Internet of Things

This is a post I started and never posted.  It is somewhat incomplete but enjoy!  Note, I am back from an extended time away due to some surgery I had in July!

From Wikipedia:  "The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure. The term Internet of Things was proposed by Kevin Ashton in 1999 though the concept has been discussed since at least 1991.

Just how big is the IOT?  According to this article, the CEO of Cisco, John Chambers said that the IOT could be a $19 trillion market.  Yes, that's a T for TRILLION.

One interesting player is the White Space Alliance (http://www.whitespacealliance.org/)....

The Weightless SIG (http://www.weightless.org/) is another interesting project.

Linux and open source WILL be critical to the success of IOT.  Linux is widely used in embedded and network-edge devices and this is complementary to IOT.

There can be a downside to the IOT, of course.  Imagine a botnet of thousands or millions of devices used for an attack.  A million appliances could make a very useful DOS attack on a company.  It's not SiFi as television sets and a refrigerator may have already been used in a botnet.  The recent heartbleed bug is not only in servers but Android phones and even network devices built by Cisco and Juniper.

Note I designed a very early system of protocols for a fleet management and stolen vehicle system based on an Internet-like structure in 1992-1993 while at METS.  This system included vehicles talking to towers via radio, tower internal coms via serial, and the tower controller talking to centralized computers and resources via TCP/IP.  I wonder how that could have evolved had it been built and deployed....