IoT, IoT, Oooh my Internet of freakin’ Things!

IoT is a fad.

There, I said it.

Embedded has a use. It always had, ever since microlelectronics. And it most certainly always will.

But IoT is a fad. Pure and simple. It roughly is to the general population today what Ruby on Rails was to programmers 10 years ago. Truckloads of hype that will soon wither and fall back to niche cases when facing the real world.

Why?

The IoT bascially involves slapping unsafe and badly cobbled microlinuxes with unsafe overkill webservers on to toasters, watercoolers, fridges, heaters and whatnot. All these features get used roughly 3 times before they are recognised as to cumbersome and complicated and forgotten.

Except they won’t be forgotten.

They will be remembered by Shodan and the likes and two years down by some bored teenager who will access your expensive error-prone IoT trinkets with the long forgotten default access codes and start messing up your stuff big time. It will be fun for him, you will be confused and frustrated, call the service and they will send someone.

Some guy with no clue what-so-ever will tell you your heater is broken and that you need a new one. He won’t tell you your heaters settings were messed up by someone who had access to it because “IoT”. Because he probably won’t know and even if he knows, he won’t freakin’ care, because he wants to sell new heaters. Because that’s more money and less hassle of working out the IoT intricacies of your existing heater.

Conclusion

Unless you are a Hacker looking for some fun – in which case I highly recommend getting into IoT – I suggest stearing clear of IoT like it were the plague. My toaster doesn’t need a webserver and neither does yours.

Trust a computer expert on that one.