IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 128

an Internet of Things. Looking at how
we use connected things to control our
home can give us insight into connecting things. The simplest example may
be a light switch with a wire running to
a light fixture. It is very easy to understand what is happening. It is also easy
to understand how to change the relationships by reconnecting the wire. It is
easy but inconvenient, and it is difficult
to extend that wire very far.
Telephones were also connected by
wires, and we created an elaborate
switching system to extend that wire
across the world with operators at
switchboards making connections.
Later we automated by having pulse
dialers driving stepping relays.
We can see the progression from the
days when the number you dialed directly stepped relays that setup the circuits
to today's phone system where numbers
have become abstract identifiers that
translate into circuit paths. That frees the
phone numbers to act as relationship
links. In practice this means that people
do not change their (cell) phone numbers when they move around. (I was
going to add "within a country" but with
T-Mobile and VoIP, I no longer worry
about getting a local SIM).

A CIRCUITOUS PATH
We need the same progression in
understanding the Internet. The first
step is an explicit and articulate understanding of the difference between a
phone number as a network identifier
and the use of phone numbers as endpoint identifiers totally apart from their
use in laying out a circuit. In practice,
the phone number gets translated into a
separate circuit identifier.
With the Internet, the IP address is
akin to the circuit identifier. It is used to
map the path. This is most obvious in the
split between the wide area and local portions of an address. In a 108.26.225.69
address, typically the first three octets are
the network number and the last octet
represents the local address. IPv6 is the
same though with a 64-bit prefix and a
64-bit local portion. If you move your
device from one local network to another,
the address changes. The problem is
exacerbated by the use of network
128 IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

address translators (NATs) that enable an
entire house to share a single public
address. A device with a 192.168.0.1
address is not even visible beyond the
NAT. Thus you cannot even use the
address to find a path between the two
end points. While IPv6 reduces the need
for such sharing of public addresses it
does not provide stable addresses.
The DNS is a distributed database of
the identifiers we use to maintain stable relationships between end points,
but it is fundamentally flawed. For one
thing the looking up of names requires
a connection to the root server at least
periodically. The result is the IP address,
which also requires being issued from a
central source if it is to be publically
meaningful. If I am not actively connected to a distant server, I cannot even
reach my neighbor's server.
As with the use of NATs to provide
local IP addresses, there are local name
resolution techniques. Of course these
share the same limitations as local
addresses. I run into these limits when I
try to use my FiOS mobile app to
choose what is displayed on my TV.
Often I get told that my video source (a
set-top box) is not reachable. This happens if my controller (smartphone) has
connected to the "wrong" network.
There are various ways to work
around these problems. IPv6 provides a
way to give each device a public
address without an NAT. Rather than
waiting for IPv6 many programs simply create a tunnel into a cloud service
as a way to make themselves available.
Inarticulate workarounds are successful as long as you stay within the standard use cases. We can treat a phone
number as a stable identifier if we take
care to port it when we change service
providers. That is because we do not really own the phone numbers but instead get
them assigned from a provider.
The DNS is supposed to provide the
stable identifiers that hold the web (and
the rest of the Internet) together. But
we do not even own our identifiers. The
registries deigning to lease us the
names can impose whatever terms they
want including setting arbitrary prices.
If anything goes wrong, including a late
payment, do we lose our very identity?

october 2015

From 2012 to 2014 Heinz used QR
codes to link to sagsmightheinz.de. It
then let the name lapse, and it was
picked up by a pornography site (http://
goo.gl/98Wlwi)!
There are some extensions that allow
for local names but, even then, we might
not be able to find the printer next to the
computers because it's on the "wrong"
network. We accept such a flawed system
because it is reasonable network engineering. Today we need an approach that supports stable relationships rather than just
making traditional networks function.

SOCIAL!
Let's not forget social relationships. We
organize our world in terms of our
relationships with other people. Yet
when it comes to technology we tend to
forget much of what we've learned and
try to force people to conform to
the technology.
Instead of appreciating the richness
of trust relationships, we impose a
naive notion of security as if we could
hide behind the castle walls and be safe.
We forget that networking is a social
activity and view networking as a service as if we had to rely on providers to
arrange dates and marriages.

AN ARTICULATE
UNDERSTANDING
The use of phone numbers as stable
identifiers arose from practice and the
DNS was designed as an improvement
on the mechanism used to manage IP
addresses. Now that we've seen the
power of working with relationships,
we are ready to build on that experience and approach relationships as a
mechanism on their own terms.
The relationships are not a layer upon
a networking infrastructure. Instead we
need to see any available facilities as a
resource. This is much like the routes we
use to get from point A to point B. That
route may only exist in our navigation
device. The road "owner" is completely
unaware that the route exists, and if one
road is blocked we choose another path.
Relationships are also abstract-I
may have a "cousin" relationship with
another person which exists even if I
am not aware that I have a cousin. To

http://www.sagsmightheinz.de http://http:// http://www.goo.gl/98Wlwi

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015