Welcome back to Geek Time advanced. Welcome, Lulu.

Hi, Brad.

How's it going?

We were talking about IoT devices in the basic episode. We're gonna continue that and we're gonna talk a little bit about cars as IoT devices.

Em, in the previous episode, in the basic one, we were talking about mostly about these smart home devices like we were joking about our fridge talking smack about us behind our backs, and all these you said like thermostat setting or setter or like smart locks. But cars that seems like, I don't know, it seems pretty big as an IoT right? It has a lot of built ins.

YEAH. We think about a car today. They already have a lot of sensors already built in. They have the thermostat, they have things related to GPS, they have light sensors and so when it gets dark outside, your front lights will automatically turn on.

So there are already tons of IoT devices in the car. However, our future cars will not just have IoT devices, but will be in a sense A IoT device themselves when we go to more like self driving cars.

Self driving cars, those cars that you don't have to drive, right? It just drives on its own.

Right,

Let me get this straight. That means our car will be if we see all of these devices in the internet of things or on the internet of things, if we see them as dots, in the future these cars our car will be one dot containing lots of bells and whistles

Yeah, because like all the cars will be interacting with each other. They are going to connect probably to a network of some sort.

And they are going to know the position of other cars as those cars are moving around so that the cars can kind of avoid, but it can also be a way to manage the traffic system. Because if there's a network that all the cars are connected to, and then the traffic lights are connected to those, they don't have to follow a regular schedule. They can see ok, if we turn this light red now then the cars that are going can move through and then we can change this light to be green. And It'll help the flow of traffic in the long run.

Wow, that kind of blows my mind basically in the future when everyone switches to self driving cars, every car is connected to the internet of things. That basically means we'll be in an almost automated ultra smart system or sort of like transportation infrastructure, then we no longer have to worry about things like traffic jam, congestion collision any of that.

Yeah, we can avoid a lot of it. I mean there are still going to be some of those things. There will be accidents, there will be collisions from time to time. No system is perfect, but it will definitely be reduced quite a bit. (em) Now there is this idea of cloud computing everything these days is on the cloud, as they say. Now we're going to possibly move into a new field called Fog computing .

Hang on a minute, so I haven't even figured out fully how cloud computing works now. People are now the old technology is moving on towards fog computing like 霧計算,從云計算到霧計算 . What is fog computing?

Like we have cloud computing like data is stored on the network rather than on your computer, so you can access that data anywhere. (yeah) But fog computing is where they eliminate the need for the internet where we don't have to even go on the internet. So all the devices themselves in one area create their own network.

And so It's kind of like a fog in one area. There's lots of cars over here and they all have their own network and so they kind of referred to that as a fog rather than being like in the cloud on the internet. It's a fog that's outside of the internet. They're all kind of just working together.

So instead of controlling every car with an internet based or cloud based system, now they get rid of the cloud and just cars will connect with one another.

Right. So it'll be less centralized, it'll be decentralized from a network. Things can still connect to a network. But in a situation where they can't connect to the network, maybe it's down or something like that, all of the cars connect to each other and create their own fog network.

Sounds like at least a nice backup system. So if the internet fails, then at least there's a backup plan, there's a plan B these cars can still avoid bumping into each other because they have their own network which is fog computing. Ok

Yeah. The whole idea of fog computing can actually be very good for a large company that doesn't want their IoT devices connected to the internet, because those devices could be disconnected from them and just on their own fog network.

I see, so we're still... I noticed that over the past few topics we kept talking about the idea of decentralizing things. It seems like this is where technology is heading towards all these peer to peer and decentralizing, it feels like people no longer want to have a centralized control on the internet.

Yeah

So a lot of these decentralized ideas or decentralized technologies are popping up.

Yeah, it's not necessarily that they're against their being a centralized network. In some cases it's just that they don't want things to go down because the centralized network is down. They want to find a way to maintain things and keep things going without the need for it, you know it's always gonna be a great backbone. But if the network is down and you need your factory to run on the network, your factory is gonna stop, but if it can run on the fog as well, then there's no need to stop.

Em, since you mentioned about factories, let's talk about the industrial use because so far we've been more focusing on personal use like individual homes. What are some of the possibilities for industrial use when we are talking about IoT.

Well if we look at agriculture, we talked about temperature before they can collect data for temperature. And this can be very beneficial to know when to plant or when to pick things. But we can also get a lot more data. We can measure rainfall in a particular area of soil. Look at the condition of the soil. If it's too... maybe there's too much acidity or too much salt in the soil. They can measure those types of things with IoT devices.

Em, I see. What about like manufacturing, suppose they will also be good for the control system.

Yeah, not only can you manage the controls, you can also look for statistics and you can look for how long should you wait before you maintenance a certain machine.

If there is a particular problem with the machine, you can rather than have humans going and checking it periodically. It can do self checks and that way it can say ok we need maintenance now.

And then a person can come and do the maintenance, but it'll make it so that we can we can do things in a much more...it just a much more statistical manner basically. Yeah, we can maintain things a little bit more easily.

Yeah sounds like it's also a way to improve efficiency.

Yeah. Definitely.

I mean we have been focusing so much on the good side, but that still doesn't really negate all these worries that I have. I know I'm just like really a dummy when it comes to tacky things, but still the idea of all of my devices that I use, including my car, they're all connected with their own network that kind of scares me a little bit. I'm sure they are some security, safety risks and concerns at least.

Yeah, one of the biggest problems right now with IoT devices is there are so many of them and there are so many small companies that make IoT devices that don't have any idea about what security is.

So they make a device and they don't even implement any security on it. And If you have an IoT device that's connected to the internet, you can often just go into that IoT device and then move into the internet. Some companies don't necessarily... they don't think about it or they just don't care about it.

Another issue is there are some IoT devices. We mentioned smart locks earlier. They have great software. And They run exactly the way they should, they're very strong and protected as far as the software goes. But then you look at the physical side and they're easily broken. I watched a video of a guy who opened up smart lock with just like a needle in like less than 20 seconds.

Yeah, I think that is so ironic. So you put all these efforts. Let me sum it up. So Either they don't put in any security safeguard, so the device itself, technologically, it's not secure; or they put in a lot of tacky side of security safeguard, but they ignored a physical side. You cannot break the code, but you can just break the lock.

Right. That's pretty much it. And aside from security, the other problem that we kind of have to look at is just the number of IoT devices that are being put out into the market.

A good example is Amazon. They made an IoT device for your laundry room. You push a button, and it orders more soap. That's all it does. But it's like there's this little IoT device that they made. It has electronic components in it. It's got plastic. What do you do when you don't need it or what do you do when it breaks? Like it's just gonna create tons and tons of garbage that we don't really need.

Yeah, it does sounds like it's still early days with all of these IoT devices. Probably in the future there would be more better developed multi purpose IoT devices. But you know as we're ending this topic, let me tell you my concerns.

You know I've bought some of those surveillance cameras. There are like smart surveillance cameras you know I can put it in your home. When you're not home it detects you can set it to detect movements and supposedly if someone breaks into your home or something abnormal happens like a fire breaks out and then you can... it will notify you on your smartphone, but I'm just thinking if there are no security safeguards put in, then basically other people or other devices can potentially turn on that camera without me noticing or without notifying me, and just watch whatever and then they can perhaps what was happening in my home and also maybe think of a time to break into it.

Yeah, that's a real worry, right?

I mean I always cover up the camera on my laptop when I'm using it and I'm not using the camera just because of things like that.

Yeah, but maybe they're gonna evolve or they're gonna further develop into things that can shake whatever covering you're using off and start...

I don't think that will happen anytime soon, but.

All right, maybe I've been watching too many sci-fi horror. Yeah. All right, advanced episode of IoT or internet of things. Leave us comment in the comment section. Tell us how you feel about the future with more IoT devices.

Yeah And let us know if there's a any IoT devices that you really like.

Thank you, Brad, for coming to the studio.

No problem.Talk to you later. Lulu.

We'll see you next time.

Bye for now.