Tag: open source

Open sourcing the IoT

Increasingly it appears open source software is the way to avoid IoT vendor lock in

With vendors shutting down connected devices and restricting data feeds, customers demanding open source software and open standards may be essential to safeguard against companies misusing their power over the IoT.

Last night I had dinner with a group of executives from US telco CenturyLink. During the the evening, conversation turned to the use of US and Chinese routers and the risks of government mandated backdoors in both countries’ equipment.

My thought during that conversation is concerns about software backdoors are a compelling argument for these devices to run open source software, making it harder – although not impossible – for hidden nasties harder to be built into systems.

Google Nest becomes evil

Overnight that argument for open source became stronger in my mind with the news Google Nest were to shut down the Revolv home automation hubs the company bought two years ago.

Google aren’t just stopping support for these devices, they are going to render them useless to their owners. It’s a remarkable move that undermines any confidence customers can have in Google’s hardware offerings.

While Revolv isn’t the first and will be far from the last Internet of Things device to be abandoned by its vendor, its fate indicates the importance of keeping as much of the ecosystem as open as possible – the less vendor lock there is, the less hostage you are to rapacious manufactures.

Locked out of the subscription economy

As we’ve seen with Amazon in the past, the ‘subscription economy opens users to the risk they can be locked out of their data or purchased apps. Now we’re seeing how vendors can lock users out of the products entirely.

With connected cars and homes now becoming common, this is something that should concern buyers. As we see everything from door locks to smoke detectors and kettles being connected to the Internet of Things, the risk of being at the mercy of an unreasonable vendor or malfunctioning software becomes greater.

At least with an open source model, it’s easier to build workarounds when faced with an uncooperative supplier and, in a world full of poorly designed IoT products, it’s possible for the community to review the software and understand its bugs.

The security aspect of open platforms is also critical for the IoT as we’re already seeing a plethora of unpatched devices where vendors have long lost interest in supporting the older products.

Open interoperation

More importantly, open platforms make it easier for devices to work together, something that is critical in connected buildings or industries. At the moment the IoT is a mish mash of competing standards and formats.

Over time it won’t be surprising to see the market demanding more open source applications and data feeds – indeed we’re seeing this happen with artificial intelligence platforms – the proprietary model brings in too many risks and makes the IoT far more complex.

While open source software won’t solve problems such as APIs and data feeds being closed or changed, it does give more power back to users and communities. It’s not hard to understand why vendors though would resist these moves.

Open sourcing artificial intelligence

The opening of artificial intelligence platforms is going to see increased development of the technologies

Silicon Valley leaders including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman have pledged a billion dollars towards the OpenAI foundation to open source the development of Artificial Intelligence.

With one of the greatest challenges facing business, political and community leaders in coming being how to deal with the massive amounts of data generated by the Internet of Things and pervasive computers, this is a major step in making the tools available to everyone.

With both Google and Facebook opening their AI platforms in recent weeks, it seems the consensus in the tech industry is that open source is the way to develop these technologies. As a consequence we may see them become commonplace a lot faster than expected.

Open sourcing artificial intelligence

Google making some of its artificial intelligence open source could change the software industry.

Yesterday Google open sourced many of the features in its Tensorflow artificial intelligence service.

Making the services available to the community will mean many more opportunities to develop the technology. It could well prove to be a turning point for Artificial Intelligence in making it more accessible to the general public and business community.

Tesla and the open patents

Tesla’s Elon Musk open patent announcement might be good for the future of both electric cars and patents.

Imagine the car steering wheel had been patented at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and that it was only top end vehicles or French cars that were steered that way?

That’s the situation we’re currently facing in the tech world as almost every conceivable idea, however silly, has a patent slapped on it in the hope it can help the business either defensively or as a revenue generator.

Yesterday’s announcement by Tesla Motors’ CEO Elon Musk that the electric car company would be opening it’s patents for ‘in good faith’ uses is a welcome change.

For Tesla it encourages the growth of the electric car industry making the sector deeper and more attractive to consumers who are tightly suspicious about being locked into proprietary technologies.

It’s interesting too that the motivation for taking up so many patents was to prevent the established motor companies grabbing Tesla’s inventions. As it turns out, that wasn’t necessary.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

So opening up the patent portfolio means Tesla might see more companies enter the space which in turn may create economies of scale.

No end to the patent wars

Although Tesla’s move doesn’t mean all patents wars are over; Musk’s statement that technologies used in ‘good faith’ will be immune from legal action leaves plenty of potential for disputes.

There’s also the problem of cross-licenses with many of Tesla’s invention being subject to agreements with other companies, not to mention technologies bought in from outside.

As Sun Microsystems showed during a previous round of the patent wars, it’s still possible for innocent users to be sued in the event of a dispute.

IBM and open patents

In the wake of that debacle, which fatally damaged Sun’s reputation, IBM made 500 of their patents available to the open source community in 2005 showing Musk’s move isn’t the first time this has happened.

History will tell us if Musk’s announcement helps build the electric car market, if it does it may be an indicator for the future of patents.

Bleeding hearts and internet security

No technological revolution is simply or without problems, securing information is one of the great challenges of today’s revolution and Heartbleed is a reminder of that.

The big tech news story of the last two days has been the Heartbleed security flaw, that might have compromised users’ passwords and other details.

Given the nature of the bug where a server can tricked into giving away bits of what’s stored in its memory, it’s hard to say exactly what has been compromised – on most sites you’d be very unlucky to have your password on banking details in the system at the precise millisecond a malicious attacker exploited the bug – but the risks are still real.

While webmasters and system admins around the world are frantically patching their systems, for the average user the best advice is to wait before changing your passwords as if the bad guys already have your details you’d have probably used them by now and changing your logins on a vulnerable server might actually increase the risk of crooks stealing your information.

The Internet of Things

The longer term risks with Heartbleed are actually in embedded systems and the Internet of Things; many systems will have hard coded implementations of the buggy software which may never be patched and these devices may be give up much richer data than a web server would.

It’s another illustration of how difficult the task of keeping embedded technologies up to date and how to secure the Internet of Things.

Open source blues

While there’s no shortage of similar security lapses in commercial software, the Heartbleed saga is going to concentrate the minds of open source community on how to tighten peer review and audit version updates.

Most open source projects are staffed by small groups of time poor volunteers, making auditing and quality control harder. That key parts of the internet and computer industries rely on these underfunded, and often unappreciated groups is a weakness for the entire sector.

No technological change is simple or without problems and securing information is one of the great challenges of today’s tech revolution and Heartbleed is a strong reminder of that, hopefully we’ll learn some lessons about building robust systems.

Can the community secure the Internet of Things?

Can the community secure the internet of things? Cisco’s Christopher Young believes so.

As more devices become connected Cisco Systems hopes the security issues can be addressed by the developer community.

“The Internet of Everything is not only turn every company into a technology company but its going to force every company to truly become a company that delivers security,” says Christopher Young, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Security Business Group.

Speaking at the Australian Cisco Live! Conference in Melbourne today, Young described how business is going to have to change the way it treats the data it collects from sensors.

“Not just in consumer security,” continues Young. “If I’m using technology or I’m delivering a service that’s leveraging technologies like cloud or connected devices and creating information about individuals or organisations through these connected devices then a consumer or enterprise is going to expect a level of security.”

Young sees three major ways that security is becoming more challenging for organisations; changing business models, a dynamic threat landscape and increasing complexity.

The latter point is the area that focuses many executive’s attention in Young’s experience with audiences he speaks to nominating complexity and fragmentation as their greatest concern.

“They get so many products and so many devices and so many tools and so much complexity they really don’t know, in so many cases, where to focus their efforts.”

Young cites Cisco’s Chief Security Officer, John Stewart, that the most fundamental security defence is getting the basics right.

Earlier this year at the release of the company’s 2014 security report, Stewart spoke to Networked Globe on how businesses are struggling with the complexity they face.

“Even the most sophisticated and well funded security teams are struggling to keep on top of what’s happening,” Stewart said.

This problem ties into the other areas that Young identifies, particularly the ‘industrialisation’ of the malware world.

“We have more well funded, more innovated, more determined adversaries than we’ve ever had as an industry.

“It used to be some high school kid in his room trying to infect a bunch of machines with viruses or some guy from Nigeria sending you an email asking you for a hundred bucks and he’ll give you a thousand bucks later.

“The world we live in today has nation states and criminal syndicates and very well funded, very sophisticated attackers so hacking has become an industrialised activity.” Young says, “here’s supply chains involved, there’s support agreements written; the bad guys will even sell each other a contract.”

Young’s views echo those of Sophos Labs’ Vice President Simon Reed who said last year that “now there’s money involved, there’s serious effort, the quality of malware has gone up.”

Part of the solution Young sees involves getting the community involved which is the motivation behind the Cisco Security Challenge announced last week.

“You can only just guess and imagine what all the different security challenges will look like in a world that’s just starting to get formed.”

“Let’s get the community involved in trying to solve some of the problems that we know are going to be inherently introduced by IoE.”

Big Data needs big databases

Investors are making big bets on the databases that underpin Big Data

While the tech industry’s startup hype this week has been focused on the impending Twitter Initial Public Offering, a much more fascinating company quietly completed a major capital raising.

MongoDB provides an open-source, document database program and last week raised another $150 million from investors that values the company at $1.2 billion dollars.

Databases lie at the heart of Big Data and businesses need better computer programs to manage the overwhelming amount of information that’s pouring in every day.

As every business is unique, larger corporations find they spend huge amounts of money on their databases. The enterprise that buys an Oracle, IBM or SAP system usually spends tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in adapting the system to work for them, often with less than spectacular results.

While implementing MongoDB or any other open source program doesn’t eliminate implementation costs, it is often easier to setup and maintain as most of the information about the system is shared and freely available rather than locked inside the vendor’s proprietary knowledgebases.

Probably most important of all, the data structures themselves are open so customers don’t find themselves locked into a relationship with one vendor because all their information is in a format that can only be read by one system.

Open source is where Big Data, social media and cloud computing intersect – without the data itself being open and accessible, most cloud computing and social media services will almost certainly fail.

So MongoDB and the other open source products are the quiet, back of house technologies that keep the internet as we know it ticking along.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports there’s some very serious investors in MongoDB.

The deal attracted new investors such as EMC Corp. (EMC:US) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM:US), along with previous backers Red Hat Inc. (RHT:US), Intel Corp. (INTC:US), New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital, according to MongoDB.

Sequoia Capital are one of the longest lasting Silicon Valley venture capital firms whose greatest success was being one of the first investors in Apple Computers and New Enterprise Ventures have a similar pedigree with companies like 3Com, Juniper Networks and Vonage. Investment by industry leaders like Intel, Red Hat, Salesforce and EMC in the company also shows MongoDB isn’t the standard Silicon Valley Greater Fool play.

When there’s a gold rush, it’s those selling the shovels who make the big money and the investors in MongoDB and similar services are hoping they’ve found some of the modern day shovels.

That may well turn out to be the case and while the smart folk make more money from the technologies that drive social media and cloud computing services, the rest of us are distracted by the latest shiny thing.

Could 3D printing be lurching up the hype cycle?

3D printing is hot, so hot it’s found a place on the hype cycle.

3D printing is undoubtedly a game changing technology that changes the economics and scalability of manufacturing. But is it possible the technology is becoming over-hyped?

Two stories today illustrate the opportunities and potential of 3D printing; a home made SLR camera and NASA manufacturing their own rocket parts.

NASA’s experiment shows how precision, low demand components could be made. One of the problems with procuring parts like rocket engine injectors is that the production runs are low so the manufacturing costs are high given there are no economies of scale involved.

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing also has the advantage that components can be manufactured in one piece rather than requiring assembly from a number of different parts. In turn this reduces production times and errors.

Printing your own camera seems a bit of waste of time and money seeing that cameras aren’t particularly expensive and the one printed isn’t a digital SLR – your have to find somewhere to buy and process the film.

The point though with Bozardeux’s project is that it is open source – anyone can modify or adapt the design and that is where the potential lies.

While the possibilities are endless with 3D printing, it may well be that the technology is being overhyped. Both the rocket engine injector and the SLR camera are early stage proofs of concept, neither are ready for full time use.

It also has to be kept in mind that traditional manufacturing methods aren’t going away – there will always be products more suited to mass production or using materials that can’t be fed through a 3D printer.

Right now we’re on the early stage of the hype cycle with 3D printing and while the potential is clear, the immediate future of the technology being oversold is also becoming apparent.

That of course means opportunity for many entrepreneurs and their investors, but it also means you have to be very careful in choosing technologies or where to place your bets.

In poker it’s said if you don’t know who the patsy is at the table, then it’s probably you. The same is true when a new technology is being hyped.

Open source manufacturing

Open source hardware promises to change manufacturing and resurrect the art of soldering

Chinese business website Caixin Online has a great video on China’s Open Source Hardware Movement, this is an area that promises to change the manufacturing industry.

Open Source is the philosophy of sharing intellectual property and allowing anyone to improve the idea on the proviso they share their changes with the rest of the world.

The hope is that open sourced products end up being more reliable than proprietary designs due to scrutiny from hundreds, or thousands, of reviewers.

Until recently, open source has been largely restricted to the software world but now it’s moving into broader Engineering and manufacturing circles.

As the Caixin video shows, the open source hardware movement is introducing geeks to a tool which many thought was dead – the soldering iron.

I noticed this a week or so ago when I walked into a co-working space and found the lady I was meeting hunched over a soldering iron putting together a part for a quadcopter.

Right now soldering parts to build quadcopters or game controllers is just the beginning, the really interesting things start when open source meets 3D printing – then we’ll see some real game changing things happen.

Soldering iron picture courtesy of Bomazi through Wikimedia Commons.

Democratising Big Data

Why a not for profit disrupting Google and the Big Data industry is important for business and society

Common Crawl is a not-for-profit web crawler service that makes the data collected open for all to use. A post on the MIT Technology Review blog speculates how the initiative might spawn the next Google.

One of the problems with Big Data is that it’s held mainly by large corporations and government agencies, both of which have the tendency to keep their data private on that basis that information is power and power means money.

We see this in the business models of Facebook, Google and many of Silicon Valley’s startups; the information garnered about users is as, if not more so, valuable as an utility from the product.

Initiatives like Common Crawl tilt the balance somewhat back towards consumers, citizens, and smaller businesses.

How well Common Crawl and other similar initiatives fare remains to be seen – Wikileaks was a good example of how such projects can flare out, collapse under the weight of egos or be harrassed by corporatist interests.

In search, Google are open to disruption as they tweak their results to suit initiatives like Google Plus. During the company’s earnings call earlier this week Larry Page spoke of the challenges of staying focused on the opportunities that matter, it may well be the company is more distracted from its core business than it should be.

Whether Common Crawl disrupts Google is up to history, it could just as well be a couple of kids called Sergei and Larry with a smart idea.

The imperative now though is to try and keep as much public data available for everyone to use and not lock it away for the privileged few. That will let the future Googles develop while making our societies more fairer and open.