One of the more interesting talks at MakerfaireUK was “Fixing the Internet of Things” by Alasdair Allan. The way IoT is made today is with a lot of different standards of communication. That leads to the troublesome conclusion, that none of them actually are standards. And the worrying possibility, that soon we will have to choose not only the wattage of a lightbulb, and the size of it. But also which protocol our “smart” lightbulb uses to communicate with the internet.

Another problem is the lack of privacy. Everything have been hacked. Even the White House mailservers… Allan believes that it is only a matter of time, before we see the first murder committed with the help of smart, internetconnected things.

A promising trend, counteracting these problems, is the way that Moores law helps us. Smart devices are not nessecarily becoming more smart. But they do come with increasing computing power. An interesting article on version2, a danish IT-site, touches on this. Read it here, and notice the competitive advantages companies trying to get in on the german market gets, when they can say that data is not stored on american servers…