#physical graph

The traffic between the cloud and the SmartThings Hub is encrypted, making it very difficult for hackers to intercept, let alone to modify for malevolent ends. It might actually be the case that automation, even mediated through the cloud, will make our lives more rather than less secure. As Wired senior writer Mat Honan has documented, our recent hacking epidemic has largely exploited the human interface—the password. We’re always the weak link in online security, and in the Programmable World, our objects will carry out their business without needing us to get involved at all.

Alex Hawkinson of Smart­Things likes to draw an analogy to Facebook, which has famously described the underlying data it owns as the social graph—the knowledge of who is connected to whom and how. Hawkinson wants us to think of a “physical graph” where all the objects in our lives take on similar underlying connections, based on how we might want the state of one object to depend on the state or behavior of another.