Headworx

My recent encounters with Android TV materialized inside the Philips PUS7150 tv set have reinforced the point: software is a hard problem. Especially for hardware vendors. Via the Android TV operating system Google brings an enormous value to consumer electronic manufacturers. It almost solves their problem. Consumers today expect a TV would behave like a computer, only on a bigger screen. Rubber remote? No thank you... Limited number of apps running on the big screen? Why oh why? Context continuity? Why isn't it available? TV makers can either spend millions billions on developing their own OS or license one that is ready. They still want to make their product special and try hard adding something. For example Philips is adding their own MyRemote companion App. Which simply said is hopeless. Looks like put together by a bunch of kids during an afternoon hackaton session. Google's Android TV Remote Control app is not perfect either, but is usable. And BTW, Google still h...

Chasing features and updates is our everyday life. I have an Android tablet in my car and everyday when I commute to work, it keeps updating some apps or parts of the system. It connects via a free 3G data (Aero2) which works well but has throughput limited to 64Kbps. Sometimes I wonder if 64K for 1-2 hours a day is enough to keep the system up to date... While the frequent updates are accepted for personal devices (laptops, tablets, phones), they are a completely different challenge for IoT systems. For two reasons: The IoT networks are narrowband by nature. Some, like SigFox, run extremely limited data rates. Low data rates are perfectly fine to transport sensor data or simple control commands, but are way too slow to perform application updates on the nodes. Even 802.15.4 - based networks, running at 250kbps can easily saturate for long periods when doing over-the-air updates. Many IoT devices are supposed to run uninterrupted. Firmware upgrade almost always requires a reboot. ...

It looks looks like TV sets have won back the purity. Set-top boxes will be gone soon. They were, after all, a temporary solution. Set-tops were application platforms, with connectivity to multiple feed interfaces: satellite, cable, terrestrial. They had storage and above all were hosting service providers' applications. Televisions were just simple displays. But now televisions are more and more powerful computers, with multiple connectivity options and power to run a number of applications. STBs are not needed any longer. This is becoming clearly visible with the recent arrival of the Android TV operating system, embraced by lead TV manufacturers like Sony and Philips. When my Linux - based satellite tuner was dying and my TV just stopped working I visited a local electronics store where - to my surprise - I've found a number of new generation TV sets. They are all already 4K / UltraHD panels with "smart" functions, but what has hit me the most were two develo...

Despite all this progress in technology and paying so much attention to ease of use, there are always difficult choices. Such prime example is the process called device provisioning. Say we have a new smart lamp that we want to bring into the smart home network and associate with switches and occupancy sensors. For the devices (switches / censors / lamps) to communicate securely, they must know a shared secret, which usually is a key they use to encrypt and decrypt wireless messages. So how do we get the key to the device in a first place, before it has any key? Chicken and egg problem? Not really, it has been solved by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman 40 years ago. The solution is called Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange and allows two parties agree on a shared secret while talking over an insecure channel. There is a great presentation explaining the problem (and solution) on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YEBfamv-_do . There is however one type of attack the D-H is susceptible to. The...

WiFi is considered secure today. Meaning the WPA2 protocol does not have any obvious open holes and cannot be easily hacked. This is enough for human - operated computers, including laptops, tablets and smartphones. But enter the IoT space and the static nature of WPA2 and the entire concept of an access-point - based infrastructure falls apart. Imagine you have a reasonable number of 50 smart devices on your home WiFi network. There are various sensors (temperature, ambient light, motion) and every day devices like door locks, light bulbs, webcams, switches etc. Provisioning them on your WiFi network was quite an effort. Yes bringing WiFi IoT devices online is not easy and every vendor has their own method of doing this, usually via a custom smartphone App. And then you want to change your router. For whatever reason. Changing your Internet provider or just upgrading to the latest and greatest. Or imagine you just want to change the WiFi password because you have given it to too m...