Putting the Internet back in the things
Tired of private equity firms reprogramming your garage door opener, or your bike getting caught up in corporate bankruptcy proceedings?
The world of connected devices, known colloquially as the “Internet of Things” (IoT) looks a lot like the rest of the world where the enclosing walls of private platforms have taken the Internet’s promise of interoperability via shared protocols and replaced it with a terms of service and an arbitration clause.
For physical devices this shift is especially problematic: it makes devices more fragile and less secure in ways that not only waste our time and money, but make actual waste as a stream of formerly connected (now useless) devices pile up as the businesses they're inextricably linked with fold and pivot.
The Hydrogen Plumbing project is effort to rewire device connectivity, leveraging existing internet standards including IPv6 and the Boarder Gateway Protocol (BGP), and building on open radio spectrum, open source tools and open hardware reference designs.
Protocols > Platforms
It turns out the tools necessary to fix IoT are baked into the very architecture of the Internet. Yet, the Internet's core systems for data exchange and organizational governance have fallen into obscurity as monolithic global platforms crowded out decentralized, bottom up approaches to network design.
Hydrogen Plumbing utilizes two of these foundational structures: regional Internet registries, a global group of nonprofit organizations responsible for assigning and managing Internet addresses, and BGP's decentralized framework for linking addresses via an interconnected network of autonomous systems. These decades-old systems quietly power the Internet, and when combined with modern standards like IPv6 they offer possibilities for bringing billions of new connected devices online without building dependences on centralized platforms.
Learn how it works »