Time for Pervasive Security?

Pervasive Security was a new track at Connectivity Week. Pervasive security occurs when every transaction is aware of the identity, location, context, and role of the requestor, wherein identity might be determined by someone identity source external to the organization, role might be determined by an external business process, location might distinguish, say, between access internal or external to a firewall, and context is the business situation surrounding the interaction.

I am not going to discuss Pervasive Security yet. By way of illustration, however, I will discuss pervasive time.

Jeff Stern, of KoolSpan, gave an excellent talk during the session. He illustrated pervasive security by recalling the development of Pervasive Time.

Time started as a city-wide, and then a town-wide phenomenon, with a clock in the central cathedral or courthouse. The entire town could look up to the single instance of time.

Later, the well-to do could acquire time, in the form of large grandfather clocks for the wealthy. In time these expanded into mantle clocks affordable for the middle classes. The model now is one clock per house.

The next development was personal time, as watches came to the fore. Everyone wore a watch, everyone had personal time.

Today, we have pervasive time. Incredibly accurate time is the underpinning of all internet activity. Each device in the house seems to have its own clock, ready to flash 12:00 angrily at us if power flickers.

And most people? Well, they no longer buy mantle clocks. Or even watches. All but one in the room had no watch, but instead reached for their cell-phone, its time perpetually updated over the ether.

Time is now everywhere, and nowhere. Time is pervasive. Security is next.

oBIX Standard Update to CABA

As if Connectivity Week were not enough fun, CABA's Intelligent Buildings comittee met on Friday after the conference. CABA was instrumental in the original founding of the oBIX initiative. Below is a summary of my report.

oBIX has been an OASIS Committee Specification since December. Delays in the IP management process as well as the review/comments/response cycle made progress slow last year. It is now in the winter of discontent when all adoption and movement appears glacial.

There are shipping applications with oBIX now. UNC is today running 70 buildings using oBIX. I am told the Department of Defense is using it in high end specialized situations, but things being what they are, I cannot say where or how. Interested parties can download the specification at:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/21462/obix-1.0-cs-01.zip

or can download the open source implementation at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148480

What is more interesting is the interest being shown to oBIX external to the buildings domain. The National Building Information Modeling Standard (NBIMS) and the oBIX committee have met to explore relationships between the standards, focusing on whether Energy Models developed directly against NBIMS models can be compared to live data from control systems read by oBIX to produce live models (or instantaneous commissioning). The Emergency Management Technical Committee, promulgators of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) would like invoke oBIX contracts directly from CAP alerts. The Open Geospatial Consortium would like to invoke contracts granting situation and spatial awareness to emergency responders. These conversations are the beginning of enterprise interactions with intelligent buildings.

During the report, I was asked about BACnet-WS and its relationship and competition with oBIX. Today, most implementers are still focused on point-to-point communication between systems using REST. Under REST, the difference between the two standards is small. As applications move toward interactions with systems outside the building system domain, wherein pervasive security, Federated identity management, cross-domain applications, long-running processes, and service orientation become more important, then the value of the SOAP binding offered by oBIX becomes of greater relative value. The applications cited above are good examples.

oBIX is currently recruiting members for the technical committee, both to flesh out errors and omissions (1.1) and to begin defining standard contracts based on the oBIX object model (2.0). oBIX is also considering forming an oBIX implementation committee. CABA members are invited to participate in either or both.

Follow-Up on Pigs, Trail Mix, and Carbon

Catching up on the reading after being on the road for a week is always interesting. The trends and issues bubble up just slightly out of chronological order as I read down through the pile.

One story that caught my eye is that food banks are getting far fewer donations from companies that have long donate improperly labeled or slightly odd canned and packaged material. Food bankers have to work “twice as hard to get half the amount of food”.

The article went on to cite improvements in the manufacturing process as the source of the problem. Make to Order and improved process control were speculated as the reason. But this was clearly speculation.

I couldn’t help but wonder, does this have anything to do with the pigs? Does the ready market for slightly wrong materials as a substitute for corn in agriculture reduce donations to food banks? If so, it is yet another unintended consequence of choosing solutions to energy problems in Washington rather than creating markets…

Pigs, Trail Mix, and Carbon

North Carolina is Pig Country – are at least a lot of it is. Pig farms produce a lot of waste, and the best pig farmers are doing some creative and innovative things about it. But I’m not writing about creative and innovative things today. I’m writing about what happens when government mandates methods rather than results.

In Garland, NC, pigs are eating trail mix. Pigs are moving to trail mix. Pigs are also eating cookies, cheese curls, French fries, and peanut-butter cups. Pigs are changing diets because the price of feed corn went through the roof this spring, driven by Congress’s obsession with picking winners and losers, rather than with setting the rules.

Farmers are practical people, who have relentlessly driven down the cost of food and the percentage of the populace involved in food production over the last century. When the rules change, they adapt. Trimmings, out of date processed food, and even simple mistakes that make a batch taste funny have all previously gone to waste; now, driven by a doubling of corn prices, they are live stock feed. Farmers understand markets.

Congress periodically gets an itch to solve a problem. Or more accurately to be seen to “Do Something” about a problem. But solutions are hard. The world is complicated. Solutions can have unintended effects. But complex approaches do not play well in our sound-bite media.

What plays well in the media is decisiveness. But congresspersons rarely possess the deep domain knowledge necessary to make decisions in complicated areas. Neither, by the way, do many utilities commissions. So they look for someone to explain it to them. And whoever explains it to them usually has a dog in the fight.

Three decades ago, it was necessary to do something about smog. But any changes in actual smog would take a long time to come—than the next election. So congress had to pick a solution. Aided by the massed lobbyists of the platinum industry, whose persuasiveness must have been strong in the days before three martini lunches were disallowed as business expenses, Congress selected the catalytic converter.

There has been a reduction in smog, it’s true. But we have also locked in on using the best technology from the 70’s. Any car company that picks another technology faces possible liability, possible regulatory delays, or they can choose the expensive 30 year old solution, a solution from a time when high end engineering calculators were more expensive than today’s lap-tops and offered less computing and programmability than today’s cell phone. Meanwhile, credible research suggests that the epidemic increase in asthma and allergy over that period is tied to road-side platinum compounds.

Today, aided by the best advice they could get from the lobbyists of the world’s largest agribusiness, congress has incentivized corn to ethanol production. It does so while continuing to defend our shores from foreign sugar, a commodity that might be made into ethanol more cheaply, but that might compete with corn sugar. Even while credible studies suggest that corn ethanol production uses more petroleum than it replaces, the subsidies continue.

Congress should set the goals, and step back. In energy and in carbon, set the bar high, and enable creativity, and market-driven innovation to solve the problems and provide the solutions.

Doing anything else is stupid. You might say pig stupid.