With the recent sloppiness in implementation of software & hardware and synergizing them into so called the being called IoT The time is appropriate that a defacto manifesto be brought in place for the artificial species called IoT.
I assume most of us are aware of the Three Laws by Isaac Asimov.
What I propose is build for the interacting robotics with lesser-minded-human-kind!
An equipment if called IoT should abide by:
It should be considered a legal offspring of the last hand-off human entity.
It should have an IDENTU mode that should let it spill out its purpose/identity/owners.
It should have safe mode where any voice may command it to stop the current action.(something like a STATUE/RESUME mode)
We are surrounded and supported by a bots ecosystem. I will try to bring that into perspective to evaluate the current rate of explosion of bots and newer solutions coming around it — and how to stay human still!
Connected with the Bot Ecosystem!
When we wake up,with help from an external alarm clock , we are taking help of a Bot.
When we are parking our car and when reversing it, there is a smart system that warns us for the exact safe-distance to keep going. That’s a smarter Bot!
Notice the cool soap dispenser that spits soap when we put our hand under it? That’s a Bot!
Recall the automated vacation response you configured in your favorite email client? Well, you have guessed, that’s also a …Bot!
We have never thanked these systems for their existence, for we know they are physics concepts glued together mechanically. A Thank-You comes and goes via a heart! 🙂
Coming back to the topic, now imagine all of those Bots, fusing into a single system with a human structure!
Hey, I am SuperBot and can do everything that was listed above & much more!
What was your reaction when the last time, your car backing system told you incorrectly that you were 1 meter from an obstacle while there was a gap of roughly 5 meters!
When was the last time your alarm clock did not wake you up?(battery out or way too low?)
Isn’t it way irritating when the mechanical soap dispenser does not spit the soap, instead only throws out the air?
Haven’t we all misfired a wrongly configured vacation response and feeling way embarrassed and apologizing for it for all day long to colleagues and co-workers!?
As for the premise, these bots *independently* do their job perfectly. But when they break, nothing else is affected around it. Well I am yet to hear about misconstruing a vacation response due to a non working soap dispenser!(all right that’s way too much exaggeration — but we get the point!).
The fact that they are disconnected, allows us, the user of that system to fallback/switch to another means. Say the car backing system is down, well ask a passerby to help you. Your alarm clock is out, well start working on your body’s alarm clock(no excuse here!).
I will construct two hypothetical views that are actually happening in the bots eco-system and obviously I am opposed to such developments. Hence suggesting a way out, as I cannot stop these movements.
Once these systems are connected, and one of its components starts acting strange(see I elevated it to a human), the whole behavior might be eccentric to say the least. If your SuperBot is out of battery, it might just get you to wake you up but might not be able to help you with and send the vacation responses.
Add the internet to the mix!
I’m out of order but controlled via the internet.
The take away from the whole story:
Let us as individuals, not try to fuse all our bot dependency into a single system. It makes it highly probable to fail and although it gives us lot of convenience, but at a high cost of dependence. This whole connected thing is a convenience at the cost of our freedom.
The most secure sites are still subject to theft/fraud ( I am only referring to financial losses). When a fused bot with the thinking of the whole internet is there, and one small error/condition unchecked/unnoticed will be not safe, to say the least.
As for the bots ecosystem, I would love to see
a centralized parking bot, letting a big relief to all humans from this petty job
an aerial bot that delivers newspapers
But then again, I won’t allow either of them talk to each other, A single Bot good for One Task. 🙂
Incase you stumble upon a VC, here is a list of questions that can help you use their knowledge/expertise/insight for your products long term vision and validation!
1/Does your experience tell you [your-product-name] is a unique solution?
2/Do you think the idea will be accepted?(a)by people b)by investors?)
3/Are you convinced by the idea and ready to risk loosing your investment? 🙂
4/What are the areas that [your-product-name] needs to specifically work on?
5/What is the suggested milestones/checkpoints you recommend that are
important post launch/before/beyond?
6/Do you think [your-idea-name] needs investment/funding/backing?
7/Does [your-product-name] need to rush the idea to the market?
8/Is it ok to go for an [country-location-name] only launch for now?
After this form of scrutinizing is over, ask the VC to take off their hat and give feedback about your product as a normal user(if they have the capacity to be your products consumer).
In my recent bad-experience with the cab booking scenario, I decided to try out the autos on a similar route of commute! Fortunately, I can shout out to an auto-walla from my home and there is never a dearth of options thanks to the auto-wallas agreeing to go by the meter!
Time for a good detour of the main route?
What is the most weird mode of transportation you have ever been subject to?
My 7 km long most weird transport medium! [PS: I was not driving! ;-)]
While keeping a tab on the state of self driving cars, and the experiments being done, no wonder the google-car looks so much like a delhi-auto!
Delhi-auto as google-driverless-car!
And having experienced first-hand the skills of an auto driver, I am inclined to suggest,for any thinking future self driving company, if you are looking out to train your cars, reach out to the auto-wallahs!
Here are the motivations:
Lowest ground distance — matching to the sef-driving car’s design.
They know the best routes — Point A to Point B, you end up spending 500 bucks or 250 bucks!
They know how to best absorb a speed breaker cruising @ 25 kmph and make you feel as if you’re flying!
They know how to best wake you up(in case you start to feel dizzy) by bumping you in a pot hole!
I have never heard/read about an auto wallah being involved in an accident( a quarrel is not an accident) — Best premise for self driving cars!
What I am suggesting is have the driverless cars minds trained by putting an Augmented Intteligence chip in an auto! First ride, they just learn what is the route all about, good roads, bad roads,bumps,breakers. In latter rides, they should pick up: speed up/slow down suggestion,collision detection, collision prevention, safe stopping etc. All this should happen in shadow mode, where in realtime the chips response and the actual response should be monitored! Once an acceptable level of confidence is arrived at, let the chip start talking about its suggestions. Once the driver starts trusting the suggestions, go auto-pilot! 🙂
Also, I doubt if the driverless cars are made to ride as a sensitive travellers? Like lets say someone cannot handle bumps as efficiently as a child can, Do these vehicles cater to this requirement?(PS: auto wallah do cater to this requirement!)
The future of driver-less cars is exciting, but the possibility of breaking it down is also very high, as someone can use a VR thingy and make the AI sensors of the car sense that an obstacle is coming and in reality there is no obstacle and eventually a future race of hacking driver less cars where you’ll come across advt like “Make the other driver-less cars around you go automatically slow”
My car makes other cars give me more way!
In closure, The roads will be way too full of cars and quarrels, we should look up! 🙂
As most of us have come to peace with the latest ripple(sorry wave ain’t news anymore) on the world wide web caused by no other than google, it is time to analyse the new offering!
What is it? An approach that takes away the mice and directly displays search results as alphabets are typed.
Any similar things exists before? Absolutely Yes. Any regular KDE user knows what happens when Alt-F2 is pressed.
Is it any worth? Yup! It was fun using it for two days. But don’t know how long it lasts.The good thing is that the mice has been pushed away one step more.
Any Gotcha’s? As with any ajax application, browser button behaviour is unpredictable.You might not see actually things on the screen, but your request has everything. Also earlier, for a search text only a single hit was required to the google servers, now every alphabet invokes a new hit.Get ready to leak unnecessary bandwith data. Google really has some strong servers to take the toll of every search query to around 5-7 times!
Well, the title might sound a bit off track, there’s some story behind it. As all “Gang-Stirs” following this blog have read RK’s earlier post Somethings cooking! (stir-ring) me and RK met at Pizza Hut @ CP today (that explains 2 CAME, PIZZA HUT SAW part) and had a meeting of sorts (that explains GANG-STIR CONQUERED part). Without much further ado, I hereby put the minutes of the meeting (or discussion whatever one would love to call it):
Three broad points were on our agenda as outlined below:
WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO?
One of the important points is what are we going to do as a team if we become one. The discussion was centered around:
Get or identify guys from varied backgrounds and technologies together. Already few “Gang-Stirs” have been identified for ownership of various tracks:
Mobile: GG
JAVA (ranging from middleware to front-end): JC/RK/NA/HKA
Rails: SD
Database/Backend: AP
Find/search for ideas that click. You can think about anything under the sun, but the implementation of the same should be possible for you and other “Gang-Stirs” to implement.
A website has to be put up containing a small description of our work/ideas. RK is driving this effort and will update once done.
Search for a hosting solution that supports JAVA/J2EE and we badly need this to be in place to proceed further.
Ruby hosting solution has been found. Check out justhost.com for more info.
Finally, need UI experts to design nice layouts for our ideas. I know most of “Gang-Stirs” (if not all) struggle at it.
R&D was also discussed, but it’s more of an individual rather than collective effort.
2. WHAT WE HAVE BEEN THINKING OF DOING?
The second which we discussed about. Few ideas which came out:
BIKE-ASSIST: Kind of a GPS/navigation system which would assist bikers/motorists find next option in case of breakdown. For starters, might be implemented on mobile/web platform. More info would be available once we actually start on this.
A RUBY PROJECT: Something similar to National UID started by Govt. of India under Mr. Nilekani. But the difference would be the identity of the person would not be based on data like ration card or gas connection etc. rather it would be on his own individual identity. SD can work on this.
E-Commerce Engine: I have been thinking about this for long, but it involves lots of effort and R&D from initial plan to final product. Hopefully, would start on this and come up with more details.
Work on improving and contributing to open-source projects under Apache preferably. This can vary from developing eclipse plugins to working on actual source code. Apache Maven has been identified for starters to work on the same.
3. THE PREREQUISITES BEFORE WE START WORKING
I think this is the most important part one needs to focus on before doing actual work. Few prerequisites have been identified for starters:
Complete ownership of the identified track is a must. Apart from doing the actual coding this would include mentoring the new guys, taking additional roles/responsibilites etc.
Each track would be responsible for their deliverable. By deliverable we mean a final product which we just need to deploy or copy and it would work without much additional rework. Apart from the deliverable, each track should have an extensive documentation on wiki or any documentation platform explaining features/known issues or bugs related to their respective deliverable.
Most importantly, need to stick to best practices and standards while going about our job/passion.
Well, that’s the whole summary of our discussions. Please feel free to comment and suggest further so that we might have a better perspective while going about our passion.
With options like this which are available now, the public network passwords are a vulnerable lot today! Coming to the solutions mode, the question that raises concerns and needs to be addressed is:
How to protect public network password from brute force attack?
And we think about the answers:
1/Biometrics? No, can be easily imitated, and IMHO, causes the power to rest with anyone who has power/money.
2/Special fonts? Kinda-OK, the fonts that are created, should reside on a system only. Limits mobility, but sure seems a viable option.
3/Thick client logins? Yup, Can be mobile, enables a secure area. More like double-check locking!
4/Best of 3 login attempts? Black list the brute force IP. (+)Good for cleaning up the internet, (-)bad for businesses!
5/Image/Non-Text based passwords? (+)Increases complexity (+) can be copyrighted/encrypted (-)Need to carry that picture always! (-) little randomness.
What could give the password crackers a new challenge? It seems brute force is won over and the text books needs to be edited!
