Headworx

One of the key features that has made Uber so popular is transparency. Taxis have always been the big unknown and one of the most probable service to rip people off. And that includes the premium authorized taxi services at airports worldwide, where the ripoff is simply the premium tariff. Before Uber, you never knew how much a ride would cost. That all changed and the taxi industry is slowly realizing that with applications like myTaxi bringing that transparency via their apps. But still when you simply grab a taxi at an airport, you never know. I would say, whenever there is no transparency, there is potentially a ripoff is lurking... or there is something wrong with the service itself. Healthcare services being probably the most prominent example. I wrote about this a few weeks ago . The snake bite story . And my own dog bite one to confirm the case. When I was admitted to the emergency room, I had no clue what procedures they wanted to perform (and they performed two differen...

Two weeks ago I attended a training for installers of lighting control systems. The training was great but really what struck me was that nobody said nothing about security of these systems. And nobody has ever explained the basic threats and the ABC of how to protect against them. When designing security for Bluetooth mesh, we have been paying a lot of attention not to overlook any potential attach surface,. This was - I'd say - close to 80% of the overall effort when architecting the specification - to have the security right. Designed for success. When you're not successful, nobody cares. When you are, you are also a target. We've gone to the extend of covering it all - device onboarding, authentication, layers, roles, device blacklisting ad protection against variety of really sophisticated attacks. But there have been a couple of very simple fundamental rules. Among them, the #1 rune has been: No fixed passwords. Which is still not the case today with so man...

Time flies and it's been 7 years since I mentioned The Lost Interview for the first time. It is a great interview to watch, especially from the 2019 perspective it is still very relevant, after 25 years. Actually what triggered me to bring The Lost Interview and watch it again was The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley documentary on Threanos. The Theranos story is pretty well known now but it is still unbelievably striking how so many people affiliated with the company were for so long submerged in a state of complete lunacy. There was this huge gap between the vision and being able to make it happen. The vision, by the way, was and still is a no brainier. But equally I could have a vision of a nano - confined nuclear fusion that could power anything forever for free. The "only" issue is how to make it work. Is it possible at all? This lunacy at Theranos was of course fueled by lies. Elizabeth Holmes started with minor lies, such as suggesting the comp...

Operating systems are quite good at managing multiple screens. And multi-monitor configurations are an absolute standard in today offices. Very often a laptop hooked to external monitors provides a yet another screen. Traveling a lot - I also use an iPad (connected over USB) as a secondary screen for my Windows laptop. It all works great. Audio, unfortunately, is a completely different story. While I can seamlessly drag application windows across multiple screens, and set the screens to duplicate or extend each other, there is almost no control over how audio is rendered. It is not possible to easily switch an application to output sound to a different device. Some applications offer this as their native features, but there is no system level control over it. And this is not a Windows - specific problem. All operating systems (including mobile) suffer from that. What you see in the attached picture here is a very ugly hardware workaround for the lack of a simple audio routing f...

Coffee is hot. Self-driving cars are not designed to avoid obstacles at highway cruising speeds. This should be clear to everyone, especially those who drive such cars. But somehow it is not. And in a typical " Hot coffee style " the cars are considered defective , such as Ms. Liebeck's coffee was "defective". So perhaps, like it is now printed on coffee cups: "Caution: Contents Hot", (self-driving) cars should carry a "Caution: Myopia" warning on the auto-pilot's switch? I elaborated on the reasons where that myopia comes from. Long story short: this is the technology limitation that won't go away quickly. Car systems are short-sighted. That allows them to self-drive at city speeds, but trying to do that at highway speeds is inherently risky. Cruising on a highway is smooth most of the time and requires nothing more than watching the bumper of the car ahead and lane dividers. But from time to time sudden things may happen, and...

Silicon Valley has not rebooted my doctor. Andy Kessler's vision is still yet to materialize. Judging by the millions that flowed into Threanos, Silicon Valley is still aware of the problem and would love to reboot the healthcare industry. But the industry is holding well. In the mean time Theranos was named the scam that rocked the Silicon Valley . But it seems a much bigger scam has been brewing absolutely legally. While the recent story on  the $143,000 bill for snakebite treatment may be shocking to many, I can just confirm I experienced something very similar (although it was not - thankfully - a 6-figure experience). I was bitten by a dog on a hiking trip to Caucasus mountains in Georgia. Guide books warn about Caucasus shepherd dogs who often would not let you pass on a trail. This exactly happened to me, perhaps I was jut too naive thinking why would the dog ever bite me if I was posing no harm to it nor to the herd of sheep. But these dogs have very strong instinct...

I have been having very little time over the recent months to visit the wooden cabin in the country. It is a beautiful place but the intensive work/travel schedule offers barely any opportunities to go there, even for a couple of days. My seldom visits, however, are all maintenance visits. Which is the sad illustration of the false economy we all live in. That cabin has been a great test bed for many systems. This is where - over 10 years ago - I realized the IoT opportunity has been the software opportunity. And I was foolish to think that it was only software that was unreliable those days. With efforts focused on designing defensive software architectures and building ultra reliable smart home management software, I hit the hardware problem hard. In a nutshell: while the software keeps on running without a single reboot for 7 years now, the hardware parts are falling apart. Things break for different reasons. Last summer we had an invasion of mice which were followed by mart...