Welcome to Exploring Computing.
Today's video is the internet of things.
So as I suggested at the end of the last video
when we were talking about mesh edge and fog computing,
more and more devices that are not
thought of as traditional computing devices
are being put onto the internet.
And this network of nontraditional computing
devices is sometimes referred to as the internet of things.
And so let's take a quick look at some examples of devices
that fit onto the internet of things
so you have a better sense of exactly what I'm talking about.
I think as a consumer, probably the most likely place that you
are to run it to these devices are
in the concept of a smart home.
So if you've got a smart light bulb, for example,
that would be considered internet of things.
Why would you want a smart light bulb?
Well, if you have smart light bulbs,
you can control their colors.
So if you've ever shopped for light bulbs,
there's the, do you want the bright white,
do you want the soft white, do you want the warm white?
Well, if you've got a smart light bulb,
you can just change the rating on the fly.
If you're like, oh, I have some friends coming over,
I want to make it a little bit warmer,
or I'm trying to do some artwork on the table
and I want to have pure white light so I know exactly what it
is I'm drawing, great, I'll go ahead and crank that up.
And you can also control the light bulbs
for if you're remote and you're not there,
and you want to make it look like you're there,
you can control those remotely.
And so there's a bunch of potential reasons
what you might want to have smart light bulbs.
As to whether or not it's worth it to have smart light bulbs
and what security risks are, well, that's up to you.
We'll talk about security risks a little bit
later in this lecture.
You can have sensors connected to the internet.
These can be combined with smart speakers, for example.
So if you've got a house with smart speakers and sensors,
as you move from one room to the next,
it can turn the speakers on and off,
and the music that you're playing
could follow you around from one room to another.
Thermostats can be connected to the internet where
you can process the data and control it again remotely
and do some analytics on it.
So there's a variety of different devices
that are being connected to the internet,
and I suspect this trend will continue
and more and more devices will just seem natural.
Your kids will probably think it's totally normal,
whereas I'm still a little weirded out
we have smart light bulbs.
All right, here's another example
of the internet of things.
This is probably one of the best uses I've seen.
So when I was in the Stanford dorms as a resident fellow,
they actually put the washers and dryers onto the internet.
And so this was actually really handy, because it meant that--
usually the washer, dryers are all in the basement,
they were in the first floor for our building.
But if you're in your room and you want to know whether or not
you can do your laundry, you just check the internet page
and it's like, hey, dryers one and four are available.
So great, you go grab your laundry,
you drag it downstairs, you know that there's
an available washer there.
And it's also pretty handy in terms
of seeing when your loads are going to be done,
so you can check in and it'll say,
oh, you put your clothes in washer number four,
and number four has 15 minutes left.
So I thought this is pretty handy,
and you can imagine in a big building, or a building
where there's a lot of use of the washer and dryer
and it's hard getting access to them, having this information
actually is quite handy.
Transportation is another area where
we're getting more and more internet of things
types of capabilities.
So just in a car, clearly the navigation system
or the entertainment system, that
could be part of the internet.
And in fact, many of us just use our cell phones
for that, so that is part of the internet.
There's some discussion on whether the engines
and actuators for things like controlling
how the engine works, whether or not those should be
part of the internet of things.
I think there are some potential concerns with security
in terms of everything in the car as part of the internet.
I think it makes it a little bit easier to hack.
You can have the cars communicating with each other,
so each of the individual cars could be part of the internet.
And this actually could be really
useful in terms of [? looking ?] at different data, like Waze
does right now where all the cars are talking to each other,
and so they can tell each other what the traffic
conditions are.
So one of them could say, hey, I was just going across the Bay
Bridge 15 minutes ago.
You don't want to go that way, it's just a complete nightmare,
go a different direction.
You can embed sensors into the roadways
and turn the roadways into smart systems,
and then using the internet, they could talk to the cars.
Here's another really cool use of the internet.
You can have smart parking meters
where if you're looking for a space,
all the parking meters are part of a network
and they all have little sensors telling whether or not
they're available.
And you can just be like, hey, I need a parking space.
Where is the nearest parking space
that is currently available?
And it'll connect in with your smartphone,
and you just look on your little map
and you go to that parking space.
I think that's really cool.
You can also connect it into paying
remotely, being reminded, hey, you've only
got five more minutes on the meter,
do you want to put out a little bit more money there
and get another half hour or another hour?
So I think some of these can be potentially quite useful.
So another area where the internet can be used
is in industrial processes, and this actually
forms a separate area that's sometimes
referred to as the industrial internet of things.
So we can take a standard industrial process
and start instrumenting it by adding
different things in that process onto the internet.
We can add sensors that are on the internet,
we can have controllers that can actually
be actuated via the network, we can control inventory
management using RFID tags.
I'll talk about those in a little bit more detail
in a minute.
If you've got a fleet of vehicles,
we can connect them all to the internet
and keep track of those, and I will
have to say personally I'm fond of delivery vehicles which
are on the internet and we can see where they're coming,
mostly because delivery often has big trouble finding
my apartment, and so knowing when they're in the area
is actually pretty useful for me.
And we can control, we can add security
like motion sensors, cameras, and lights onto the internet
as well.
So these are all areas that they're certainly
moving into this area, and I think, again, we'll
see more and more of this.
All right, let's go back to this idea of RFIDs.
These are radio frequency IDs.
Generally, the devices with the RFIDs themselves
are not part of the internet, but the devices
reading the RFIDs will be part of the internet of things.
So an RFID is similar to a barcode.
So if you've been to the grocery store,
and I'm sure you've all been to the grocery store
at one point or another, there's little barcodes
that they use to run at the checkout stand
to see what the particular item that you're purchasing is
and what the price of them is.
That's the barode, and so an RFID
is very similar to a barcode in that it provides
a unique number, or a number that's
associated with a particular product,
but the difference between an RFID and a barcode
is that we need to optically scan the barcode,
whereas for the RFID, I don't need to optically scan it.
I just need that RFID tag to be within a certain distance
of my RFID reader.
And the actual distance for the RFID reader
does vary depending on-- there's a bunch of different competing
standards, but on the low end, you
can read the RFID tag from about a meter away.
And at the high end, you could actually read them
as far as 200 meters away.
And in a lot of cases, the RFIDs don't actually
have their own power.
They're going to be triggered remotely by the device that's
scanning the area for them.
So one of the most compelling scenarios
I've heard for using RFID is inventory management.
So currently, if you've ever been in a store
or you've been part of the staff of a store that's
doing inventory, you've got all the employees out
and they're running around down each
of the aisles pulling all the items off the shelf
and counting them all up.
And it's an extremely time-consuming measure,
and it's annoying and time-consuming.
Well, with an RFID on each of the items,
you don't need to do that anymore.
All you need to do is you need to take
an employee with an RFID reader and just walk down
each of the aisles of the stores,
and the RFID reader will ask each of the boxes
on the shelves, hey, what's your ID number,
and it'll count them all up, and you'll be done.
So inventory counting will go from a huge undertaking
to a very simple, quick undertaking.
The main reason why we aren't doing this right
now is the RFID prices are still a little bit too high.
The low end is around $0.10 per RFID,
so if we were to do this at the grocery store
or at the drugstore, it would add $0.10 to the cost of all
the items.
And so that's still fairly high, but the first time
I gave this lecture, it was actually $0.15 per RFID,
so it does seem to be coming down in value.
And you can imagine once it's down to a couple of pennies
per item, it's probably going to be worth it to switch over.
OK, so there are some concerns to note
about the internet of things.
One of them is, how are these devices
connecting to the internet?
So most of the devices we use that connect to the internet
either use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Wi-Fi,
takes a fair amount of energy.
So that's problematic unless this device is actually
plugged in.
There is a Bluetooth Low Energy standard,
and so this is the choice for a lot
of internet of things devices.
This also potentially adds a lot more devices to the internet.
So if you start counting up how many devices you already have,
I'm sure you have a laptop, you've got a cell phone,
you might have a tablet, I do.
You might have a bunch of game consoles,
your television might connect to the internet.
So that's a fair number of devices,
but once we start adding a whole bunch of other devices,
your oven's connected to the internet,
your refrigerator's connected to the internet,
your heaters are connected to the internet,
it starts adding up pretty quickly
and we are already running out of IPv4 numbers.
So this would really accelerate the move to IPv6.
You'll recall from our discussion on the internet
that IPv4 uses a set of four numbers between 0 and 255,
and that there aren't enough numbers using that standard.
So IPv6 is a standard with many, many more combinations.
You hear Maddie barking in the background
because there's a dog outside that's barking
and she's all excited about that.
OK, the other concern about internet of thing,
and I guess this goes along with Maddie barking there,
is that I think there's a lot of security concerns with internet
of things.
And there's a bunch of reasons why
you should be particularly careful
with the internet of things.
One issue is that a lot of times, the internet of things,
they're trying to keep the device cost down.
So any time you're keeping the cost down,
that means you're potentially shortchanging your security,
and so that is a bit of a concern.
I think another reason why I have concerns
about the internet of things is a lot
of times, the cool internet of things stuff
that comes out at--
somebody has this idea for, hey, wouldn't it
be great if this device was on the internet?
And so they go ahead and set it up,
but they don't actually have any security people.
They aren't familiar with security issues on their own,
and maybe they don't have the money
to hire somebody who's a specialist in security.
So I would say be cautious.
If you see some random Kickstarter, and you're like,
that seems like a really cool idea
but it connects the internet, do you
trust them to have good security?
You also need to remember to update your internet of things
devices, and this isn't something
that a lot of consumers are thinking about.
I mean, who thinks about keeping their light bulbs
updated all the time?
So let's take a look at a couple examples where internet
of things devices have failed.
So smart light bulbs have been hacked,
and you might be thinking, well, if somebody
takes over my light bulb, what's the worst that can happen?
But these are considered potential ways
to get around your security.
If you can hack somebody's light bulb remotely,
you are now in their internal home internet.
And so that may give them access to things
and make it easier to access things
that you don't want them to, whereas, if they have
to go directly through your router,
your router might actually have better security.
So one suggestion that I've seen is
that you can keep your internet of things devices
on a guest network.
So a lot of Wi-Fi routers have a guest network and then
a regular network, and so you could
put your internet of things devices on your guest network,
although that may impact the convenience of accessing them
and exactly what you can or can't do with them.
Internet of things cameras have also
been found vulnerable to hacking.
So if you've got that camera in your home,
think about where you're placing it,
think about what would happen if a hacker were
able to get access to it.
I know a lot of security experts who
have the cameras on their laptops covered up.
One internet of things company's smart locks actually bricked
when they did an update.
In this case, it bricked such that the locks were always
open.
It's unclear to me whether that's
better or worse than having the locks always locked.
But yeah, people were not able to lock their homes,
so that's a problem.
And I think internet of things also provides
a lot of privacy concerns.
So well, I think the internet of things,
there's a lot of cool, interesting, fun stuff
that's coming out related to the internet of things,
and I'm sure we're going to see more and more of these things
as we move forward, do be a little bit cautious.
Think about who these different companies are
that are creating these devices, and whether or not you
trust them to have good security,
and whether or not you think that they're
concerned about your privacy.
All right, that's it for today.
I'll talk to you all soon.