Internet of Things – Page 4 – Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord

Common meltdown

Ah, indeed a meltdown is approaching; maybe not even of the common kind of just something breaking down in ‘IT’ — the inverted s… hits the fan scenario — but a larger-scale one. Being the lack of budget / approval for IT staff to do continuous education of all sorts. [As in here, in Dutch.]
Which will inevitably lead to ever larger of the small- to midsize collapses mentioned, possibly one triggering the other till past the critical point where the chain reaction feedback loop switches from negative to positive.

By which time it will be too late, much too late, to hyperventilatingly engage in counteractions. Both against the root cause problems in IT, as in the edjucayzional category within those. Because, au fond, so many of IT’s ails were and are, increasingly, driven by lack of (continued) education. Causing problems in the user’s specs (at the highest levels) and subsequently, 2nd Law of thermodynamics, spawning all of the subsequent complexity developing into unmanageability, and error stacking that breeds like viruses.

Even more poignantly in InfoSec corners. You know, the outposts of IT — yes, yes, I know that the I is of so much greater import than the T but get real, instead of 20% InfoSec is 85-95% T still, these days ..! — where the real commandos and fancy-dancy ‘Delta teams’/SEALs operate.

Can we all please get our act together ..? If we don’t turn this supertanker around quickly, we don’t even need to bother about global warming because we’ll have no industrialised world to worry about…

Après nous la deluge …

[Mosquito hunt; Edinburg]

C’est arrivé près de chez vous; LoRaWAN

Yet another major building block of the Future … in place. [And, not a ref to some City of Light atrocities]
Where’s the Privacy and (OR) Security experts …? For certainly, though almost out of public view, the undercurrents develop fast, into a maelstrom — I’d like it even more in this form — of possibilities; to be abused before being controlled, as has always been the case throughout history.

Oh well, can’t stop Progress, certainly not of the Technology kind… But one can hope we (sic or huh?) the Concerned will be in sufficient numbers to be able to and to be allowed to insert the appropriate controls into the whole shazam.
Like, you know,

[Or is this an Tocqueville’ian opposite ..?]

Comparatively innovative (Beetleroot)

There was this quite simple hack; in (very) pseudo-code: If 2-wheels Then { Rollerbank; diss up some fancy figures; }
Which calls to mind the Problem of BIOS hacking / backdoor/malware pre-installing, as explained here.

On the one hand, a solution is available: At a sublimated information level, encode, as here. In the physical, car, scenario this would be readily implementable as: Just test the emissions, not rely on data produced by the system itself. Prepared By Client is used pervasively in accounting (financial auditing part) as well so consider yourselves warned…
On the other hand [there always is another hand it seems, possibly because this is real life], in the VW scenario there will probably also be a call for source code reviews. Or at least, from the software development corners, there will be. But then one ends up in the same situation as spelled out in the Bury post: How to verify the verification and not be double-crossed? A source code review would be one part, but how to compare a clean (pun not intended at time of typing) compile / image to what is actually installed (continued, without change-upon-install-to-dirty-version or change-at-service) throughout in the field?

Another issue from this: How to overrule self-driving (or what was it; fully-autonomous) cars ..? The BIOS-hack and Car examples show some intricacies when (not if) one would have a need to overrule near-future “Sorry Dave, I can’t Do That” situations. Once no physical controls are left to take over manually, … Arrmagerrdon. Yes, that 2001 was a rosy, romantic, not horror scenario. And demonstrating that at a comprehensive abstraction level, Prevention still trumps Detection/Correction. But not by much, and the advantage will slip by careless negligence and deliberate deterioration efforts.

Oh well. We all knew that All Is Lost anyway, And then, this:

[(digi)10mm wasn’t wide enough to capture the immersion in this… Noto again]

Vendors pitchin’ — reality’s b… moving elsewhere

Was reminded today that still, a great many vendors in the (Info)Security arena are pitching their worn-out warez to a laggerd crowd — or is it just me to see that, in particular where IAM is concerned, all eyes are still on some vault idea of data storage and systems, behind some mirage of a perimeter of the ‘data center’ (as it is presented ..!).
Luckily, I met this old friend of mine of Zscaler that see that today’s access and wider security concerns are over Cloud (storage, services) and Users (out there, anywhere). How nice would it be if not too much time would be wasted anymore on the classical, outdated (sic) model(s) and we’d all move to this new world ..?

This, for your viewing pleasure:

[Watching the ships go by, Amsterdam]

Chronology of the birth of the information society ..?

A shout-out for pointers; as Chris Anderson noted in Makers, Western society had a breakthrough in the … 18th ..? century when patents were invented.
As they signified the realization that intellectual ideas, innovations, are actually things in themselves, existing outside of physical reality. As first step on the road to Singularity. [Oh, philosophers already had the nous idea and maths; but those alien ideas didn’t get the societal traction that inventions did … (?)]
Notwithstanding (heh: ) that patents might go the way of the scaffolding under an arch: once the keystone is placed, the scaffolding can go. Once the Information Society stands on its own, patents may go ..!?
And, there’s a separate? line from ‘programming’ labour into machines powered by humans through implementation of tools etc. (spears and onwards) via ‘programming’ through implementation of machines proper, to programmable machines, to general purpose programmable ‘computers’ and now in some catch-up wave, taking all of IoT on board and moving waaay past, into programmable human minds (psychology-as-a-science driven brainwashing; was around since the dawn of time, now can be done still buggy, somewhat (sic) reliably), past humans into Watson And Friends. With such brain (sic) power, who needs friends ..?

But this all was just some ad lib rambling. What I am looking for, is actual studies into these phenomena, preferably not Hegel-oriented… Any ideas, pointers?

And this:

[Oh the days of Machine… Amsterdam]

Blown over — smart dust or where is it?

In all the news about IoT, where has the (admittedly far-flung) prediction about ‘smart dust’ gone ..? Where has the smart dust gone? Was it a wormhole glimpse into the future, was it some runaway brainstorm on steroids (or other stimulative substance) session’s result ..?
Where still, it looms in the background. Once information is created, will it remain in the universe, existing without a result (as it may or may not have a cause, the rebel against entropy that it is)? (Here I go in similar vein, not stimulated!)

Now, let’s first have actual working quantum computers. Similarly vague at inception and counter-intuitive — for which reason I believe it will turn out to have logical fallacies in its current models so will in the end not be feasible to realise ..! —, let that come first. In itself, already difficult enough to cope with, as a global society.

Afterwards, smart dust will look like a rough cut piece of cake, probably. But maybe the Problems of it, will stil be Hard (compute-complexity-wise), as here and elsewhere.

And this, for your blue pill:
20150911_143851
[Excellent or mundane archi; but with sublime acoustics — second (to) one in Amsterdam!]

Trivial TLA Things-Tip

If you Thought This Time Things would be easier, as the universality of plug-‘n-play has spread beyond even the wildest early dreams into the realms of the unthought-of non-thinkingness, think again. Drop the again. Think. That was IBM’s motto, and they created Watson. No surprises there.
However… It may come as a surprise to some that now, an actual TLA has some actual tips, to keep you safe(r). As in this. Who would have thought… On second thought, this agency of note might have no need for the access disabled themselves anymore, as they’ve provided themselves of sufficient other access (methods) by now and just want to hinder the (foreign) others out of their easy access ..?

Oh well, never can do well, right? And this:

[Another one from the cathedral of dry feet — only after, making sticking fingers in dykes worthwhile; at Lynden, Haarlemmermeer]

Drones are the new tablets

It’s obvious once you think about it (which admittedly may or may not be obvious in your case) —

Desktop sales rebound a bit, on new (‘large’, expensive-)chip performance;
Tablet sales a sagging as they turn out to be too slow, and the ‘keyboard’ size and control pads turn out to be insufficient for all but casual browsing. Though highest-end specs may suffice, almost;
But at the lower end they’re overtaken by notephones;
And, at the higher end, 2-in-1 laptops shrink with all their convenience and power on board (SSD mem…) to (better) serve the nomads (than till now);
Unexplored newness (post-retro-hipster, though a lot of ppl around may have missed a couple of trend switches probably due to being sheeple anyway) is now in Drones. Of all sorts:
- Not just cam pics/vids of the casual kind,
- We’ll see an array of submarkets springing up,
- E.g., photography: Think about all the much-better tilt-shifted [No. No. NO! Not the crapcam idiot-filter kind!] pics of any environment, including cityscapes and high(sic)rise architecture,
- Or the pro-am sports event coverage that can improve so much (except for the actual pros — they may lose their margin),
- And industrial inspection may be much easier if done right; replacing bulky dangerous man-manned choppers etc. — see the text of this!
- Lots of variants are out there, still; no market rationalisation in action (yet),
- No easy Eple version being in sight. That could only have the functionality that sheeple can handle; two simple push buttons: ‘Take-off’ and ‘Crash’,
- All this, especially since safety issues (and privacy maybe, huh) may mean full freedom may not be feasible in the end — leaving the drone thing to techies (those that have a developed feel for tech, not the weaklings that have grown up thinking math was hard b/c they didn’t want to put in any effort into anything let alone hard learning stuff and were left free by their ‘I live like my kids are an accessory’ too stupid to should have been allowed to be parents). Where techies just don’t grow the market into early adoptor/early majority sizes quickly.

Oh well, I made my point. I hope. Anything to add ..? Like:

[This is a test: If you don’t know what that is, you’re disallowed to operate a drone for obnoxious ignorance]

Tempting Under-30’s

It dawned, suddenly. The ubiquity of lists of Under 30 mil/billionaires, where they live, etc. All that attention – Why? Jealousy? Maybe, (most) partially that is the lure for attention.
[Note that it dawned only. If you’d find this post a bit … imperfect, that would be a. impossible ’cause it’s mine, b. as the thaw hadn’t dried up, c. in particular on socmed not very much elsewhere. If unsure always go for b.]

For one thing, the Under 30 list phenomenon is real and annoying.
For another, it shows the slightly less-than-full-witted to be the target audience – how else to explain the ’30’ cut-off ..? Age isn’t even a number, it’s a word. And why so fixated? … Ah, because:
It (the lists/phenomenon) serves as teaser, as bait, for the gullible (‘slightly-less-than’) to work their … off, even accepting nothing but a vaporware share (‘points’ anyone?) of the mirage. So that the ones that stay behind the screens, the Powers That Be can reap the benefits. It doesn’t even help to have experience; most don’t learn from that anyway as practice shows.
And it creates a sense of urgency, when one inevitably gets closer to the 30 mark so quickly. To not be a failure, hurry up even more armagerrd the pressure to be Creative!
And then find that sane people might be as creative, or even more so, at all later ages as well. My guess: The early fast burners are exhausted by their 40s and have nothing left to rekindle [or, maybe they have, if they’d try really really hard], when the percentage of as-yet untapped innovation and disruption capable people does not go down except when stuck in dumbing-down moronic work (factory, office..!). The ones that escape, have more! Both an urge, a cropped-up primordial energy, and experience to effectively and efficiently release it. Some hope for Yours Truly, then.

So, we weren’t surprised when this came along. IoT not invented in Silly Valley. Because that is where all the minions are doing the hard mind work. Whereas IoT relies heavily on old tertiairy industry and at the same time doesn’t require the totalitarian unphysical-labour-only approach of the Valley. The mindset-disconnect is why IoT hasn’t taken more flight yet; one needs both the less-than-exponentially-exploding developments from everywhere-but and the ‘disruption’-labelled somewhat-faster business model innovations together whereas still, the disconnect is too much of a sea (baha) to be parted-is-connected by some Steve type.

[Morning fog still there. I’ll pause now.]

[Boating, banking style @ Zuid-As. Oh stop it! Not literally as a utterly wasted money pit sailing yacht – Dutch invention in two ways… – but figuratively in more ways than two.
In the background left: Not symphony but simple.onetrickpony…]

Keezel: Online freedom

Now, biting my nails awaiting delivery …