Internet of Things News of the Week, June 9 2017

Here’s a summary of interesting analysis and news about the Internet of Things from the past week. Get this summary in your inbox every Friday when you subscribe.

Worrisome news on the NB-IoT and LTE-M front: The cellular carriers have been touting two standards for low power wide area networks. LTE-M has higher data rates, consumes more power and is in the middle of rollouts in Europe and the U.S. BB-IoT has a smaller payload and is reportedly cheaper. The idea is that instead of using a technology such as Sigfox or LoRA, a device manufacturer needing a cheaper low power network option would stick with cellular. The reality is proving to be different. Both articles have European operators discussing some of the challenges associated with the cellular LPWAN tech so far. Price, security and interoperability concerns are apparently slowing adoption. (Light Reading, The Register)

Can animal cognition teach us about building distributed IoT networks? Uh, maybe? My mind was blown as I read this article about spiders and octopuses and how they think, having evolved distributed and external thought processing techniques. Then I started thinking about how the new EdgeX Foundry distributed middleware project for industrial IoT has an octopus as its emblem, and wondered if we could learn more about building networks from how these animals think. It’s not that far out there. (Quanta Magazine)

Annie get your contour makeup: Looks like police in Wales have arrested a man based on automatic facial recognition. The case provides a scary glimpse into the future where the government has a record of our faces and can apply it to people surveilled in public places. When it comes to catching criminals people may applaud this use case, but it could become a  tool for censorship or even extortion. The way out may be ever odder makeup and hairstyles to stymie the algorithms. (Ars Technica)

Speaking of surveillance: If you have a smart speaker in your home, such as an Amazon Echo or a Google Home, you may want to read this overview of how each of these products protects your privacy. Or doesn’t. (CNET)

How to hack a pacemaker: Dick Cheney was ahead of his time in deciding to break the wireless functionality in his pacemaker. Security researchers who looked at seven pacemakers made by four different vendors found 19 vulnerabilities shared by most of them. (Quartz)

This one is for the makers and prototypers: Microchip has launched a microcontroller with an integrated graphics processor.  So if you have a device that powers a larger screen, but is still relatively dumb, this might be the chip for you. (Hackster.io)

Want to pitch the FTC on your privacy technology? The call for ideas and papers to present at the FTC’s PrivacyCon event next year is now open. Topics include: How do companies assess consumers’ privacy preferences; What are the greatest threats to consumer privacy today; What are the costs of mitigating these threats; How are the threats evolving; and more. (FTC)

Privacy may become a competition issue: The large data repositories companies hold on consumers and their ability to use that data to erect barriers to entry for newcomers may result in new thinking around antitrust. This is a concept we’ve touched on before in this newsletter, and apparently, the Germans are thinking about it too. (Wired)

IBM made a 5-nanometer chip: For all the talk of Moore’s Law fading away, the chip industry is doing back bends while roller skating to keep it going. The effort of cramming more transistors onto a chip is getting technically more challenging to build thanks to the laws of physics, but that hasn’t stopped IBM from unveiling a 5 nanometer chip this week. Big Blue and its partners in this endeavor say the soonest such a chip might make it to market is 2019, but go ahead and learn about it now. It’s a pretty big deal, even as the idea of massively powered processors seems somewhat quaint in our mobile, modular world. (Wired)

Your offline shopping is heading online: Two staples of online shopping, the ability to track what you are buying and dynamic pricing, are making their way into the physical world thanks to the awesome powers of data collection and analysis. This MIT Technology Review story explains how Google can use your credit card and Maps data to track if you have made purchases in a physical store after seeing an ad, while the Guardian worries about dynamic pricing based on your shopping history and demographic data. (MIT Technology Review, The Guardian)

Want to know what’s new in HomeKit? Watch here for new features, including data on the addition of speakers as a device type. Wheeeee! (Apple)