Upon2020 (archive)
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Migratio Mentium
In the old days, peoples would migrate, creating all sorts of upheaval in the process, including the demise of the Roman Empire. There’s a similar migration going on right now. It has already destroyed entire industries, and keeps rattling the Roman Empires of today. But it is not a Migratio Gentium — a migration of…
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The UBOS Shepherd rules their #IoT Device Flock with a Staff
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how to manage large numbers of intelligent devices in our homes, the #IndieIoT way. Let’s say you pick up two dozen WiFi-enabled motion detectors or thermometers from the store and put them into your home: one or two for each room, hallway, window, attic, dog kennel,…
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Let’s create the Internet of Our Own Things #IndieIoT
Bruce Sterling penned a marvelous, impassioned essay titled “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” a few months ago. ($3.99 at Amazon). He pulls no punches, right from the beginning: The first thing to understand about the “Internet of Things” is that it’s not about Things on the Internet. It’s a code term that…
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The Perfect Surveillance Architecture
If you set out to design the perfect surveillance architecture, what would you come up with? Assume there are no “legacy” issues, and you get to design the entire system for the benefit of the entity that gets to do the surveillance (government, or private sector, doesn’t really matter which). It’s an interesting thought experiment,…
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We need open-source firmware
Kapersky reports that hackers in the “Equation Group” (see Ars Technica coverage) infiltrated the firmware of most major hard drive manufacturers: rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers … on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived…