The Internet of Things and Active Digital Debris

We are starting to see an exponential increase in the amount of “Digital Debris” left behind from our romps through the digital world.  This debris contains not only personal information but also now represents active systems left on in the digital cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) wilderness.  To break down how we got here, we can structure this into several different epochs:

1. From the Digital Dawn to Shared Hosting Services
2. From Shared Hosting Services to the Cloud and the Dawn of the Internet of Things
3. To the Era of the Internet of Things (IoT)

Before we characterize each of these and the impact of the emerging IoT epoch is important to differentiate between two different types of debris:

1. Passive Digital Debris - This is characterized by both the offline and online digital data that we leave behind
2. Active Digital Debris - These are the active systems, that may have personal data, but more importantly are active in the control of something physical

Passive Digital Debris. In the first epoch, for those that can remember, information was stored on punched cards that were direct descendants from Herman Hollerith’s first machines produced for the U.S. Census Bureau in the 1890’s.  These 80 column paper records then moved to digital tape and then rapidly onto hard-disk drives.  Today, much of today’s consumer passive digital debris is embodied in the hard-drive of our desktops and laptops and the solid-state storage of our smartphones and pads (and of course, in landfills along with billions of biodegrading punch cards).

Since a person or organization should know the devices it has, it is relatively easy to clean-up this passive digital debris.  For devices that have hard-drives (spinning or solid-state) one can simply remove the drives and store them safely, or physically destroy them.  However, devices such as pads have embedded and very difficult to remove flash drives.  These are generally “wiped” before the devices are discarded, given away, or sold.  Unfortunately, this is easier said than done as is it is relatively complex to actually get rid of the information stored on these devices without some care.

So far, we have explored data that just lays around in devices.  It can not be accessed until attached to system connected to a network.  However, towards the end of the first epoch we see the emergence of dedicated and shared hosting services.  These provided the ability for people to create Websites and provide data services.  With simply a credit card an account could be set-up, website developed, and data uploaded.  Over time, how many thousands of these sites exist essentially unknown by their original owner, with the data littering the Web.

In the second epoch, with hosting and Cloud computing services, the situation now gets much worse.  With easy uploads of data to Cloud storage, whether through a managed service such as iCloud or more raw directly to a Cloud service (e.g., AWS S3 & Glacier or Google Cloud Storage), this data is being uploaded at dozens of Terabytes (probably much more, but I don’t want to sound too hyperbolic) a day.  With people canceling service, forgetting about the service they bought, or passing away, this data will stick around for month, years, and perhaps for whatever is humanity’s ultimate destiny.

Of prime importance is that this passive digital debris, although it may be accessible via a network does not directly interact with the physical world.  

Active Digital Debris.  Now, in the IoT epoch, IoT devices and systems create something new: Active Digital Debris.  Active Digital Debris are ensembles of those devices and their support ecosystems that become part of the long-lived infrastructure of a structure (e.g., home, business, car, etc).  For example, take the case where there IoT thermostats, refrigerators, lighting systems, an irrigation system, a security system, and several generations of digital cameras.  The original user that installed and configured the system understands (or thinks they understand) its use.  What happens when the house is sold?  What happens if the owner is no longer available?  What happens if the owner does not remember how the systems are configured or their passwords?  In fact, without an “IoT House Inspection ” how would a new homeowner even know what is lurking in the light bulb next to her bed?

So, there are significant questions on how do IoT systems transfer from owner to owner.  What are the responsibilities of a user to clean-up their Active Digital Debris?  Without exaggeration, within a few years there will be tens or hundreds of millions active devices within the homes, cars, and businesses that are essentially running against their last set of configurations, and unknown to the people they surround.  These devices may be the next trend in Cyber crime enabling illegal surveillance of home and bringing a new dimension to stalking.  In fact, there appears to be, what maybe is the first case of IoT-based revenge, where a spurned husband used an Internet connected thermostat to wage home temperature retribution against his apparently cheating wife (see, IoT Revenge).

Finally, what is the Active Digital Debris future?  It all depends on the emerging IoT ecosystems which is going to have to at least include mechanisms for some sort of consolidated inventory control and identity management approach.  Hmm, aren't these some of the holy grail of Information Technology? How about an IoT Pest Extermination Service?

Comments on Amazing Predictions from 30 Years Ago...

I have a decent collection of classic texts on Computer Science.  These include both books on the history of computers as well as some (well, maybe too many) textbooks from my academic career.  On a fairly regular basis, I take a book off the shelf to see what I can glean from previous wisdom.  In general, I am looking for those technical and business decisions that enabled the rise or fall of technologies and companies.  This time, I took “An Introduction to Operating Systems”, by Harvey M. Deitel, Revised Edition 1984, a book thirty years old.  A classic at the time, the book spends much of its time talking about operating system concepts and issues that most people, and even most newer Computer Science students, do not even know were at one time fundamental trades in the evolution of computer Operating Systems.  For example, how many people care or understand about allocation of memory in a multiprogramming environment with a fixed number of tasks and different memory partition as compared to variable memory partitions?

However, what is truly remarkable about the book is actually in the Introduction section “Future Trends”.  I am going to look at a selection and and make some modern-day comments as well as some comments on what we (or I) should have tracked for investment opportunities.

1. Computer hardware will continue to decline in price, while processor speeds increase, storage capacities increase, and the physical size of processors and memories decrease.  
• This trend was clearly obvious in 1984
• Back in 1984 the Intel 80386 was just about to be released which at 16 MHz provided about 5 MIPS of 32-bit processing.  Today a 2+GHz single core processor provides around two Billion Operations Per Second
• A 1GByte hard drive was around $50K.  Today, a 1 TByte disk is less than $100
• What took a room for a single mainframe or minicomputer of the day is now a room with hundreds of servers and thousands of cores (and, thousands of servers and hundreds of thousands of cores)
• See the next trend for investment comments
2. The “scale of integration” will continue to increase with VLSI moving to ULSI over the next decade.
• The 80386 had approximately 275,000 transistors
• Today, modern multi-core processors and Graphics Processing Units have several billion transistors
• Investment: The trend should have been to look at companies that were developing microprocessors that would sell in the millions in applications areas that were fantasies at the time.
3. Massive parallelism will become more common.  It will become possible to execute parallel programs with great speed because of the very high degree of concurrency.
• Today we have parallelism at many levels: multithreaded cores, multi-core sockets, multi-socket servers, GPUs with hundreds of processors, and machines with millions of cores.
• Take a look at the TOP500 supercomputers in the world and the massive problems set sides and complexity enabled by massive parallelism.
• Virtually every large commercial web service reflects a massively parallel execution of requests and data analysis.
• Investment: Companies that were developing novel technologies to incorporate dozens or hundreds of processors for applications, such as high-performance graphics, that would find themselves into workstations and consumer devices.  Software companies that were looking to orchestrate huge amounts of data.  For software, the interesting trend, is the proliferation of Open Source-based products, which enabled great capability in working with large data, but potentially dilute the revenue potential across multiple companies providing very similar products.
4. Computers and their operating systems will be designed to foster the operation of virtual machines.  Real machines will be hidden from the user.
• IBM invented the Virtual Machine concept that was embodied in their VM/370 system.  It wallowed for some time as something that was invisible to the larger computer industry, but with the proliferation of Virtual Machine systems for several different product lines (e.g., Intel, SPARC, z-series, etc.) virtual machines are even common on laptops.
• These systems are also enabled by the incorporation of specific capabilities into the processor set.
• Investment: Clearly VMWare comes to mind.  Today, you would have a nearly 100% return on investment if bought on its opening day in 2007.
5. The family concept of computers as first introduced in the IBM 360 series will endure.  Users will be able to run their applications on many different members of a family of computers, and these applications will see only virtual machines.
• For better or for worse, applications written for older versions of Microsoft Windows will run on newer version of Windows.  The same can be said of Android applications, and Apple iOS and Desktop operating systems (with some major bumps due to 68000 to PowerPC to x86 changes).
• More and more, the core services provided via the Web or in the corporate data center runs in Virtual Machines.
• Investment: This is the realization of the emergence of “ecosystem” economics.  Its about the breadth and sustainment of developers by enabling long-term stable platforms for users.  Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, and ARM are good examples.  Those that have not maintained a good ecosystem have generally struggled (e.g, Blackberry)  
6. As new generations of computers are introduced by the manufacturers, existing programs will run on the new equipment as is, or with nominal conversion effort.
• This is an amazing fact that user code written for Windows machines or under Linux operating system move virtually untouched as computers incorporate updated processors and other system improvements (e.g., RAM, storage, graphics acceleration, etc.)
• This is also true in the Apple iOS and Android worlds
• Investment: This is directly tied to the emergency of the major ecosystems
7. The cost of data communications will continue to decrease, and data transmission speeds will increase.
• Although a not rocket science production (technology makes things better and cost less), the typical approximately 1.5Mbps point-to-point circuit in the continental United States was around $10,000 per month in 1984 and a phone call (the equivalent of around 30Kbps, if you have the technology) was well over 10 cents per minute.
• Today, an Internet connection at home typically costs around $10 per Mbps (if you average upload and download speeds) and commercial rates for high-capacity links are less than one dollar a Mbps.  And, of course more than a simple private line, the Internet brings you a network around the world that touches on the order of a billion devices.
• Investment: Well, there was that telecom bubble, but if you bought Cisco stock at an equivalent of $0.04 in 1990 your return today would be over 62,000%.
8. Computers will be tied increasingly into networks, and work performed for a user may be done on a computer of which the user is unaware.  This will continue to emphasize the importance of the view of virtual machines.
• Can someone say “Cloud”.  This is clearly a homerun prediction.  Both in the fact that I am using Google Apps to write this document that uses a set of servers that I have absolutely no idea of what or where they are.
• Investment: This addresses both infrastructure capabilities and content.  Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace, and others.  Google return since its IPO is approximately 1200% (in 10 years).
9. Personal computers will be omnipresent.  Utilization of the resource will mean less than its availability, reliability, flexibility, and “user friendliness”.
• One of the prevailing problems before the 80s was the full utilization of expense centrally located mainframe-type computers.  The trend to multi-user minicomputers was well underway, and the personal computer revolution was getting started in earnest.  The Apple Mac was released in 1984 and “user friendliness” has been the key design element ever since.
• Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, and Mobile devices are the norm.  The goal is usability, and the fact that you don’t keep the four ARM cores in your tablet busy all the time is virtually no concern to anyone.  The fact that they are available when needed to ensure the near instantaneous responsiveness of the user interface or an application to make the user happy, is what it is all about.
• Investment: Clearly, if you follow the “user friendliness” as the primary factor, then all eyes should have been on Apple, the company that focused on the “Insanely Great” user experience.  From 1984 to today, this would have grossed a handy 2,300% return.

Internet Governance: It's not just about the "namespace"

As we pointed out in our AFCEA Cyber Committee paper: AFCEA Cyber Committee: The Future of Internet Governance, there are significant changes occurring on the way the Internet is "governed".  Much of the attention in this regard has been the announcement that the US Department of Commerce is planning to give up oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers (ICANN).  ICANN is the organization that coordinates the Internet's global Domain Name System (DNS) that provides the critical web address name to Internet Protocol (IP) address translation, as well as the assignment of IP addresses to service providers and organizations.

Much of the focus of Internet governance has been focused on a combination of the control of key Internet infrastructure elements (e.g., DNS and IP addresses) or focused around and "Internet Bill of Rights-like" approach which being driven, in large part, by the unauthorized disclosures of US Intelligence Community activities involving the Internet and Internet-based services.

However, these are missing one critical element that surfaced this week.  The AFCEA paper identified four items that were critical to Internet Governance.  Two of them are related to the above, but the other two are related to what is likely to have the most global impact.  These are, of course, about money.

The recent focus in the news has been on the impact services such as Facebook and Twitter on political discourse. This includes Twitter and YouTube bans in Turkey.  At first, these seem related to the desire of the ruling class to control political discourse and to derail dissent.   However, it is likely that underlying this, in large part, is the money aspect of the services.  Social Networking companies have built empires and valuations in the hundreds of billion dollars.  Just yesterday, Turkey's Finance Minister made a statement that Social-Media companies must pay taxes. 

What Turkey is asking is essentially "Where is the Money?".  There is a service that is being used within its country that generates revenue, but virtually none of it is invested back into the country.  There is certainly investment in Internet infrastructure to support the services us (e.g., mobile 4G, fiber, etc.) but the service itself likely housed in a datacenter thousands of miles away. 

So, it is all about control.  It's not just all about who controls DNS or keeping prying eyes off people's personal information.  It's also about the money, and of course if there is money being made, how can it can be taxed.