IoT news of the week, Nov. 13, 2020

From COVID to a panopticon: This article’s author does an amazing job of weaving together various corporate activities aimed at adopting wearables for social distancing into a coherent look at what happens to people-tracking in the office after COVID-19 no longer has us all in pandemic mode. There are many companies building wearables that use ultrawideband, Bluetooth, and other technologies to ensure that employees stay six feet apart or that handle contact tracing if an employee gets sick; I just got a press release today about a new partnership from Renesas and Altran, for example. But this story asks what happens after the pandemic (or after an effective vaccine is produced and distributed). Employers will want to know where their workers are, how long they take at lunch, where in the building they congregate, and even who they talk to. As the companies building the technology note, it’s employers who will be choosing to surveil their workers and how, but I think we’ll need to see some accountability here in the form of best practices — and likely a push for some sort of workplace tracking and employee protection legislation. (OneZero)

Amazon launches its Care Hub monitoring service: Amazon on Wednesday launched its previously announced Care Hub monitoring service. The idea is that a child or caregiver might want to keep an eye on an elderly parent from a distance to ensure they are OK, so this service allows them to link their two Alexa accounts together to let the caregiver see if the person has interacted with their Alexa device during the day. The cared-for person needs an Alexa device and the caregiver needs either a device or just an Alexa account on his or her phone. The caregiver would receive a truncated activity feed for the day letting them know when their parent or other monitored individual interacted with it. I asked my mom what she thought about it and she threatened me with bodily harm if ever I tried to monitor her using it or anything like it. As a side note, I also think it might be nice if Amazon created a two-way link between people that would allow them to check in with a long-distance friend or partner. With COVID, some form of connection that feels less like monitoring and more like sharing would be cool. (Amazon)

Amazon device discovery gets a little more seamless: In other Amazon news, the company has made device discovery a bit more automatic. Now when you plug in an Alexa-compatible device, Amazon’s Alexa can auto-detect it on the network and ask if you’d like to connect it. No more searching for skills in the Alexa app, although you will still have to link your account. (Engadget)

Researchers may have unearthed a cryptographic holy grail: Security researchers may have figured out a way to hide data and also hide the way a program works, creating a level of encryption that security experts didn’t believe could exist. The article describes the creation of what researchers call an indistinguishability obfuscation (iO). When it was first theorized back in 2013, it became a race between creators and hackers to see who could build something that was actually secure. All of the attempts failed. But now researchers from the University of Washington and UCLA say they have created the iO and have done so using existing and hardened technologies. I don’t know enough about encryption, the detailed equations it rests on, or much about how to hack computers, so I can only offer the article and its experts, but I did find the idea of creating a secure way to store data and give different people access to different levels of data really interesting for the IoT. I also appreciated the effort to explain how all this works. (Quanta)

How COVID affects chip firms and industrial IoT: This article quotes a few analysts detailing how the pandemic has pushed digital transformation efforts and what it means for industrial sensors. It also looks at automotive sensors and medical sensors, which have seen sales go down and up, respectively, since the pandemic began. (Fierce Electronics)

Distributed computing is coming for the edge: One of the challenges that comes with deploying thousands of sensors is that they can deliver a lot of information. Most companies are realizing they can’t send all of that data to the cloud and, even if they could, they want to use the data now, not after a few hours when an analytics service in the cloud gets done processing it. That means the industry is very focused on figuring out how to divvy up computing jobs across many edge nodes. I’ve written about this topic in the past, and am so excited to see what new types of computing architectures develop around this problem. Ericsson has done a good job of laying out the issues and explaining where we are at various points in what it calls “data pipelines.” The article also points out what technologies we still need to develop if we want to build a world of real-time edge analytics and process massive amounts of data. Read it. (Ericsson)

Wow, the IIoT market is really insignificant: This article mostly covers things readers of this newsletter already know, such as the fact that IIoT adoption will be based on packaged solutions that solve a particular use case as opposed to companies building their own from a variety of components. However, it also offers a few new ideas and data points, including a breakdown of how companies are spending on IoT. While big on marketing, most services associated with companies’ digital transformation are traditional IT and OT options, with 2020 market sizes of $4.4 billion and $6.2 billion, respectively, according to data from Credit Suisse’s Industrials Equity Research team. Pure IIoT technology providers only brought in $471 million in overall revenue in 2020. (Enterprise IoT Insights)

China’s blockchain-based internet gets interesting: China wants blockchain developers to build decentralized software applications on the Blockchain-Based Service Network (BSN), which is a network of Chinese-run servers. China touts the use of the BSN as a way to save on cloud hosting costs. I’m fascinated by the novel architecture here, the use of the blockchain to build something far more disruptive than a cryptocurrency, and the attention paid to the idea by Lawfare, which I think of as a policy site as opposed to a tech site. (Lawfare)