Automated Home podcast out

Automated Home blogger Mark McCall has published an interview with AlertMe co-founder and director Pilgrim Beart and design engineer Amyas Phillips. In it he asks about how AlertMe came to be, our experiences with ZigBee and our plans for the future, plus we both get to recommend favourite pieces of gadgetry at the end.

You can listen online or get the podcast on itunes.

If you enjoy that (or maybe if you want to listen to someone else!) check out Mark's Top 10 Tech Podcasts as well.

Alertme more secure than banks

Our web security guru Steve has been getting all excited about a new website called TLS Report. Its already a massive hit amongst web administrators, now we think its time to share it with our blog readers too!

TLS Report tests the security of supposedly secure web services and gives them a grade and a score. The kind of security it tests is cryptographic, basically how hard it would be for an evesdropper to get hold of confidential information passing between your web browser and a website. That's different to other kinds of security, like not using the same password everywhere and not telling everyone that you collect diamonds as a hobby, but it is the basis for providing secure web services where you know that the website on the other end is the real deal, and that nobody in between you and the website can read what you're saying to each other.

TLS is actually the name of a protocol (Transport Layer Security) which browsers use to set up secure connections to websites. The first part of the protocol's job is to check that the website is really who it claims to be, and not a fraudulent phishing site (what's phishing?). This is done by checking the sites' certificates. To properly understand certificates, you need to understand something about how public key cryptography works, but basically they're digitally-signed documents from people we definitely trust saying "I know this website, and I say you can trust them too". If they check out, your browser can be sure this site is who it says it is. It is good practice to renew certificates regularly.

The next part of the protocol lets your browser agree with the secure website's server what kind of security to use - specifically what cryptographic cipher to use (what's a cipher?) and how to exchange keys (what's a key?). Most browsers support a variety of different ciphers and key exchange mechanisms, often including old and out of date ones which are no longer considered secure. Properly secure websites shouldn't offer to use these antiquated methods.

TLS Report checks the freshness and security of a sites' certificates, how up-to-date the ciphers and key exchange mechanisms are, whether the version of the TLS protocol itself is up to date, and whether the site meets the minimum requirements for some payments-related security standards. Then it gives the site a score.

Secure.alertme.com, where Alertme customers log in to their systems, ranks joint 3rd in the roll of honour with a grade A and a score of 82. Shop.alertme.com does equally well.

Is that good? Yes it is! Compare our score with some online banking web sites:

• LloydsTSB (online.lloydstsb.co.uk) - score B 78
• HSBC (www.hsbc.co.uk) - score C 64
• Barclays (ibank.barclays.co.uk) - score C 67
• Natwest (www.nwolb.com) - score C 61
• RBS (www.rbs.co.uk) - score D 54

According to TLS Report, Alertme is better than all of them! (as of June 17th 2008 anyway)

There's some debate as to how TLS Report awards its grades, and the banks are sure to improve - that's really the point of TLS Report - but congratulations to Steve and his team!

June newsletter out today!

If you're not on our mailing list already, read the latest AlertMe newsletter online here.

To subscribe, just send a blank email to friends@whenineedtoknow.com with the word 'subscribe' in the subject line.

Alertme comes out top in MSN.com review

MSN technology columnist Rob Clymo reviewed AlertMe against another system, and handed the laurels to us!

We've worked very hard on good design and ease of use, so we were especially pleased that Rob picked out those features for special praise:

"AlertMe wins the prize for idiot-proof set-up and installation."

"The component parts have been fabulously designed and look like a family of iPod peripherals in their brilliant white plastic finish."

Read the full review Beating the Burglars on MSN.com.

New features now available!

We've been working hard since our launch to bring you new features and a better AlertMe experience. Now we're delighted to announce that version 1.2 of the Alertme software is ready, and available as a free upgrade to all our customers.


So what's new?

'At Home' and 'Away' are now joined by 'Night Mode', a new mode for you to use when you're at home but want to protect unoccupied parts of your home. A new Lamp service lets you choose what you want each lamp to do when you are At Home, Away or in Night Mode. Keyfobs are now automatically detected when they leave or come back home, and you can set up Presence alerts to let you know by SMS or email when someone comes home, goes out or both. There is a new Voice of AlertMe to welcome you back to your home (and tell your intruders to go away).

We've also made lots of useful improvements:

Battery Life of battery-powered accessories is improved to between 18 months and 3 years, depending on the accessory. We now tell you the Causes of Alerts - when an Alarm goes off, we tell you why. The window/door sensor icons on the Accessories page now show you whether the corresponding door or window is open or closed. When an intruder alert has occurred, the hub now continues to sound the alarm until the alert is cleared by a keyfob or remotely via SMS or the website. myHistory now contains more information and events for you to browse and enjoy, and if you click on any accessory in the Accessories page a detailed information pane will appear. You can now delete sensors from your system. Finally, SMS control allows you to control and monitor your home via SMS text message on your mobile phone.

You can download a PDF of the full release notes here.

Changing faces

Laura James has left AlertMe. Laura's contributed a huge amount to AlertMe, and we all wish her luck in her new job.

You'll now find QA engineer Charles and the Customer Services team manning the forums, and various of us updating the blog. For AlertMe technology issues, including ZigBee and connected homes, please contact :

Dr Amyas Phillips
email : amyas@alertme.com
direct line +44 (0) 1223 222 157

For non-AlertMe things, Laura can be reached at lbjames /at/ gmail.com

Crowdsourcing - for security?

AlertMe is always keen to spot other home security projects, even "hobbyist" ones that we know most of our customers wouldn't be able to do for themselves, because sometimes they embody interesting ideas.

The BUGLabs team, who produce an open source consumer electronics development platform, blogged this week about their home (well, office) security system. They've connected motion sensors and cameras, via a BUG system, to twitter and twitxr, so that friends of the company who follow these data feeds can spot people coming in to their office. You can keep an eye on their office with the rest of the crowd here; this is an example of crowdsourcing (what's crowd-sourcing?).

I think AlertMe disproves the statement "the static/automatic nature of an off-the-shelf consumer electronics device [means that it is] designed to do its task very specifically" - we show that consumer electronics can be a platform and can have new services deployed on it. But the general idea of crowd-sourcing security raises some interesting issues. Would you trust your twitter, or facebook, friends to monitor your home, or assess whether a picture was of an intruder or not? Does having information about your home's security online - either for anyone to read, or just for your online friends - is a security risk? Do you think they are more able to take action to help you and your home than other friends, family and neighbours? Or is AlertMe in fact already crowd-sourcing security, by keeping you and your nominated contacts in the loop via text and email? (Feel free to discuss this on our forum)

Nonetheless, the idea of a "Social Gadget Network" discussed in the post is an interesting one, and with AlertMe already producing text and email notifications from the home, we're part of it (along with Andy's house, the botanicalls potplants, and more).

European ZigBee developers conference

For all the ZigBee fans out there, AlertMe has had two talks accepted for the EuroZDC next month.

Amyas will be talking about the elephant in the room: commissioning, which is how you set up a ZigBee network from a bunch of disparate devices each with a ZigBee radio, and how you make it secure and functional for a range of applications. My talk is about AlertMe's experiences with ZigBee, how we choose it and tested its suitability for our application, and the challenges of going from prototype to product.

Hope to meet some of our readers in Munich! We're looking forward to getting more involved in the ZigBee community.

Gadget Show success!

AlertMe is enjoying the holiday weekend here in the UK, after a great week following our appearance on Channel 5's Gadget Show.

You can read what the show said about us here - we detected the burglars and informed the householder in seconds - just the way we intended :)

Set your recording devices!

AlertMe will be on the Gadget Show, Monday 28th April, Channel 5, 8pm.

All the staff will be poised with popcorn to see our kit starring on the small screen. We've not seen the footage yet, so we're waiting with baited breath...

Fighting crime, Web2.0 style

Greater Manchester Police now have a Facebook application, to alert users to local crime! Users get crime news items in their Facebook feed, and can post items of their own too.

There are even videos to raise awareness of crime issues.

Chief Constable Rob Taylor says “Facebook has 59 million users, seven million of which live in the UK, so we realised that this was an excellent way of spreading our messages to people on a more personal basis.”


(Thanks to Techcrunch UK for the link!)

PIR-based Marauders Map

When we tell technically-minded people about Alertme, often their first question is "where are the cameras?" Well, there aren't any! For most situations, we think motion sensors do a better job.

There's a great illustration of the ways motion sensors are actually better than CCTV in this article on New Scientist's website. Its about how engineers at Mitsubishi's research labs in Cambridge, MA, used a network of simple Zigbee motion sensors to make a Marauder's Map, letting them monitor how people use and move around their building.



In the video, you can see how the PIRs let a single researcher monitor the whole building, with no need to intrude on everyone's privacy by blanketing the whole place with CCTV. In the locations where there is a CCTV record, the PIR data lets them search it much more effectively than they could otherwise.

CCTV often seems like the obvious choice for this sort of thing, but the problem with video is that machines find it difficult to understand and search, and it needs lots of costly equipment. PIRs on the other hand give an easy to understand 'someone's here' / 'nobody's here' message, are able to monitor a wider area, are very small and far more cost effective.

Of course, there are times when a picture is worth a thousand words, and being able to see whats going on in your home is exactly what you want. If you participated in our video survey, you'll already know we've been thinking about this. The consensus so far seems to be that you want a camera that works at night, doesn't have any wires, is easy to use, and is nice to look at. That's a tough specification, but we'll see what we can do!

feeling secure?

Bruce Schneier often has something worth reading about security. Today he blogs about how people confuse feeling secure, and being secure. I quote: "If someone tries to convince us to spend money on a new type of home burglar alarm, we as society will know pretty quickly if he's got a clever security device or if he's a charlatan; we can monitor crime rates. But if that same person advocates a new national antiterrorism system, and there weren't any terrorist attacks before it was implemented, and there weren't any after it was implemented, how do we know if his system was effective?"

Well, a company may not be able to change crime rates overnight, but one thing we know is that with AlertMe, if you haven't heard from us, your home is safe and secure. So that's one less thing to worry about :)

I've got something new

Chill out with the girls on AlertMe's new video:



Now, where's that cocktail...

IBM Master Inventor visits AlertMe

Just before Easter we had a visit from IBM Master Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark, who runs the Pervasive and Advanced Messaging Technologies team at Hursley Park. Hursley is home to several IBM products including Websphere MQ, which is middleware.

Middleware (which is also an interest of our friends in the Opera group) is software designed to move information around organisations, especially between other software applications. There are lots of ways software programs can talk to each other, but because organisations get things done by taking in raw materials - including information - and processing them into a final product, the movement of information through an organisation is extremely important. In fact, it is often their main reason for existing! When those information flows become very complex, and they usually do, it is hard for managers to know what's going on. Its even harder for them to change how things work. That's dangerous, because efficiency and being able to adapt quickly are vital survival skills for many businesses.

Middleware makes it easy to manage those information flows. It gets its name from where it sits, between the parts of the organisation that generate information and the parts that need information. It automates processes, makes sure applications can get information when they need it, translates between different applications' languages, keeps track of who's allowed to do what, and delivers messages reliably. That leaves application designers free to concentrate on doing what they need to do, instead of reinventing the wheel. Also, having all the business applications that share information talk to MQ and not directly to eachother makes it much easier to integrate new features and streamline the way things work. That gives business leaders more freedom to try things out and respond to change.

MQ was originally designed for corporate intranets, running on relatively powerful computers which could talk to each other via high speed links, but Andy and his team are busy extending it to work with lower bandwidth connections and less powerful devices. They're doing this with an MQ extension called Telemetry Transport (see MQTT.org). In the world of small and cheap connected devices, information flows are often very local - around a home, say, rather than around a corporation - and are often considered an integral part of a larger application, rather than simply connecting distinct applications together. But middleware still offers the same advantages of transparent design and easy reconfigurability.

Being an IBM Master Inventor, a big part of Andy's job is exploring how how his technology can be used. He's already demonstrated many applications using things like embedded linux computers connected by GPRS, and now he's interested in really tiny microprocessors connected by ZigBee.

We first read about his work in Eureka Magazine, which recently featured his Power Orb. The Orb reacts to his rate of electricity usage by changing colour from cool blue to hot red as it increases. Andy showed us how he can also get this information on his mobile phone (using a Java MIDlet) and even publish it to a Twitter account (what's Twitter?) via Twitter's API (what's an API?). In fact, if you look at his Twitter feed, you'll see that electricity is only a small part of the information Andy collects from his house - there are also updates on lighting, heating, temperature, phone and water usage. Each update comes from a simple sensor, via MQTT. The system works both ways too - it is possible to turn the fountain, lights and heaters on and off by flicking switches on a web page.

We got a lot of good ideas from Andy's visit, including a bunch of cool things AlertMe could do in the future. The Power Orb is a particularly interesting one, because we already have a Lamp accessory that glows pretty colours according to whatever rules we build for it. Twitter feeds excite us too, because they seem like such a great idea and the world is still figuring out what to do with them. We'd love to hear what you think! Sign up to our forums and let us know. How would you feel about your house having a Twitter feed? Would it be amazingly useful or scarily public? Would you prefer it to use IM? (what's IM?), or email? What would you want it to say to you?