The Internet of Things - What is a Spime?

CoolVibe writes "From the abstract in the talk: "World-renowned Science Fiction writer and futurist Bruce Sterling will outline his ideas for SPIMES, a form of ubiquitous computing that gives smarts and 'searchabiliity' to even the most mundane of physical products. Imagine losing your car keys and being able to search for them with Google Earth." It's a very interesting lecture given by Bruce Sterling about something we might see in the near future. The lecture can be viewed here on Google Video."

Re:Appropriate name

[DragonWriter]

If you can find your carkeys on Google, then so can Google.

That depends where the logic is that identifies a particular electronic identifier as your carkeys; done properly, other people might be able to locate an object with a particular identifier, but not know that it is the keys to your car. Or get no information at all about it.

But for ubiquitous computing to not be a giant gaping security hole, we're going to need ubiquitous encryption and a whole generation of new tools to manage it and partition information.

All that is old is new:

[Hartree]

I think Vernor Vinge called it a localizer a number of years back.

Not sure what Drexler et al were calling the idea in the late 80s, but they were talking about much the same thing as well as general assemblers and such things as utility fog that could do the same thing.

People have been working on ubi-comp for a long time.