suggestion. Perhaps instead of trying to stem the tide of surveilence, what we should do is try to make sure that it washes over everyone evenly. If the state has this technology, then push for the same technology to be made available to private citizens. If the state wants more information about the people, then push for a more open government, so that the people will also have more information about the state.
Re:A world without privacy. (Score:2)
Someone is watching. Someone is recording. His name is God.
I'm hardly a religious freak, but I think the world, especially the West, would be a much better place if people just took religion more seriously. If they took God more seriously.
Think about it. He's there, watching everything. We will all be held accountable for everything we've done.
It doesn't even matter what religion you believe in. As far as I know, all of the major religions have this as a basic tenet. It's part of being God. He get's to see everything, to know everything.
If people actually believed that there was an ultimate consequence to everything they did, this would be a better place.
Re:A world without privacy. (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought seriously about discussing this idea in my original post. A number of ethical theorists like Bentham and Locke thought that the idea of constant observation by God was a key part of moral consciousness. Religious people who take this idea seriously are always in a position of having to think about what their behavior would look like from God's perspective. Bentham actually proposed that prisons should be built, so that the inmates were literally under constant observation, in the hope that they would get into this habbit of thinking (his plan which he called the "panopticon" has actually be implemented in some places).
I am an athiest, but like Machiavelli I am willing to consider the possibility that religion might serve a useful social function even though it is strictly fiction. Still it seems to me that there are serious problems with the idea of grounding morality in religion. For one thing it is getting increasingly harder to maintain the fiction. For another thing, people who think that God is the source of all value are prone to forget that it is really individual human lives that matter. When that happens they tend to do horrible things even though they think God is watching.
Wouldn't it be better if we could really make it true that we will be held accountable for every action, and that it is our fellow hummans who will do the accounting?
Vunerability to hacking? (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if you couldn't decrypt the signals, you could detect their presence.. which leads to a bunch of potential counter-measures: jam their communications with a bunch of RF noise, sweep a microwave beam to fry their circuits, the list goes on.
Interestingly enough, fairly low tech countermeasures could be used to combat this kind of high technology.
Re:neil stephenson (Score:2)
In diamond age they had mites, microscopic robots that would decay into "toner", a dust-like pollutant. They had surveillance mites, but they were active robots, not passive sensors.