[opendtv] Re: Lives tangled in growing net
- From: "Dale Kelly" <dalekelly@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:49:18 -0800
"In the 15 years since Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, the life
of almost everyone in the industrialised world has been touched by it."
You mean it wasn't Al Gore? ;~)
-----Original Message-----
From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Ciril Kosorok
Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2009 3:24 PM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Lives tangled in growing net
Lives tangled in growing net
by Sean Dodson
26 January, 2009
What if everything you owned - from appliances to books - was connected to
the internet? Don't laugh, it's already happening, writes Sean Dodson.
Most people, if they bother to think about it at all, probably view the
internet as an agent of profound change. In the 15 years since Tim
Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, the life of almost everyone in the
industrialised world has been touched by it. But just as many of us are
coming to grips with its second stage, the mobile internet, very few are
prepared - perhaps even aware - of the third and most revolutionary phase:
the internet of things.
Sometime between now and 2010, the internet is poised to reach beyond
virtual space and take root in the physical world. According to many
futurist thinkers, almost every object you can see around you carries the
possibility of being connected to the internet. This means that your
domestic appliances, your clothes, your books and your car may one day be
assigned a unique IP address, just as both computers and web pages are
assigned them today, to enable them to talk to each other.
Recently, a coalition of big technology companies, Cisco, Ericsson and Sun
Microsystems among them, formed the Ipso (IP for smart objects) Alliance
with the aim of shaping a set of standards for the coming internet of
things. "We could incorporate internet protocol (IP) into nearly
everything," enthuses Geoff Mulligan, chairman of the Ipso Alliance.
"There's no reason why the internet shouldn't be in every single appliance."
And he should know. Mulligan is one of the original architects of Arpanet,
the proto-network built by the Pentagon that led directly to the wider
internet we all use today. He believes the connection of physical objects to
the internet is the logical next step in its progression. "The whole thing
about IP is that it can run on almost any type of physical media," he
explains.
The days of the internet as we know it are numbered because the present IP
address space - version 4 (usually called IPv4) - is going to hit its limit,
even as early as 2010. It will be replaced by IPv6, which has enough space
for about 3.41038 addresses, or 5x1028 for each of the 6.8 billion of us on
earth. In other words, every human on the planet could have a personal
network the size of today's internet.
One of the reasons the internet needs so much address space is to create
enough room for the internet of things. Already in Japan, cows grazing in
the fields of Hida Takayama have their own IPv6 addresses embedded on
wireless RFID chips beneath their skin. Farmers can now track their
livestock through the growth and distribution process.
In Britain, the first IPv6 applications are likely to be in the control and
sensor networks of expensive industrial machines and then by business
applications, probably in energy management. Mulligan cites the example of
IP-enabled lights that can switch on and off as someone walks along a
corridor, or rooms that are heated only when someone is present.
After that, the internet of things is likely to extend into the home, with a
range of IP-enabled appliances: smoke detectors, fridges, microwaves, water
boilers - almost anything that is at present connected to the power grid is
expected to get an IP address sometime in the future. "Wouldn't it be cool
if your smoke detector goes off and it told all of your gas appliances to
turn off?" Mulligan suggests.
The trouble is that this vision of the smart home has been a staple of
futurologist forecasts for decades and yet failed to become part of daily
life. But what's different this time is the adoption of IP to standardise,
and by extension popularise, a network of "intelligent" devices. Until
recently the thinking has been that the adopters of such technology would be
those keen to geekily control every aspect of their domesticity. But Tony
Lucido, vice-president of marketing at Jennic, the Sheffield manufacturer of
semiconductors and microchips says utility companies - not individuals -
could well drive the early adoption of the internet of things.
"Energy management is becoming a hot topic," he explains. "The first phase
is just displaying the energy usage within the home. The next stage is
remote energy management so that utility companies can find ways to do
load-shedding, [which helps] smooth off the peaks you get in energy usages.
They will offer consumer discounts if they are allowed to control a few
appliances in the home and shut them down for a few minutes during peak
energy usage."
That electricity usage should be the first major domestic application for
the internet of things is something of a poetic beginning. For it was the
late Mark Weiser, the former chief scientist at Xerox Parc, who first
articulated the idea that ordinary household appliances could become
embedded with information technology. For Weiser, information technology was
nothing more than a commodity, like electricity, that would become part of
the fabric of everyday life.
"What a lot of people are doing these days is networking up their
electricity meters in order to display their current energy consumption,"
says Usman Haque, a London-based architect and designer who believes the
internet of things is already here. Last year he launched a web service
called pachube.com, which enables people to connect their devices and share
real-time sensor data with each other.
"I compare it to YouTube but rather than sharing videos, you are sharing
your sensor data," he says.
Since then everything from iceberg weather stations to river height sensing
equipment, to general building management systems have been connected to the
network by a set of enthusiasts eager to experiment.
But, warns Haque, there could be disadvantages too. "It depends whether we
end up treating the internet of things as a system where we become enslaved
to our devices, or whether we treat it as a truly open framework in which we
are putting our devices and machines on to this system in order to
facilitate our existence," he says.
Few experts doubt the internet of things will have a profound effect on the
world but there is no single authority designing it. Talk to any of the
designers and coders building the infrastructure and each will tell you they
have private fears about a world where, as Wired magazine founder Kevin
Kelly recently described it, "the environment is the web". Furthermore, the
internet of things would have no on-off switch. It will arrive
incrementally, one IP-enabled light switch at a time.
In doing so, the internet of things promises to reshape our lives as
fundamentally as the introduction of the railway but with less public
consent or even debate. Before it does arrive, perhaps we could spare a
moment to think what it might mean. One day in the future you might get
assigned your own unique IP number. By then, of course, it will be too late
to complain.
Guardian News & Media
SOURCE:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/digital-life/articles/lives-tangled-in-growing-ne
t/2009/01/24/1232471647772.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
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