Category: Engineering Technology

Open Source Hardware

That’s just someone giving a short introductory talk on what is open-source hardware. Someone.

The Diamond Age

After watching this commercial from IDEO, about the future of e-books and reader devices, it got me thinking about a previous blog post of mine on social reading – particularly my third idea and Coupland. However, Alice reminds me of something straight out of The Diamond Age, one of my favourite books and features strongly as the main mantra of my company.

I am most excited by Alice and its possibilities for educating our young in a far more immersive environment. Imagine a childrens’ book that encourages a child to learn about the natural environment by actively getting the child to step out of the house and into the real-world. It can use the built-in GPS on the reader to pull in local content for the child so that the book is customised for the local environment.

So, in Malaysia, the book may talk more about rain-forests and may even encourage the child to take a trip to one of our National Parks, where the child will be encouraged to hunt for photos of specific flora/fauna with the built-in camera on the reader. Successfully taking a photo would unlock deliverable gifts/toys and earn the child kudos points at the central repository.

Snazzy!

MineCraft Success

The Internet is abuzz with the sensational success story of Minecraft, an independently developed game, that is now raking in US$250k per day. The game is largely the effort of a single developer and the company is pretty much a one-man show. I congratulate the genius behind the game and it breathes life and gives hope to other indie game developers around the world.

At $10 per pop, this developer has cleanly raked in almost US$10 million overnight.

Minecraft is another story on how you can turn problems into opportunities. When they had server problems causing outages, they gave away free copies of the game to everyone who had difficulties playing during the outage. Once the problem was solved, these freebies became converts and paid the ten buck for a license. Read that – he gave stuff away for free during a down-time and this brought in converts once up-time was restored. Brilliant!

However, as good as this story sounds, it reminds me of another adage – overnight success takes years of effort.

PWN2OWN

As reported here and here, it is kind of good to see that Linux was the only operating system left standing in the end. If we read into how the hacking competition was conducted, it becomes quite clear that the Open Source way of doing things is probably the best way to do things.

For many years, the main selling point for the Open Source way was the fact that anyone could look and modify the source code of computer programmes, freely. The logic behind this is that with many eyeballs looking at the code, the chances of spotting errors is higher. This is also the logic behind peer-review in science.

In this particular competition, three different laptops were configured and the hackers were challenged to break into the system “as-is” and if they succeeded, they would walk home with some cash and the laptop that they broke into. Surprisingly, the first one to fall was the AirBook. You could possibly consider that the AirBook, being such a beautiful machine, would have attracted the most attempts. But that still doesn’t change the fact that it fell so quickly.

Some slightly more technical people will, at this point, quote that OSX is based on an Open Source operating system, Darwin, which is itself a descendent of FreeBSD. But then, there are many parts of OSX that is proprietary, like the graphical user interface running on top of Darwin. Also, it is reported that the culprit that caused the downfall of the AirBook, was actually a piece of software by Adobe.

Then the rules were relaxed further to allow the machines to be compromised using any pre-installed software on the system. This caused the Windows machine to be breached, again due to a problem with a piece of software from Adobe. On the last day, the rules were relaxed further, to allow the machines to be compromised using any commonly installed 3rd party software. And surprisingly, the Linux machine held on without being compromised.

Instead of gloating on the strengths of Linux, I would just like to point out that there is a correlation between openness and security. When I was a boy, I was once told by a Debian developer that, security by obscurity is not security at all. That totally confounded me at the time but I have since learned the wisdom of such words.

A truly secure system is one that is thoroughly open, that you could fiddle with as much as you’d like, and still remain secure. The Linux operating system is developed on an open platform. All the various bits running on top of it are also bound by the same rules. Even random 3rd party software are often developed along the same lines. So, openness breeds security.

Software Upgrade

This latest version of WordPress has just been released and this blog has been upgraded to the latest version. You won’t see much of a different in the front because most of the changes made have been to the behind-the-scenes stuff.