Identity, the Internet of Things and the Blockchain

Technology’s Martyrs: The Slide Rule” by Kirk Johnson in the New York Times (3rd January 1987) covers the story of Keuffel & Esser.

This company, founded in 1867, was America’s pre-eminent manufacturer of slide rules. In 1965, they sold one million of them. In 1967, their centenary, they were commissioned to prepare a report about the future called “Life in the year 2067″, looking a century on. They interviewed scientists to come up with a vision that predicted electric cars and 3D TV. What it didn’t predict was that they would be out of business within a few years because of the electronic calculator. The end came quickly. On this day in 1976
K&E produced its last slide rule, which it presented to the Smithsonian Institution.
[From Computer History Museum | Exhibits | This Day in History: July 11]
In less than a decade they were gone because of technological change. But note the “Gibson” take on this: the invention that destroyed them, the electronic calculator, already existed when they wrote their report. In fact the first all electronic calculator desktop calculator went on sale in 1961
At the end of 1961 the Bell Punch Company put the Anita Mk VII on the market in continental Europe and the Anita Mk 8 in the rest of the world as the world’s first electronic desktop calculators. These were the only commercial electronic desktop calculators for more than 2 years
[From Anita: the world’s first electronic desktop calculator]
What’s more, the first electronic all-transistor calculator (from Sharp) went on sale in 1964. So by the time the slide rule guys did their study, the technology that would destroy them had been on open sale for several years. They made the mistake, I guess, of thinking that because slide rules cost $10 and calculators cost $1,000 they would never compete, forgetting that the inevitable curve of technology price/performance would do for them in time. And, I suspect, the scientists that wrote the report all used slide rules and were perfectly happy with them.

Disconnection

(Picture) British Post Office engineers inspect Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraphy (radio) equipment, during a demonstration on Flat Holm island, 13 May 1897. This was the world's first demonstration of the transmission of radio signals over open sea, between Lavernock Point and Flat Holm Island, a distance of 3 miles.

A frequently used analogy is that of “The New Frontier”, which rests on a comparison between the opening up of the American West and the opening up and development of cyberspace. The American frontier was pushing west throughout the nineteenth century, expanding a single market with a single currency. The invention of the refrigerated railroad car (for example) made it possible to produce food on the frontier for trade with distant centres of population. Similarly, once Western Union had invented electronic money, it was possible to shift capital to the frontier (in order to exploit resources) instantaneously.
The process of homesteading by which the vast expanses of the midwest were turned into productive economic resources is interesting. The land was parcelled up and given away, rather like IP addresses. In order to encourage people to take up parcels, the government had to make them large enough to be economically viable. But even when the size of the land parcels was increased to 160 acres, there were still not enough takers because ranching and herding were not productive enough. The need to create viable homesteads was hampered by a lack of surface water and a lack of wood for fencing. The first problem was solved through the use of windmills which drew up ground water and, further west, by massive federally subsidised irrigation projects. The second problem wasn’t solved until Joseph Glidden, a New Hampshire farmer, invented a way to mass produce barbed wire in 1874 and it became cost–effective to fence off areas and enforce property rights. After all, if your cows can wander all over the place, you wouldn’t husband them in the same way as if you could keep them put. David Banbom, in his book Born in the Country—A History of Rural America (John Hopkins Uni. Press, 1995), describes the transformation: “Ranchers began claiming land [and] throwing up fences around it. They discovered that closer attention to their cattle and their range enhanced their ability to survive an enterprise with high risks and low margins. Ranchers began managing their range more carefully and rotating cattle on it systematically…”
Does this illuminate current developments? On a limited scale I think it does. It tells us that, for example, the branding of cattle—that is, the ability to clearly mark property as belonging to somebody—didn’t really help that much. If, then, the frontier analogy has any predictive component it is that the new kinds of barbed wire—what Kevin Kelly referred to as the “technologies of disconnection” in Out of Control (Addison Wesley, 1994)—are the key technological advances that will make cyberspace productive. But is there an analogy that might reveal more about future trends?

I think a phone that can check up on other people's stuff might be fun. After all, 900MHz is much longer range than NFC (several metres for industrial readers). So if you're at a boring party and you're wondering whether the hostesses dress is a real Chanel or a knock-off, you can find out from across the room. Or if you want to snoop around a neighbour's house but can't actually be bothered to go into other rooms, it's ideal. But, as I pointed out some time ago, Suppose RFID is used to implement Electronic Product Codes (EPCs) for luxury goods. If I see a Gucci handbag on sale in a shop, I will be able to point my Bluetooth EPC-reading pen (these already exist) at it and read the EPC, which is just a number. My mobile phone can decode the number and then tell me that the handbag is Gucci product 999, serial number 888. This information is, by itself, of little use to me. There has to be a database to establish provenance, and it is that database that is at the core of the Korea Telecom business model discussed earlier.
Thus, the counterfeiters will inevitably shift their attention to attacking the database. If I were a counterfeiter, I'd put chips in my whiskey that linked to a URL that displayed something that looks like the official Korea Telecom page but says "Sorry, the service is currently down, please try again later" or perhaps even "Sorry, the service is down, please call this number for more information" followed by the number for a reverse-charge premium-rate call to Surinam at $199 per minute. Just as with smart posters and so on, unless the chip carries a digital signature, you don't know whether the URL is real or not, so nothing it directs you to can be trusted. There's no need for a URL here: just have the chip store a digitally-signed identifier and let the "provenance infrastructure" do the rest. Better still, have the chip store a digitally-signed and encrypted identifier so that only the database owner can decrypt it, ensuring that all provenance request have to go through them. Without an infrastructure that includes end-to-end digital signatures there's no way round this. The phone needs to know the chip is authentic. The database needs to know who is asking, and the consumer needs to know who is answering.all applications.