IoT, can you hear me now?

Readwrite brings recent news of Sigfox and its plans to provide a low-power, low-bandwidth IoT networking solution built on top of cellar networks. Integrating within an existing infrastructure is a smart move, and funding from some big players definitely helps; from the article:

Sigfox’s network does not require lots of investment to scale.... Samsung, Telefonica, and Intel have invested $150 million into the company...which should give them enough to heavily expand into new countries.

As IoT starts to pick up the pace, Sigfox believes it will see an increase in sales.

Sigfox’s business model appears to target enterprise and industrial users, you won’t use their service to live stream an event, or upload photos. Some stats from their dev page:

  • Up to 12 bytes per message
  • Up to 140 messages per day
  • Six messages per hour

The +/- on this service will likely mirror cellular providers — on the one hand, it’s fantastic to have an option to connect hardware on a world scale; on the other, probably everyone has had at least one negative experience with a cellular provider’s service or contract terms.

This blog tends to focus on developments in data and security, but with the low-bandwidth model of this service, I don’t anticipate a lot of potential to expose personal data. With any smart (exploitable) device on a network, it’s good to proceed after determining 1) the device will benefit from being connected and 2) losing network access to the device for any amount of time won’t be catastrophic.

Data snake eat tail

This recent blog post from the capital is bound to make some heads spin. From the post:

Big data is here to stay; the question is how it will be used: to advance civil rights and opportunity, or to undermine them. [Our organization] is deeply committed to ensuring the Federal government is on the forefront of using technology to advance civil rights and opportunity.

That sounds extremely noble and admirable until you recall the revelations of the a certain organization's phone metadata collection and its constant effort to expand its surveillance powers. 'Big data' has been around for some time now; it was just a matter of time before the organization from the link decided to become publicly-involved.

While some may see this as a validating move, experience tells me differently: more than once I've witnessed people proclaim military standards (milspecs) as some gold standard. While an amount of rigor was appropriate for some previous endeavors -- the space program is a fine example -- this isn't the case.

One of the great things about data and IoT is the freedom to work in a space that doesn't experience the constraints of a field where gov't has already imposed excessive regulations. The industry has flourished with its own set of standards.

IoT's affinity for open source software

I've been a fan of open source software (OSS) for some time now. But ask anyone who's worked with older systems in hardware, and they'll probably tell you the interface was written in proprietary software. My main complaint with proprietary software -- and a common one, I'm sure -- is that it often feels uninspired and sometimes sluggish or dated. It's almost as if more effort is spent on marketing and licensing efforts. And that makes sense; if a customer has locked in a license, there's not a lot to incentivize a company to rapidly develop and release new software.

Not so with the case emerging with IoT, which is seeing an increasing number of OSS stacks, writes readwrite. Compared to proprietary software, OSS is more flexible in terms of end user control, and tend to offer more rapid updates, usually improves quality quickly. From the article:

[W]hile open source will remain a big deal to IoT developers even as the space commercializes, we’re likely to see it embraced more for its quality than for its ideology over time.

What's interesting is the analog between IoT hardware and software -- circuits and fixtures are prototyped from individual components the same way the code base is connected together from various OSS projects. In both cases, the result maximizes control and flexibility. Hopefully the OSS trend in IoT continues.

Explainer: Rule 41 and its dangers

The EFF brings news of an innocuous-sounding — yet Orwellian — Rule 41. The proposal has two main segments; from the article:

The first part of this change would grant authority to practically any judge to issue a search warrant to remotely access, seize, or copy data relevant to a crime when a computer was using privacy-protective tools to safeguard one's location.

The second part...would grant authorization to a judge to issue a search warrant for...infiltrating computers that may be part of a botnet. This means victims of malware could find themselves doubly infiltrated: their computers infected with malware and used to contribute to a botnet, and then government agents given free rein to remotely access their computers as part of the investigation.

This means that any judge in the US — perhaps one with a history of granting warrants without much consideration of evidence — can issue a search warrant for any computer in the world, regardless of jurisdiction. Combine that with the language of the second segment, and this is effectively a rubber-stamp to intrude every connected device on the planet with a single warrant.

Congress has until December 1 of this year to block these changes to Rule 41. See EFF’s write up for an in-depth on the the legal ramifications.