Over the last month I’ve been struggling with the Internet of Things. My scale has an internet connection, my TV has an internet connection, my toe has an internet connection and soon my watch will have an internet connection and managing the WIFI passwords and connectivity was a Pain-in-the-Ass.
I kept telling my wife that we need a better solution.
Turns out two very interesting technology trends are going to radically remake the internet of things.
The first is that 4G LTE chips are really cheap. For those not in the know, it used to be the case that building a chip that could do cellular was black-magic, but with 4G LTE this is no longer the case. Thus the how do I connect to the internet is really a how do I make a cellular call and that’s a much simpler user experience.
The second is that BlueTooth LE is transformative. If you think about the internet of things, the things are actually generating a small amount of data very frequently or infrequently. For devices that don’t have enough power to justify placing a 4G LTE chip, BlueTooth LE is a really interesting alternative. BlueTooth LE, if you believe the marketing buzz, will allow a device to transmit longer than the life time of the battery without requiring a battery replacement. Given the range of BlueTooth LE and the existence of the ultimate BlueTooth LE receiver – your cell phone, I can totally imagine a combination of BlueTooth LE talking transparently to your cell phone and your cell phone talking transparently to the internet to transmit the data.
The core objection I had to Internet of Things seems to be addressable with existing technology that is going to market right now.
Cool.
But is this such a good thing?
One of the problems with the “Internet of Things” is that many embedded devices are horribly insecure and are very difficult or impossible to patch. Yeah, it may be cool to have your scale automatically post your weight to your fitness blog or whatever… until some script kiddies pwn your unpatchable scale and use it to start posting links to shock sites or whatever on your blog instead.
BlueToothLE may address some of these concerns… I just don’t know enough about that particular protocol to see if it makes a difference or not.
Frankly, despite some of the conveniences offered by the Internet of Things, I have no plans to ever use these features of all (or at least the vast majority) of my gadgets. It reminds me of the time when I was replacing a broken garage door opener in my home. The installer asked if I wanted the “internet hookup upgrade” and I was like “No way in hell. I am not going to allow a scenario where hackers could remotely open my garage door and then walk right into my house to steal my stuff.”
Excellent points, Lou. And yes security will be key to this whole success.
A lot of machine-to-machine however is not in your home. It’s in remote sensors that today require a human to go read.
Consider the fridge in a convenience store that needs to send an update to home base if it’s been off or flakey. Now with machine-to-machine communications that becomes possible.
The real, transformative, win is not with computers but with an endless barrage of remote sensors that allow us to monitor the real world vastly more efficiently than before.
Not clear that that is a good thing either 😉
That’s a very good point about the sensors, like the convenience store fridge.
I’d argue that such machine-to-machine communication probably shouldn’t take place over the pubic internet at large, but either over a private hardline (prohibitively expensive for the most common cases) or a VPN of some sort. Of course, I’m sure you’d agree with me here. 🙂
Right now, there are serious, serious security issues with many of these remote sensors, however. Browsing any sort of computer security database will come up with tons of vulnerabilities in SCADA (the current standard for these sorts of industrial monitoring devices) devices. Unfortunately, the engineers who developed these devices, while presumably very skilled and knowledgeable in sensor design, aren’t quite so knowledgeable in security. Many of them have networking features bolted on with such severe faux pas as unchangable default passwords and whatnot just because someone at some point said, “Wouldn’t it be neat if our process sensor could connect back to the main office over the internet?” without thinking through all the possible problems with that.
At least there is awareness about the problem now, so hopefully between security researchers and the engineers developing those devices, the security problems in current implementations and designs will be cleaned up before they become truly widespread.
(Sorry about talking so much about this — I’ve kinda been on a security bug recently and have been reading/listening/etc. to a lot of stories about these sorts of problems).