AT&T considers reading all the packets that cross its lines. Quite an interesting proposal. Tim Wu’s take The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way
Google’s engineering culture
Article in the New Yorker on Google contains a fascinating description of a product design meeting: Page and Brin had wanted an upgrade of an existing product, and they were unhappy with what they were hearing from the engineers. At
Cell phone handsets and linux and software value
Update at the end. Two FSMLabs alumni are leading the charge for Linux handsets in two different companies. Jason Whitmire is now GM of cell phones for Wind River. Jason’s blog is here and a Linuxdevices article discusses his first
Hollywood writers are smarter than programmers
The strike in Hollywood is about royalties. The writers, who are used to getting a share of the royalties on their work, want to keep getting royalties on work shown on the internet. The producers are making the claim that
OpenBSD developer notes king’s clothing is “virtual”
Theo de Raadt explains why virtualization does not improve security. How about this: to improve security, you have to have a secure design, a marketing buzzword won’t do the trick. Anyone who has seriously looked that the current generation x86
Silver Bullets
Like many famous papers, Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet is more referenced than read but it deserves better. Here is Brooks explaining why verification hype, for example the recent vast investment in marketing supposed security levels of Common Criteria Software
OSIM Madrid and Value Manifolds
Spent a couple of very interesting days at the OSIM conference in Madrid as part of my consulting for WindRiver which has a very powerful market position in cellular handsets now – partly due to their acquisition of RTLinux for
Exciting moments in fiber
… the first truly game changing advance in bend-insensitive fiber came at the FTTH Council Europe meeting in Amsterdam early 2005, when an NTT engineer demonstrated a tough fiber that could be tied into knots. As we reported in oour
Thinking like a subcontractor
Many industries are organized so that a small group of companies controls the “product” and sit on top of a pyramid of subcontractors who provide parts and labor. It’s natural for companies at the top of the chain to prefer
Apple’s strategic brilliance
I may be reading too much into it, but Apple looks to have come up with a strategy to pass Microsoft in the next ten years. They are linking their phone, music, and PC business together to form an unavoidable