by Marc Goodman
The dealership purchased a new technological tool from the Cleveland-based Pay Technologies that promised a far superior alternative to the confrontational repossessions of yesteryear. Pay Technologies’ product was known as the WebTeckPlus, a system that allowed car dealers to install “a small black box, about the size of a deck of cards, cleverly concealed underneath a vehicle’s dashboard.” The devices were controlled remotely via a central Web site that relayed signals over a wireless network to the cars’ black boxes. When activated, the signal allowed the dealership to “disable a car’s ignition system or trigger the horn to begin honking,” a nice, if not too subtle, way to remind owners their payment was overdue. Texas Auto Center began slowly installing the boxes in its entire fleet, and before long more than eleven hundred cars had the system in place. In charge of administering the new high-tech repo management system was Omar Ramos-Lopez, a young credit collector at the dealership with an affinity for technology.
All seemed to work well with the new system until February 2010, when suddenly a few of Texas Auto Center’s customers’ cars just stopped running and would not restart. They had no idea why. A check of company records indicated that the clients were all current with their payments. Throughout the day, the number of complaints began to increase, and by the fifth day more than a hundred owners had flooded the dealership with their irate grievances. What was going on?
Customers throughout Texas suddenly had their cars bricked, completely un-drivable and unable to start. Randomly, in the middle of the night horns began honking out of control around the city of Austin, and police were called with numerous noise complaints. When the cops arrived, they discovered the horns could not be shut off until physically disconnected from their car battery cables. Worse, these hundred customers found themselves without transportation, forced to miss work and desperately needed paychecks.
Though the incident was initially dismissed as a “systemic mechanical failure,” something much more nefarious was at play. An intruder illegally accessed Texas Auto Center’s Web-based remote vehicle immobilization system and one by one began turning off their customers’ cars throughout the city. Attempts by the dealership to turn the cars back on were stymied because the hacker had also altered the records in its database, changing vehicle identification numbers and replacing the names of legitimate customers with those of celebrities, such as the long-dead rapper Tupac Shakur and the pop star Jennifer Lopez.
Clearly something was amiss, and eventually suspicions fell upon twenty-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, who had been fired from the dealership in the days prior to the widespread vehicular paralysis for “not meeting company standards.” Law enforcement officials alleged Ramos-Lopez used his knowledge of his former employer’s system and the password of a former co-worker to exact revenge for his firing by disabling cars en masse throughout Austin. The police investigation showed that the former collection agent logged in to Pay Technologies’ servers in Ohio from the AT&T broadband network leading to his home. Ramos-Lopez was arrested and charged with felony breach of a computer system.
As for Texas Auto Center, it is far from unique in its decision to install remote repo-man technology in its vehicles; today there are more than two million cars with the technology. But as we shall see later, there are tens of millions of vehicles around the world that can be controlled one way or another online, with thousands more being added to the global information grid every day. With such black boxes installed in more and more automobiles, it is becoming increasingly clear that there may be more back doors in your car than you ever realized.
Where the Wireless Things Are
Throughout the short history of modern computing, we have come to think of computers as big boxes of one size or another. In the 1950s, a single computer occupied an entire building. By the 1970s, a mainframe computer had been reduced to the size of a refrigerator. The 1980s brought the personal desktop computer and the 1990s the introduction of the laptop. At the turn of the millennium, mobile phone usage exploded, and by 2007 Steve Jobs had given the world his iPhone, a small but powerful handheld computer. As always, Moore’s law marches on, but in the very near future our concept of what constitutes a computer will be blown away as the boxes that have always caged the processor disappear and we enter the reign of ubiquitous computing.
Unlike the stationary desktops of yesteryear, the post-PC era promises a world in which computer processing will take place anywhere, everywhere, and in all things. We are already well into this transition. Laptop sales supplanted desktop sales back in 2005, and in 2015 the number of tablets, such as the iPad, sold worldwide will outstrip sales of desktops and laptops combined. In 2014, we saw more cell phones in use than people on the planet. Of course the smart phones and tablets in our homes have company, joined by gaming consoles, DVRs, cable boxes, and smart TVs, all networked and connected online. But a stroll down the aisles of a local retailer such as Best Buy, Lowe’s, or Home Depot reveals yet another trend already under way. At these stores and elsewhere online, a whole new array of digital devices are vying for a position on our home networks—things such as Internet-enabled thermostats, lightbulbs, music speakers, baby monitors, and security systems. Together they represent the first steps in a rapidly emerging new paradigm of computing known as the Internet of Things (IoT), and when it takes off, it may very well change the world we live in forever.
The Pew Research Center defines the Internet of Things as “a global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment built through the continued proliferation of smart sensors, cameras, software, databases, and massive data centers in a world-spanning information fabric.” The term was first coined in 1999 by the MIT researcher Kevin Ashton, who, when working on a project for Procter & Gamble, realized that “if all the objects in daily life were equipped with identifiers and wireless connectivity, these objects could communicate with each other and be managed by computers.…‘If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost.’ ” Ashton’s concept was both simple and powerful and had a major impact on manufacturers and retailers like Walmart, dramatically improving their supply chain management and cutting costs for consumers. Back in 1999, however, the technology did not exist to make the IoT a reality outside very controlled environments, such as factory warehouses. Today that has changed, and a confluence of developments has come together to enable major leaps forward in the world of ubiquitous computing, allowing for the first time the widespread “embedding of miniature computers in objects and connecting them to the Internet using wireless technology.” Indeed, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, as of 2004, human beings were producing more transistors than grains of rice—and at a cheaper cost.
Thanks to advances in circuitry, software, and miniaturization, it is possible to build an Internet of Things whose devices fall broadly into one of two categories: sensors and microcontrollers. Microcontrollers are tiny programmable computer processors measuring just millimeters across. They are low-powered, ultracheap computer chips, some as small as the head of a pin, that can be built and embedded in an infinite number of devices, some for mere pennies. These miniature computing devices only need milliwatts of electricity and thus can run for years on a minuscule battery or small solar cell. As a result, it is now possible to make “a Web server that fits on (or in) a fingertip for $1.”
These microchips will receive data from a near-infinite range of sensors, minute devices capable of monitoring anything that can possibly be measured and recorded, including temperature, power, location, hydroflow, radiation, atmospheric pressure, acceleration, rotation, magnetic force, altitude, sound, and video. This global array of sensors will allow us to perceive, analyze, and interact with the world around us as never before humanly possible. Once gathered, these data will not sit idle but rather be processed by a bevy of new IoT microcontr
ollers such as those mentioned above—miniature switches, actuators, valves, servos, turbines, and engines—all capable of autonomously interacting with the physical world around them. Thus, for example, when a sensor detects excessive temperature or pressure in a gas pipeline, its microcontroller receiving the information will be preprogrammed to react by shutting down or rerouting the flow of natural gas, thereby averting a catastrophic explosion.
Expansive growth in high-speed wireless data networks will allow these sensors to speak to the world using a variety of communications protocols and technologies such as Wi-Fi, broadband, GSM, CDMA, Bluetooth, radio-frequency identification (RFID), near-field communication (NFC), ZigBee, Z-Wave, and power lines. They will communicate not only with the broader Internet but with each other, generating unfathomable amounts of machine-to-machine (M2M) data, which will be stored and processed at greater speed and lower cost thanks to cloud computing and its near-unlimited data storage capabilities. The result will be an always-on “global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment,” a mere prelude to the tidal wave of change coming next.
However, one thing had to be fixed first—the basic communications protocol that routes nearly all traffic on the Internet. The backbone of today’s Internet runs on what is known as Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4). The communications architecture has been around since 1981 and provides for about 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device. Back when IPv4 was introduced in the late 1970s, nobody could have imagined that 4.3 billion addresses would be insufficient to meet the demands of the very few major universities and corporations that were online back then. Yet today the unthinkable has happened: we’re out of Internet addresses. Just as New York City needed to create new area codes when it ran out of 212 phone numbers to serve its residents, so too has the Internet.
The Internet’s answer to this problem is IPv6, which will supplant IPv4 and profoundly increase the size of addressable space available online. The new protocol resolves this problem by increasing the length of the “phone number” from 32 bits to 128 bits. Mathematically, IPv4 can only support about 232 or 4.3 billion connections. IPv6, on the other hand, can handle 2128 or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 connections. The implications of a number this large are mind-boggling. There are only 1019 grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. That means IPv6 would allow each grain of sand to have a trillion IP addresses. In fact, there are so many possible addresses with IPv6 that every single atom on our planet could receive a unique address and we would “still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.” It is in the wake of these changes that the Internet of Things will be born.
To help put these gigantic numbers in perspective, we can think of today’s Internet metaphorically as about the size of a golf ball. Tomorrow’s will be the size of the sun. That means that within the coming years, not only will every computer, phone, and tablet be online, but so too will every car, house, dog, bridge, tunnel, cup, clock, watch, pacemaker, cow, streetlight, bridge, tunnel, pipeline, toy, and soda can. Though in 2013 there were only thirteen billion online devices, Cisco Systems has estimated that by 2020 there will be fifty billion things connected to the Internet, with much more room for exponential growth thereafter. As all of these devices come online and begin sharing data with one another, they will bring with them massive improvements in logistics, employee efficiency, supply chain operations, energy consumption, customer service, and personal productivity.
As noted previously, Metcalfe’s law dictates that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of nodes or computers attached. As IPv6 adds 340 undecillion (340 trillion trillion trillion) new potential nodes to the global information grid, the concomitant explosion in economic value will be incalculable. The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the innovation enabled across multiple sectors by the Internet of Things is expected to drive as much as an additional $6.2 trillion in value to the global economy by 2025. The IoT may very well be where the next Google, Facebook, or Apple is found, and the number of sensors, consumer devices, and industrial control systems online has already surpassed the number of mobile phones. Early entrants to the IoT such as Fitbit, Jawbone, Oculus Rift, Withings, Estimote, and Sonos have generated significant buzz and market valuation. Indeed, one such firm, the smartthermostat company Nest Labs, was acquired in 2014 for an astounding $3.2 billion just 854 days after the launch of its first product. And while there is undoubtedly big money to be made in the IoT, its social implications may even outstrip its economic impact.
Imagining the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is a way of saying that more of the world will become part of the network … We are assimilating more and more of the world into the computer.
GORDON BELL, MICROSOFT RESEARCHER
The promise of the Internet of Things sounds rosy. Because chips and sensors will be embedded in everyday objects, we will have much better information and convenience in our lives. So, for example, because your alarm clock is connected to the Internet, it will be able to access and read your calendar. It will know where and when your first appointment of the day is and be able to cross-reference that information against the latest traffic conditions. Light traffic, you get to sleep an extra ten minutes; heavy traffic, and you might find yourself waking up earlier than you had hoped. When your alarm does go off, it will gently raise the lights in the house, perhaps turn up the heat or draw your bath. The electronic pet door will automatically open to let Fido into the backyard for his morning visit, and, most important, the coffeemaker will begin brewing your first cup of coffee right on time. You won’t have to ask your kids if they’ve brushed their teeth; the chip in their toothbrush will send a message to your smart phone letting you know the task is done. As you walk out the door, you won’t have to worry about finding your keys; the beacon sensor on the key chain makes them locatable within a two-inch radius in your home. It will be as if the Jetsons era has finally arrived.
While the hype-o-meter on the Internet of Things has been blinking red for some time, everything described above is already technically feasible today. To be certain, there will be obstacles, in particular in relation to a lack of common technical standards, but a wide variety of companies, consortia, and government agencies are hard at work to make the IoT a reality. The result will be our transition from connectivity to hyperconnectivity, and like all things Moore’s law related, it will be here sooner than we realize. Ubiquitous computing will affect every area of human endeavor, including transportation, energy, finance, government, agriculture, education, public safety, travel, and commerce.
The IoT means that all physical objects in the future will be assigned an IP address and be transformed into information technologies. As a result, your lamp, cat, or ficus will be part of an IT network. Things that were previously silent will now have a voice, and every object will be able to tell its own story and history. The refrigerator will know exactly when it was manufactured, the names of the people who built it, what factory it came from, and the day it left the assembly line, arrived at the retailer, and joined your home network. It will keep track of every time its door has been opened and which one of your kids forgot to close it. When the refrigerator’s motor begins to fail, it can signal for help, and when it finally dies, it will tell us how to disassemble its parts and best recycle them. Buildings will know every person who has ever worked there, homes every person who has ever lived in them, and streetlights every car that has ever driven by.
All of these objects will communicate with each other and have access to the massive processing and storage power of the cloud, further enhanced by additional mobile and social networks. We will be living in a world where everything is programmable and interactive. Objects will become “smart” and be able to describe their own location, proximity, velocity, temperature, flow, acceleration, ambient sound, vision, force, load, torque,
pressure, and interactions. The first generations of smart phones, smart meters, smart watches, and smart cards are already here today, but in the future all objects may become smart, in fact much smarter than they are today. As these devices become networked, they will develop their own limited form of sentience, resulting in a world in which people, data, and things come together. As a consequence of the power of embedded computing, we will see “billions of smart, connected ‘things’ ” joining a global neural network in the cloud that “will encompass every aspect of our lives.”
While the “old” Internet allowed desktops, laptops, and servers to share information, the “new” Internet will make it possible to remotely control any object on earth. As Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, explains, there is a “phenomenon of convergence, where bits from the digital realm are fusing with atoms here in the physical world.” Every object will have an identity and a life in both the physical and the virtual worlds, and when this happens, the difference between online and off-line, previously a meaningful distinction, goes away. To this point, the CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, recently predicted that the Internet of Things would have an impact five to ten times as large as the Internet itself.
