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by tls
3781 days ago
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I have acutally kicked this idea around 4 or 5 years ago of A "WSW" but more so in a sense that modularity would have been the groundworks for such a revolution. Modularity. Modules, taking the scale of what cpus on the phones have to what the cpus in the late 90's till now had... interoperability... it is just not there yet. Infact it stagnated. |
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a lot has changed in the last months alone. there are several standards ready for IoT (ETSI M2M) [0], some are still being drafted (W3C Web of Things "WoT")[1].
Where I still see lot of room for improvement in standards is for totally radically new use-cases. Standardization guys are usually industry representatives from bigger companies who think about inter-op (and to a lesser extent use-cases). But many use-cases in IoT transcend or even threaten the business models of what the bigger players have built their power/dominance on (they prefer sustainability over disruption -- god I hate those buzzwords).
Therefore smaller innovators (individuals or garage start-ups) who have radical ideas such as building a decentralized business model (maybe using cryptocurrencies or blockchaining and not driven by harvesting user-data or advocate strong privacy) usually don't have the resources or time to put one of their staff into the slow-moving standardization bodies to make/defend their case.
Though the W3 is extremely open compared to others and even there are official members who vote behind closed doors, ... if enough contributors bring ideas in the open discussion groups, then these points too might get standardized.
The biggest problem though is standardizing security.
It is no coincidence that most IETF drafts especially older ones and official RFC's have under "Security" a note that says "to be done". Thinking ahead what might become a design problem later is hard and depends on how the standard later gets understood by the industry. But more important there aren't enough people who understand security in standards groups. That is not just a standards problem though and more of a disease of our industry. Just look at most web developers and have them explain how XSS/SQL-injection works ... or ask an Embedded engineer who is used to building non-connected appliances to think about remote exploitable buffer overflows after they connects the thing via a CoAP proxy to the WWW ... Yes you'd assume they know that in detail but reality is usually most have no idea - not because it's hard but because we are not incentivized by making it extra secure (security often is a useless feature unfortunately only indirectly affecting your financial bottom line (when sh1t hits the proverbial fan)).
[0] http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/m2m
[1] https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework
EDIT: typos (possibly even grammar mistakes gasp)