[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-net/2009/01/24/1232471647772.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

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