The Internet Of Things 134
Roosta writes "BBC News has an article by Bradley Horowitz, responsible for novel technology development at search giant Yahoo, looking ahead to the 'internet of things'. He discusses the importance of the 'W4' problem, the four 'W's' being who, when, what and where, and how to bring together metadata to make the world a more searchable place. 'All entities - everything from the particular chair I am sitting on to objects like the Lincoln Memorial monument should have a unique digital identifier. As an example - let's start with people. I don't know if darren@yahoo.com is the same as darren@gmail.com. There is a problem of managing identity across the internet, so when I say Darren Waters I mean this person and all of the manifestations and representations and personas of that person. The ability to knit those together is a huge challenge and opportunity for us as an industry. That's what I mean by resolving people - I mean this person and not the likely thousands of other people who share your name.'"
The Internet Of Things (Score:1, Funny)
Spam attack (Score:3, Funny)
--Darren
In the future (Score:2, Funny)
The future is here... (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:3, Informative)
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In the future we'll have numbers instead of names, and I'll be number 1!
Don't you mean.....42?
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you forgot the 5th "w" (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm all for spimes/blogjects/fountains that respond to stock prices, but for crissakes why does my inanimate chair need an IPv6 address?
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This is not about giving an identifier to every object, this is only the basis to be able to express and collect data about them.
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...Why? I'm all for spimes/blogjects/fountains that respond to stock prices, but for crissakes why does my inanimate chair need an IPv6 address?
Inventory tracking
If your inanimate chair had a unique identifier, the store you bought it at would be able to know that you're returning the specific chair you bought, as opposed to returning a broken chair you bought 1 year ago. The manufacturer could fully track the purchase-return cycle of the chair. You could obtain the history of your chair if you bought it used.
Funny story: A few years ago, when I was moving, I bought a few record needles from a store that sold them ultra-cheap. After a year
I like my privacy, so please, no email ID (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I like my privacy, so please, no email ID (Score:4, Insightful)
We're seeing this with hypothetical RFID scenarios. If you have RFID tagged car keys (like a SpeedPass token) and a credit card, when you walk into a store and buy something those keys can be read and associated with your credit card number. If those same car keys come back but you use a different credit card, a relationship between the two credit cards can be discovered. Any RFID tagged merchandise can be used in the same manner, and associated with you. Eventually a whole "cloud" of your tagged stuff will be related, so that even if you pay for "Catcher in the Rye" with cash, they can still figure out that you're ion++. And that's just with today's technology.
Today, only your IP address is associated with downloading a copy of Shrek 3. IPv6 is going to make sure that your cable modem, your computer, your RAM and your hard disk are all associated with downloading a copy of Shrek 4.
Re:I like my privacy, so please, no email ID (Score:5, Interesting)
One way or another, no it's not.
I am becoming increasingly conscious of my on-line footprint, the sheer scale of collection of data about me in real life, and the ways it is being used to my disadvantage. Some of those are sinister, but most are simply businesses or government departments using their greater resources to screw me out of things. Either way, I am personally damaged as a result.
I have always challenged things like asking for all my contact details in a shop when they have no need of them, and I'm sure a lot of people simply lie on various sign-up web pages that ask for information that isn't necessary to provide whatever feature or service is being requested. Now I've got to the point of actively disconnecting from social networking sites that are harvesting information about me, and I'm considering filing formal complaints with my representatives about certain well-known organisations who are obviously storing my credit card details in their databases beyond the end of our transactions.
I care enough about this issue — and more to the point, I suspect enough other people do as well — that if the pressure keeps ramping up, and damaging incidents like losing a whole database of credit card numbers keep happening, I think pretty draconian pro-privacy laws will gain political will long before universal tracking is a reality. All the lobbying and campaign funding in the world won't buy the law back once enough voters have personally been hurt by someone screwing this up.
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Some of the ways the data is being used are of dubious legality/morality and have no obvious defence, most commonly in recent times when people's freedoms are sacrificed on the altar of fighting terrorism. Others are simply businesses exploiting their ability to profile customers in order to maximise prices or target advertising, which is somewhat damaging/annoying but at least fairly obvious and something I can choose to challenge by shopping elsewhere.
Re:I like my privacy, so please, no email ID (Score:4, Insightful)
Take shopper loyalty cards, for example. For a benefit of perhaps 1% of the value of the transaction, people are glad to give away their private information. From that, they learn that "it's not so bad, I get a discount, and I always shop there." The industry might even spin the issue to say something completely factually incorrect, like "this privacy law will mean the end of frequent shopper cards!"
People are sheep. They can be led around like cattle for one penny on the dollar. Don't count on them to pass any legislation protecting themselves.
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While I take your point, and agree with it for that matter, I think the difference now is that when things go wrong, they tend to go wrong significantly and for lots of people. Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes today, and no-one who's been on the wrong side of it and spent the months it often takes to sort it out thinks identity theft is a trivial problem. This can be as simple as a business losing a whole load of credit card numbers and not informing people fast enough to get their cards
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Shrek 4? (Score:1)
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I am not sure that i want anyone but those i tell to know if darren@yahoo.com and darren@gmail.com is read by the same person.
Of course they're read the by the same person: Alberto Gonzalez.
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Author needs to get out of the basement (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The world should not be re-organized to suit computers. Computers should be reprogrammed to handle a complex world.
We see one of the classic symptoms of the bureaucrat here: someone who thinks that the person - or thing - should be subordinate to the numbering system.
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I think your accent was wrong there, friend. You need a strong Texan base, with a touch of Australian and a little British. Although given the recent government hand-overs in Germany, France and Britain, you might need to change that again in a few months.
Re:Author needs to get out of the basement (Score:5, Insightful)
Side note: notice that he talked about links our email addresses, but didn't talk about linking corporate identities? How about shedding a little light on the incestuous relationships between corporate boards & ceos?
But aside from that - the real world consists of things that are hard to classify:
where their boundaries are gradual:
- rivers (change over time)
- events (see example from TFA about coffee shop outside of event)
- times (new years eve party started exactly when? 8:00 pm? 11:00 pm?)
or where there are different opinions about what a thing is:
- table can be a chair if you sit on it (see Wittgenstein)
- a stick can be a tool, weapon, toy, etc
- what a computer is has changed over the past 90 years
or where there are arguments over which parts of a thing are the thing:
- is your mouse part of your computer? how about your monitor? your hard drive?
- does your home include the yard? odds are sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't
And this doesn't even touch on concepts (the TFA stated that we should label concepts). That's truly rediculous. Imagine the above problems magnified a hundred times to deal with abstract concepts and language.
Will it be called... (Score:4, Funny)
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How? (Score:1)
"Visit my site!" (Score:3, Funny)
I think your proposal would cause the stock price of the word "septuple" to skyrocket.
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I'm thinking barcodes... (Score:2)
Evil as this is... can it be prevented? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yes. Systems like this work well against a low level of random noise, but have a high vulnerability to deliberate poinsoning.
Simple example, that people (including myself) really do... Go to your grocery store and apply for one of their annoying "we promise we won't track you but your coupons will magically relate to things you usually buy" customer cards. They generally give you two of them (sometimes even four, as two keychain fobs and two wallet photo sized c
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Yes. Systems like this work well against a low level of random noise, but have a high vulnerability to deliberate poinsoning."
The larger question is not whether the system itself can be poisoned, the question is how and who will trust the system and will they understand it can be poisoned?
Will you be hauled into court and have this metadata presented in the same manner, as say, fingerprints are?
The problem is not the system itself, but how much TRUST people will put i
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The AC who responded to you really hit the nail on the h
There's this thing called privacy (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, yes. I have many different email addresses precisely so people know know that 0123456@hotmail.com is the same person as 0123456@gmail.com.
What a strange world he must live in if he thinks we actually _WANT_ everyone to know everything we do and to search all information that's available. Still, if he's that trusting, maybe he'll buy the bridge I have for sale.
Re:There's this thing called privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, he's under no pretense that YOU want any of that. He thinks that there are businesses that would pay his company a basket full of dollar signs because THEY want to search all information that's available about who you are and what you do, regardless of what you want. And he's right.
Overcomplication? (Score:2, Insightful)
No Thanks (Score:1)
A philosophy of approach (Score:5, Insightful)
We can give every person a serial number and an easy means for machines to track that serial number, or we can train the machines to do voice and face recognition to do authentication the way humans do. We can attach RFID tags to every item sold at every store, or we can develop vision algorithms to recognize and track the items with cameras to achieve the same results.
I worry that modifying the world to make it easy for machines will make the world difficult for humans. We should modify the machines fit our needs not the other way around. I would rather live in a world that is full of robots than live inside a giant world-sized robot.
Changing the environment for to help machines operate is nothing new. Railroad tracks provide navigational control for a very non-intelligent transportation machine.
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We can give every person a serial number and an easy means for machines to track that serial number, or we can train the machines to do voice and face recognition to do authentication the way humans do. We can attach RFID tags to every item sold at every store, or we can develop vision algorithms to recognize and track the items with cameras to achieve the same results.
Or, here's a thought: we could not turn the world into one where privacy is dead and your entire life is lived under the watchful eyes of unknown computer-based observers at all. Just sayin'.
Too late for mod points, but whatever. (Score:2)
I haven't yet RTFA but... (Score:2)
There is often a REASON that darren@yahoo.com will not tell everyone he knows that he is also darren@gmail.com. Personally, I manage my email in such a way that accounts I have at various locations serve different purposes - commercial/junk, family and friends, work, university, etc. I don't necessarily want all of these identities crossing over and I would like to have precise control over who has this information to begin with - and that includes some commer
groceries (Score:4, Funny)
Great. Now I have to get permission from my phone to go grocery shopping.
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The only phone even close to such a capability is the iPhone. And I would do anything my iPhone tells me to do!
--Rob
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W5H - Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How (Score:1)
Wny not skip W4 and go to W5H? The classic 'who, what, when, where, why and how' of information has been around for years longer than the Internet and covers the basics.
That's the point, isn't it? (Score:2)
In real life, my boss has no idea what religion I practice (or don't), or what my political views are.
If my identities were all tied together, this would mean losing that separation in cyberspace. I wouldn't be able to maintain a "political commentary" identity separate from my work based identity. Heck, there are several posts on Slashdot I would never have b
Revelation 13:16-17 (Score:3, Interesting)
17) that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Who knew it would be an IPv6 address?
Re:Revelation 13:16-17 (Score:4, Funny)
Which "Darren Waters": two problems (Score:3, Interesting)
A second "which 'Darren Waters'" problem is role-segmentation. I, and am sure many, have multiple online persona reflect different interests, roles, and communities. Depending on the context, I'm a geek, engineer, photographer, stock trader, businessman, etc. Any meaningful search for me would need to specify which version of me they were looking for.
Searching for a person implies both uniquely defining the person and defining which aspect of the person one is looking for because "which 'Darren Waters'" is a problem with two dimensions of ambiguity.
Umm, No. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? Seriously, why should my chair have some unique identifier, and why should you need to search it? It is a physical entity that I sit on. If it is physically present then I can sit there, if not then I'll hunt for it myself. I don't need google to find it.
Good!
Central management of internet identities and central linking also means no anonymity. No ability to create an identity on a per user group basis. Why should the people I discuss 40wheeling with be able to link to my identity as a campaigner for gay rights? The two are separate worlds and I like them that way. They don't need to interact and I see no reason that you should force them to interact.
Tough, go join another industry.
When last I checked Yahoo was in the business of searching out information not mapping all things including my chair. I don't want Yahoo to know about my chair, that is why I didn't make a webpage for it.
Yes well again I'm not wooed by your crocodile tears. Yes when looking up things there is the possibility of confusion but some global numbering system won't change that really. Even if such a system was implemented it would reduce privacy, probably by outing many a closet homosexual, but the people who really wanted to game it still would and even though you matched the serial number for Bob Henderson at 2213 Mockingbird Lane, and found that he likes Monster trucks, and old Judy Garland Movies you still wouldn't be able to believe it. Because someone who wanted to hide their love of Monster trucks may just have been posting under his name.
Even if you put the force of law and economics behind it, say the way that credit card fraud is banned it will still happen. The net result of an internet of things would be 1) My chair having its own fan club 2) Yahoo getting into the ChoicePoint voter-roll purging busines, and 3) people too weak to protect themselves being outed for no good reason.
Lest we forget there is a reason for anonymity in this world. Many people, esp those coping with personally difficult things, want to broach them under different identities for fear of persecution. Others, like me, just value our privacy as a matter of course and feel that more information only benefits others, not us. Finally dangerous or unpopular ideas (say phamplets advocating for the American Revolution, democracy, and the rights of man) cannot be published except anonymously for fear of violent reprisal. That's why Benjamin Franklin used the name 'Mrs. Silence Dogood' [wikipedia.org].
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So your phone can tell you whether it's safe to sit down, silly. It will buzz green if the chair is under your ass, and red if it's not.
That way we can all surf pr0n all day safe in the knowledge that our phones will run the rest of our lives for us.
That's too far fetched. (Score:2)
Advance planning is always good.
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Actually, your phone warning you that the office has burnt down might be a useful feature.
Or a fire extinguisher. Whichever's more useful.
Haven't you realized anything. (Score:2)
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Yes, but with a unique identifier you can track which chairs you've thrown and which chairs are left to throw.
Well... sorta (Score:3, Interesting)
Everything doesn't need an unique ID. You don't need an ID for every cashew nut in the can.
However, there's probably a reasonable reason to have an unique ID for your chair -- at least at some point in its lifetime. Maybe for inventory control in the store; or as part of the nasty divorce settlement you will go through with your wife several years from now.
So to restate the problem, it is useful to be able to identify things uniquely at various
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I understand your concern, but it is not technically correct. All you need to generate an unique Id is another unique ID. Read up on UUIDs.
Amazon? (Score:1)
I guess without a lot of additional code, UIDs for everything won't make a lot of difference.
Scope / arbitration (Score:1)
Fight the power! (Score:1)
Yeah, but (Score:1)
Hope he's not thinking a numeric unique id (Score:1)
{
spam(i);
}
It's the reason I quit using ICQ years ago.
Fuck that! (Score:1)
Who, when, what and where. But why? (Score:2)
Amassing a comprehensive knowledge base of who, when, what and where is noble enough, until you consider the reason for it, which isn't explicitly mentioned: marketing. He speaks of being able to accurately identify a single person on the internet; the obvious reason why they want to do this is to be able to target advertising more effectively.
The answers to who, when, what and where are "junk food" information. How and why are the sources of real knowledge, and require critical thinking and reasoning t
W4? (Score:4, Funny)
For very large values of 4.
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Bussinesses will buy this... (Score:2, Funny)
Cheers!
Why (Score:2)
Why would we WANT to manage identities. Thought one the freedoms of the internet was anonymity and freedom of speech.
OIDs (Score:2)
When did context die, and when was the wake? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what I mean by resolving people - I mean this person and not the likely thousands of other people who share your name
The chief reason we get to reuse names has traditionally been that they really don't overlap that often. This is very similar to IPv4 addresses.
For example 192.168.1.50 is my MythTV box, just like Darren Waters is a buddy of mine from High School. When I say 'Darren' to my wife, she KNOWS who I'm talking about thanks to a little thing known as context. This proposal would change the way I refer to 'Darren' to something arbitrary and unique. The trick is, my brain already does this for me. When I think
"Now! Bar-code everything in your home!" (Score:2)
In the late 1990s, somebody was selling a "bar code everything in your home" kit. You could print bar code stickers, and there was a wand for scanning them. If you loaned a hammer to a neighbor, you could check it out and get follow up messages if they didn't bring it back. Really. Didn't sell.
This is roughly the same idea.
Much of the "Internet of things" is silly. There's not much utility of putting sensors in everything where there are no actuators to act on the data. If we had lots of robots ru
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personal safety (Score:1)
There are countless articles on kids and also adult idiots who meet up in chat rooms, hand out their personal data like it was free candy, and then get fucked over in various ways because they weren't careful enough.
I have a specific alias to be associated with all my chatroom activities so they can't tie that version of me to the me in the real world. I also have a pen name and substitute fake names for
Semantic Web Anyone? (Score:1)
Is this guy serious? (Score:2, Informative)
The problem isn't coming up with systems to name things the problem is how to
associate semantics (i.e. meaning) to the things that are named that allow programs to operate
on them. I think some guy (Berners-Lee or something) has been working on this -:)
Not even wrong (Score:2)
Was it Mencken said something to the effect that people who say they want to save the world really just want to control it?
This is a pathological solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You don't need to know who I am (that is, what skin I inhabit); you only need to know what our relationship is. If I'm the person who put in the highest bid, I'm the one who gets the item. If I'm the one who deposited the money, I'm the one who gets to withdraw it (Swiss Banks understand this--they don't give a dam about
Easy solution (Score:2)
Recycling RDF (Score:2)
The Mark (Score:1)
unique ID is a timestamp... if not for relativity (Score:1)
were it not for that whole relativity thing which always screws things up
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Now all we need to do is find a bar code reader with a fine enough resolution
Sounds familiar... (Score:2)
Didn't they call that Microsoft Passport? Or is that Windows Live ID nowadays?
"The problem of managing identities." Do people really want this "problem" solved?
the human factor (Score:2)
Bruce Sterling Called.... (Score:2)