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Hewlett Packard: Smart Dust to Monitor Everything

CuttingEdge100

CuttingEdge100

Commodore
Commodore
Hewlett Packard: Smart Dust to Monitor Everything
URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/03/smart.dust.sensors/index.html
URL: http://www.puppetgov.com/2010/05/04/smart-dust-aims-to-monitor-everything/

This is something you really should read if you value personal privacy. This is absolutely horrifying, effectively this guy wants to create tiny sensors that could be used effectively to monitor everything on Earth. I don't know how anybody could consider this to be remotely ethical, but apparently there's always some person out there who thinks it's a great idea.

What's even more sickening is that one of their justifications for this is to monitor and protect the environment -- Yeah, I'm sure that's why they're going to use it, certainly not to monitor anything and everything and completely gut every last vestige of privacy we have left *sighs*.

And in case you are wondering, they plan to field this within the next two years.

What are your opinions?


CuttingEdge100
 
So they want to put a bunch of boxes the size of VHS tapes around the world to monitor specific things such as temperature. Okay, could be useful.

The difficulty with collecting any data which is even remotely complex (video, or even audio) in such a system isn't the sensors; it's processing. You very quickly hit a wall in how much of the data you can do anything useful with. In order to make it practical, you'd need the network to function not only as sensors, but as a distributed computing system as well, and even if you did that you'd hit interpretation limitations fast.

So I'm not too worried about this yet.
 
"Finally, we have defeated privacy!" - A cheerful Doctor Bhamba, Better Off Ted
 
If HP makes this tech anything like their damn printers, or software for said printers, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

A 6 square mile paper jam?
 
CuttingEdge100 said:
Hewlett Packard: Smart Dust to Monitor Everything
URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/03/smart.dust.sensors/index.html
URL: http://www.puppetgov.com/2010/05/04/smart-dust-aims-to-monitor-everything/

This is something you really should read if you value personal privacy. This is absolutely horrifying, effectively this guy wants to create tiny sensors that could be used effectively to monitor everything on Earth. I don't know how anybody could consider this to be remotely ethical, but apparently there's always some person out there who thinks it's a great idea.

What's even more sickening is that one of their justifications for this is to monitor and protect the environment -- Yeah, I'm sure that's why they're going to use it, certainly not to monitor anything and everything and completely gut every last vestige of privacy we have left *sighs*.

And in case you are wondering, they plan to field this within the next two years.

What are your opinions?


CuttingEdge100
Click to expand...

Smart dust is old news. I work in the instrumentation field and they've been talking about this for years. The breakthrough they've been waiting for is taking the concept from the millimetre scale to the micrometre scale. They'd make my job a hell of a lot easier, that's for damn sure.

I'm honest when I think that you seem like the kind of person whose paranoia might get the better of them some day. Be cautious, question things, but don't jump to quickly to conclusions. Every technology imaginable has the possibility for good an bad. I have no desire to halt progress every time something bad might be done with it, we've just got to take such things into consideration.
 
FordSVT said:
I'm honest when I think that you seem like the kind of person whose paranoia might get the better of them some day. Be cautious, question things, but don't jump to quickly to conclusions. Every technology imaginable has the possibility for good an bad. I have no desire to halt progress every time something bad might be done with it, we've just got to take such things into consideration.
Click to expand...

CuttingEdge, please listen to this. There are plenty of things you should be worried about here and now without freaking out over what's just around the corner.
 
Ar-Pharazon said:
If HP makes this tech anything like their damn printers, or software for said printers, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

A 6 square mile paper jam?
Click to expand...

My first thought too.

HP is far from what it once was. Mismanaged down from a great tech company to one that essentially sells little more than overpriced printer ink.
 
Ford SVT,

Smart dust is old news. I work in the instrumentation field and they've been talking about this for years. The breakthrough they've been waiting for is taking the concept from the millimetre scale to the micrometre scale.
Click to expand...

Which is obviously a serious problem as micrometer sized objects are not visible. They would also easily be carried by the wind, and they wish to produce enough of them to monitor anything and everything.

I'm honest when I think that you seem like the kind of person whose paranoia might get the better of them some day.
Click to expand...

What do you mean?

Be cautious, question things, but don't jump to quickly to conclusions. Every technology imaginable has the possibility for good an bad.
Click to expand...

Some technologies, however, have a much greater propensity for being used for ill-purposes. This would obviously be one of them. If you cannot see why, or disagree, you probably don't know enough about human nature.

I have no desire to halt progress every time something bad might be done with it, we've just got to take such things into consideration.
Click to expand...

I don't know why everybody seems to immediately jump to that conclusion, that imposing any restriction on scientific development is tantamount to stopping all research in every scientific field. I'm not talking about stopping all research in every scientific field, I'm taking about stopping certain research due to the obvious potential for malevolent uses. This technology obviously has such a propensity, and in fact, practically begs to be abused for surveillance purposes.

I think we would all be for outlawing the development of bio-weapons that could be engineered to only kill certain ethnic groups. Now why is this so? Because, this technology would practically beg to be abused.
 
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Lindley,

We've clearly established that they do not have to be as big as a VCR, and they are developing things the size of a cubic millimeter or smaller; according to Ford SVT, they're planning on even going down to the micrometer level.
 
CuttingEdge100 said:
Lindley,

We've clearly established that they do not have to be as big as a VCR, and they are developing things the size of a cubic millimeter or smaller; according to Ford SVT, they're planning on even going down to the micrometer level.
Click to expand...

That's the ultimate goal, sure, but where they are right now is VCR-sized things.

Besides, no matter how small they make the things, the ability to collect and process the information into something useful is still the biggest problem. More senors would just compound the problem.
 
Meredith,

I'm more worried about what the hackers will do with it...
Click to expand...

That's also a major issue.


Lindley,

That's the ultimate goal, sure, but where they are right now is VCR-sized things.
Click to expand...

The smart-dust particles? Are you kidding me, in the first link I sent, they showed a picture of what appeared to be the chips, they were dwarfed by a penny...
 
CuttingEdge100 said:
The smart-dust particles? Are you kidding me, in the first link I sent, they showed a picture of what appeared to be the chips, they were dwarfed by a penny...
Click to expand...

That's probably an artist's conceptual rendition.

Both articles clearly state that HP's devices are the size of matchbooks, and larger when properly protected from the elements. this link shows a smaller chip (about the size of a nickel), but that's a research team's efforts, not a deployable system.

Like I said before though.....we already have scads of sensors. We can't properly interpret all the data we get from them now due to lack of computing power and algorithms. Adding more and smaller sensors will just make the situation even more so, unless they keep them to relatively limited applications.
 
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Lindley,

this link shows a smaller chip (about the size of a nickel), but that's a research team's efforts, not a deployable system.
Click to expand...

And a deployable system would be substantially refined

Like I said before though.....we already have scads of sensors. We can't properly interpret all the data we get from them now due to lack of computing power and algorithms. Adding more and smaller sensors will just make the situation even more so, unless they keep them to relatively limited applications.
Click to expand...

Data processing capability has substantially increased over time; the fact that the NSA is able to intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone-calls, and other communications daily is testament to this.
 
CuttingEdge100 said:
Lindley,

this link shows a smaller chip (about the size of a nickel), but that's a research team's efforts, not a deployable system.
Click to expand...
And a deployable system would be substantially refined

Like I said before though.....we already have scads of sensors. We can't properly interpret all the data we get from them now due to lack of computing power and algorithms. Adding more and smaller sensors will just make the situation even more so, unless they keep them to relatively limited applications.
Click to expand...
Data processing capability has substantially increased over time; the fact that the NSA is able to intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone-calls, and other communications daily is testament to this.
Click to expand...

The ability to process data is increasing more slowly than the ability to collect data, however.
 
CuttingEdge100 said:
Lindley,

The ability to process data is increasing more slowly than the ability to collect data, however.
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure about that
Click to expand...

Lindley and I both have more experience in this area and we're telling you our data-mining and analysis capabilities are pitiful and are nowhere near enough to handle the vast amounts of data we can collect. Targeted data collection is going to be far more effective for the foreseeable future than blind collection of everything we can get our hands on.
 
CuttingEdge100 said:
I'm not so sure about that
Click to expand...

Then please do some actual research in just how much computing power and storage space would be required to "monitor everything" as well as provide a meaningful output.

I don't even want to get into how much transmission power something the size of "dust" would have... you'd need dozens of receiver stations every square mile if you hope to collect even a fraction of that data.
 
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