If you shop at stores that have a modern cash register, buy gas at most gas stations, drive through most traffic lights, etc. you are using the IoT whether you know it or not.
Those were around before IoT was even a word, POS registers and gas stations haven’t changed much since the 90s. Traffic lights ditto, many haven’t been upgraded since the 80s.
If that is what you mean by IoT as just a rebranding of things that have been around for a long time?
As someone who makes industrial electronics, it's frustrating when people redefine the term IoT. It originally meant anything on the internet that isn't a general purpose computer (or a phone), but now some people define it to refer only to a subset of consumer products.
That's given rise to the term IIoT (industrial IoT), but it's still troublesome since some discussions of IoT refer to both kinds and some don't, and because the exact same piece of hardware can be IoT or not IoT depending on whether it is installed in a home or a business.
Surely discussions of IoT security should refer to both industrial and consumer products!
IoT never had that meaning. It stems from CMU smart devices work (1982) and ubiquitous computing (1991). Gas station and retail POSs as well as smart traffic lights predate that and aren’t related. Maybe some people have decided to take IoT literally and redefine it to include existing technologies, but that definitely wasn’t the original intention of the word.
> Gas station and retail POSs as well as smart traffic lights predate that and aren’t related.
> Maybe some people have decided to take IoT literally and redefine it to include existing technologies
I'm pretty sure it's normal to take new descriptive terms and group preexisting things into them where applicable. For example, just because the terms "car" and "motor car" came into use circa 1895 doesn't mean that nothing prior to that date can be considered a car.
Whether the definition actually works for the devices mentioned is still a valid question though.
> that definitely wasn’t the original intention of the word.
That's an odd thing to argue. We aren't talking about people who compute things when we talk about computers, are we? The original meanings of words are fairly inconsequential if over time the accepted meaning is something else.
