Mea Vita: Carpe Diem

I’m fascinated by how Hezbollah’s pagers were compromised. This is the most technically creative and innovative attack I can think of since Stuxnet in 2010. A trojan horse of cyberwarfare. 

It seems that explosives were planted in the pagers and two-way radios – it wasn’t merely an exploding battery. This means that the attacker had to gain physical access to the pagers in order to plant both the explosives and the electronic circuitry that triggered it.

Once that was accomplished, the attacker needed access to the pager network in order to send a message to all of the pagers at once, followed, seconds later, by the detonation signal.

Alas…Think you don’t need art? Try to get through a pandemic without the artists’ creativity to fill your mind. The artist will take you from deep in their soul to a world away.

The medium and methods may keep changing – sometimes drastically – but the artist will always be there to awe and entertain us. And we will evolve to adapt. We have an excellent track record for surviving unprecedented times. But we can't always beat the odds. The house always wins. So, we must skeptically embrace transformational ideas. A new, good idea ineffectively adopted is a bad a idea.

 I am not a fan of NFTs – at least not yet.

When we buy physical things, we typically have complete control over the item such as a book, cup, or car. It becomes less clear when we buy things like stock or real estate.

After an IPO, when you buy a publicly traded stock, the money you pay (invest) never actually goes to the company. Rather, the money simply goes to the person you bought the stock from. But you do get a say as a shareholder since you are a partial owner of the company.

Another way to think about NFTs is similar to a property deed. You can purchase property (land), outright, without a mortgage. But you can't move it just like Jack's first tweet can't be moved. And, even though you physically own the land you bought, you don't really own it. Stop paying your taxes and then see who owns the land.

Perhaps the best way to think of NFTs is as proof of intellectual property ownership.

So, while I'm not yet a big believer in the future of NFTs, I understand that they could become a deed for digital property... if they're widely adopted. Perhaps the future of NFTs, as digital property, will require a tax to be paid to keep the servers running – just like I pay property taxes to keep the streetlights lit and the roads maintained.

When I first heard about PDF Formats I thought it was redundant since PDF is an abbreviation for Portable Document Format, hence, portable document format formats. But, it turns out there are different types (formats) of PDFs, not to be confused with a 2D barcode called PDF417 (portable data format).

You may have noticed, from time to time, that you can't highlight and copy text from a PDF; or you can't search for text within a PDF. That's because it's a different PDF format than the type of PDF where you can copy and search for text.

1. PDF (FTG)

PDF (FTG) is a PDF with Full Text and Graphics. This is the best kind of PDF since you can highlight, copy, and search for text without any errors. If you created the PDF from the original text source, i.e. by using macOS's print to PDF feature, then you'll get a PDF with full text and graphics.

2. PDF (I)

PDF (I) is a PDF with the entire page stored as an Image (no text). It is basically a PDF version of a bitmap (i.e. JPG). This is the least useful kind of PDF because you can neither highlight and copy text, nor can you search for text. This type of PDF is generally created when you scan a document. The scanner treats the page as nothing more than an image.

3. PDF (I + HT)

PDF (I + HT) is a PDF with an Image plus Hidden Text and it's a nice workaround to a PDF (I). On the surface, the PDF is nothing more than an image, but, behind the scenes, OCR (optical character recognition) technology is used to read the text of the image. Hence the hidden text. This enables a user to see the original scanned document with the ability to highlight, copy, and search for text.

The PDF was originally an Adobe, patented technology. However it's become an ISO 32000 standard and anyone may create applications that can read and write PDF files, royalty-free.

In the past ten days, nearly the entire knowledge workforce has moved into a virtual environment. Now is the time to begin practicing good digital hygiene. 

I'm lucky to work for a small data analytics firm where our workforce of two dozen people work from home. We have no corporate office. How good are we at working virtually? World class. Earlier this week we attended our annual offsite retreat. Originally planned for Pennsylvania, we moved, at the last minute, to cyberspace without skipping a beat. We even had a virtual happy hour at the end of each day.

Digital hygiene goes beyond cybersecurity. Security is a subset of safety that deals with protection from a conscious attack. Safety deals with more. It deals with protection from anything and everything – it's about being safe from harm.

Single Points of Failure

With many Stay at Home orders going into effect, it's important to recognize and think about options for newly emerging single points of failure which had previously been redundant.

What if my Internet goes down or my wireless router breaks? I no longer have an option to go to a cafe or coffee shop.

What if my computer breaks? I no longer have the option of going to the library.

What if my phone breaks? I can't schedule an appointment at the Genius Bar. 

Take care of your technology so it can take care of you.

Here's a minor mystery that has me stumped.

The group selfie photo I snapped.

The group selfie photo that an audience member posted.

Here's a great radio interview with Kurt Beyer regarding his book that I read about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN. She faced a ton of challenges as the pioneer of computer programming, and she was a key developer of the COBOL programming language which is still heavily used.

Kurt Beyer and I are from the same hometown and went to the same military college, where he was the highest ranking Midshipman my junior year. He caught my eye, again, when I read his excellent book about Grace Hopper.

http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2017/12/8/life-legacy-grace-hopper/

Things we enjoy in the real world, we don’t like online. I like it, when I walk into my local coffee shop, that they know my favorite food or drink. But, it seems creepy when I visit Facebook and see ads for products I searched for, days ago, on Amazon.

Like all technology, we’ll learn how these interactions work and we’ll get used to it, especially those who will grow up with it. But we sometimes forget too quickly; especially if we didn't live through it. Even our grandparents are too young to remember a time when people scoffed at teenagers, living a hundred years ago, because they learned to drive a car instead of ride a horse. 

AI of tomorrow, like the iPhone X, will know who you are from more than touch (PIN or Touch ID). Like another person, the iPhone X can now see literally see and recognize who you are. And it already knows exactly where you are. Perhaps, its camera and microphone will guess more about what you're doing before you ask, if we can trust it.

Have you ever walked into Target with a low battery charge on your phone and say to yourself, "I wish Target had a secure way to recharge my phone while shopping."

Lo and behold, Target has a locker kiosk exactly for that. Of course, my shopping list was on my phone (along with Pay). But it's still an improvement from the old days when I'd get to the grocery store and have to guess what I wrote on my shopping list that I left back home. It worked exactly as expected. I entered my phone number, e-mail address, and picked a security image from a list (dog, picnic, fire pit, etc) and then I choose a locker. To retrieve my phone, I entered my phone number, tapped my security image, and the locker opened. Simple.

Perhaps. One solution is to turn off the phone at LEO encounters

Over the past two days, a surprising number of friends and colleagues have asked for my opinion on the iPhone X. This new smartphone seems to have received a lot of attention.

While I love the new features, I'm concerned about the form factor. Initially, it seemed to be as big as the iPhone 6/7 Plus models, which is too big for me. (I've been using the iPhone 6 & 7.) 

It turns out I was wrong about the size. Compared to the iPhone 7, the iPhone X is about about one tenth of an inch higher and about 0.15" wider. So, it's slightly bigger than the iPhone 7. And, compared to the iPhone 7 Plus, the iPhone X is about half an inch shorter and quarter of inch narrower, making the X significantly smaller than the 7+. The beauty of the iPhone X is that the screen is more than a quarter of an inch larger than the screen on the iPhone Plus models (6, 7, and 8). That's a bigger screen on a smaller phone due to the X's edge-to-edge design.

So, the bottom line is I'm considering getting the iPhone X. 

Face ID

Instead of using Touch ID's fingerprint recognition feature for authentication, the iPhone X uses Face ID, which recognizes a person the same way humans do, by their face. Apple claims that Face ID is 20x more accurate than Touch ID, which is great. But, some people have raised alarms that law enforcement officers (LEOs) could take you into custody and simply unlock your phone by pointing the screen at your face. Could that really happen? Perhaps. But, I've seen alarmist headlines before ("Apple Crosses The Line With New iPhone Feature"). One way to protect against this is to simply not enable this feature for people who are deeply concerned. Another option, if Face ID is turned on, would be to simply turn off your phone before a LEO encounter (i.e. crossing international borders, etc). 

Each time the iPhone is turned on, the secure enclave, which processes your Touch ID or Face ID credentials, remains inactive until a person manually enters their PIN to decrypt this information. It appears, during Craig Federighi's demonstration of Face ID, that his demo phone had been restarted but not unlocked with the PIN, prior to his demo. This prevented Face ID from working. While that's the correct technical behavior, it happened at the wrong time – but he seemed to recover well during the demo.

Update: Apple's Craig Federighi details Face ID and how to quickly disable it.

Earlier this month, my octogenarian mother had to give up her defunct decade-old MacBook that she inherited from my father. Before 2007, she had never sent or received an e-mail – so high tech is still new to her. My sister and I were a little hesitant to move her from her laptop to an iPad due to the UX change, but it's working out better than expected.

Today, she called me asking about the Epley Maneuver on YouTube. She called on a POTS line and then I switched the call over to a FaceTime video call, which she enjoyed. After I told her how to watch the YouTube video that I sent her ("Simply click the link in the e-mail, mom.") I then told her how to hang up and she enthusiastically said, "This is soooo easy." There was almost a hit of "why didn't you switch me to an iPad sooner" in her voice.

Innovation is something that reduces the cost of a transaction in terms of time or money. And that's exactly what the iPad has done for my mother.

Last month, I withdrew $200 from a San Diego ATM. Unlike New York, where ATMs dispense $20, $50, and $100 bills, San Diego's ATMs have always spit out $20 bills, in my experience. But, last month I got a pleasant surprise when, instead of receiving ten $20 bills, I received nine $20 bills and one $100 bill. Suspected jackpot! 

My first thought was that I had either received $280 in cash or, perhaps, I received $180, plus a counterfeit $100 bill. I immediately spent the "Benjamin" without any problem. On Friday, I looked at my bank statement and saw that I was debited $200, as expected. I spoke to a local corner market owner who refills his store's ATM and he told me that there would be no record of the extra $100 bill since the ATMs can't distinguish between bills – everything's a $20 bill to the ATM. Reaffirmed jackpot!

I figured that I would be free-and-clear of the extra $80, but it wouldn't surprise me if, at some point in the future, that money might be debited from my bank account without notice. So, I sent a message to my bank, describing what happened and this was their response:


Confirmed jackpot!

Bad Luck With Banking

In the mid-1980s, I withdrew some money from a Marine Corps West Federal Credit Union on Camp Pendleton. I heard some paper crunching inside the machine as the money was dispensed, jamming up the cash dispenser. When I walked into the bank to report the issue, the banker looked at me with suspicion and skepticism as I told her what happened.

"We'll look into it," she said, dismissively.

About a week later, I followed up with her and she made me whole. She seemed a little defensive when I asked what happened and how they confirmed it. She simply said the extra money was discovered jammed in the ATM cash dispenser feeder. A minor hassle for me before the age of e-mail, but it all worked out. 

One day, I'll write about how, in the mid-1990s, my landlord deposited my rent checks, but he wasn't credited for them. My bank, which was a different institution than his, was adamant that he was "almost positively" lying. He wasn't, but it took a couple months to reconcile. 

PS – Did you know that you can make actual size, hard copy reproductions of US bills in black and white? You can also make color reproductions of money as long as the one-sided reproduction is more than 25% smaller or 50% larger than genuine bills.

My self-programmed Honda remote.

A friend taking an HR course contacted me, this evening, to ask me for my input into her homework assignment. The scenario was that you, the student, work in the HR department at a 75 person company that delivers meals to people. The first version of the mobile app, used for scheduling deliveries, has been outsourced and the CEO believes it's taking too much time and money to be developed. The CEO is considering hiring software and QA engineers to bring development in-house and wants your input.

This a good scenario for the real world and I was happy to share my thoughts. My first question was asking if the company considers itself a technology company. Corporations like Apple and Amazon are clearly high tech companies, so it's a no brainer for them to develop their own software. On the other end of the spectrum would be companies who use custom IT systems, but are not tech companies. For example, Wyndham, where I worked about five years ago, outsourced development of their e-commerce websites and backend reservation systems. Asking a company to determine how they self-identify is a good first step.

Another thing to consider is how often will the software be updated. Modern, high tech companies release new versions of their software weekly or monthly. Facebook is a perfect example of a 21st century company that treats development as an ongoing process, instead of an event, by releasing new software three times each day.

These considerations are simply a starting point for the discussion. If the decision is made to bring development in-house then there are questions about conducting interviews, how to dress, and hearing about candidates real-world experiences.

What does a busy day look like?
Ten years ago it was reading and writing e-mails. Today, it's bouncing between Slack, Trello, Basecamp, and Facebook.

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
–Mark Twain

I recently read Winer's comments about the lack of older people in tech. Just a day earlier my 79 year-old mother headed back to New York after visiting me for a week. She had some concerns about traveling alone which had me thinking...

An old person is someone at least 20 years older than you. When we encounter people, we make judgements by fitting them into a persona or applying a label we've experienced which can help or hinder our view of the true reality. A 20 year old's view of a person in their 40s or 50s is that of their parents, their view of a person in their 60s or 70s is that of their grandparents.

Today, as I waited at a bus stop, a slow moving woman, close to 80 years old, headed in my direction. As she approached me I wondered if she was homeless, looking for a handout. Stopping in front of me, she held out her hand with some change in it and said, "Could you help me? Are these two quarters or two nickels?"
After I answered her she said, "I have trouble seeing, could you tell me when the 215 bus comes?" I immediately realized that she could be my own mother asking similar questions while traveling through the airport, such as where a particular gate or baggage claim carousel is located.

I told her that I'd let her know when her bus was arriving and, at that point, I decided I'd wait until this nearly blind lady got on her bus which arrived about two minutes later. She's was extremely grateful.

So, now that I'm "old," let me go back to when I was in my 30s, as a software engineer at Apple. I worked with an older, gray-haired, software engineer and my perception (misperception) of him was, "Why is this guy still coding in his mid 40s? Why isn't he in management?" At 40, software engineers are taken out back and shot, or promoted into management.

So, therein lies the issue – I, too was part of the problem, back then and now I'm on the receiving end.

It's a fact of life that people will judge you based on how you look, smell, dress, age, poise, presence, etc.

So it's key to have to have a lot of experiences and an open mind.

Note: I originally drafted this last October, but didn't publish it until today.

Apple CEO, Tim Cook and Didi President, Jean Liu in China

When Apple invested $1B in Didi Chuxing, the "Uber" of ride sharing in China, it got me thinking...

What do wrist watches and cars have in common? They've both been around for a hundred years and, in my life time, there hasn't been significant innovation prior to the last decade. Until recently, cars have used internal combustion engines to transport people and wrist watches simply told time.

Over the last dozen years, we've seen automobiles transition from internal combustion engines to hybrid and pure electric cars. While it's still a nascent technology, with single digit market share, it's growing. The same is true for wrist watches which have been simple digital or analog devices with limited functionality beyond telling time. Once a technology has matured, it frequently becomes a fashion item such as clothes, cars, condos, and color choices, to name a few. A $10,000 watch doesn't necessarily tell better time than a $10 watch; and a $110,000 car doesn't get you to your destination faster than a $10,000 car. The inside of a $299 Apple Watch is the same as a $17,000 Apple Watch.

Before the Apple Watch, Apple could choose the form factor for their products. Simply look at the Apple II, Mac, iMac, iPod, etc to see how Apple dictated the industrial design. That changed with the Apple Watch where Apple had to fit the technology into a predefined form factor while making it fashionable. Wearable high tech is hard to make fashionable, as we saw with Google Glass. The key to rapid adoption is packing innovative technology into a familiar form factor.

For years, there's been a long standing rumor that Apple is developing a car. The details are secret and many Apple R&D products never see the light of day. But it seems clear that Apple's working on something automotive related, whether it's an entire electric car or merely software for a car.

Perhaps, Apple can bring to market a self-driving electric car, which is the holy grail of personal transportation. Now, imagine if you produced a self-driving car and you owned a transportation network company?

"That's the challenge," said Sugar Jones as she raised her drink.

When I was in high school, I considered joining the Air Force. "Aim High." It seemed to be a natural fit for my high tech interests. At school, one of my classmates began sporting a military style crewcut – he'd signed up to join the Army after graduation. Shortly after that, I saw a Marine Corps recruiting ad in a magazine. The only thing I knew about the Marines was that they had, inarguably, the toughest and longest boot camp training in any of the Armed Forces. I asked my father, who had served in the Army, "Why would someone join the Marines?"

"Some men want a challenge," he said.

Some men want a challenge... that resonated with me, which I've written about in Six Four One. As a kid, it resonated like, "You did a good thing for a bad man," from a Bronx Tale. Since then, I've loved the challenge of boot camp, plebe year, OCS, jump school, and overseas deployments. Now, in my more seasoned years, I find myself seeking more conveniences and complaints than challenges and commendations. Every so often I need a refresher.

A couple weeks ago, Sugar Jones and I were discussing Instagram. Instagram has been around since 2010. In 2012, with only 13 employees, it was purchased by Facebook for about $1B. It's only grown in popularity since then. Instagram's key differentiator was two fold. It was simple to post and photographers could apply filters. Since cameras on smartphones, back then, weren't as good as today, applying a filter helped distract from the graininess by adding an artistic spin.

I told Sugar that I didn't like Instagram. Sugar responded with a small look of silent disbelief. "I prefer Flickr," I said, explaining that I was begrudgingly moving to Instagram.

"Why don't you like Instagram?" asked Sugar.

"Every photo has to be square," I said with disdain. I pompously believed that the artist should choose the aspect ratio.

"That's the challenge," said Sugar.

That's the challenge... Ah-ha! Those three words, which she so profoundly said, instantly sunk in.

One hundred and forty characters is the challenge of Twitter; that's what makes Twitter unique and the haiku of a new millennium. How could I have missed a similar challenge with Instagram?

To hijack and repurpose from Breaking Bad...
When I heard the learn'd Sugar.

In the 1990s, I witnessed the dot com boom. The Web was clearly the way of the future. Thousands of dot com companies popped up, trying to replace market inefficiencies with Internet based technologies. Some companies did well, other's, I joked, lost money on every transaction but tried to make it up with volume.

After the dot com bubble burst, Web 2.0 came along with user generated content and dynamic web pages. This was followed by the dominance of social media which killed print media as it connected more people on both personal and professional levels.

Today, the cutting edge trends are seen in mobile apps. ForeFlight has revolutionized the cockpit as much as Uber's changed the car service industry. Twitter and Facebook have seen increased growth after moving from desktop to mobile. Mobile, "always with you" Internet connectivity, along with GPS, creates a lot of opportunities.

Here are two mobile apps that I'd like to see, and I wonder when they will come.

Bluetooth Beacon Heat Maps

Why is it I can see rush hour traffic on my map apps but I can't see how many people are at a restaurant, bar, or nightclub? Map apps have been displaying real-time traffic for more than a decade. These apps don't require crowdsourcing the data. Sure, Waze can help, but the DOT has cameras set up on roads and highways; they have all the data they need. So, what's stopping the same kind of heat map for a Yelp venue where our Bluetooth enabled phones provide the source of the data?

Ideally, I'd love to see a wireless provider anonymously license its subscriber GPS data so I could see how empty or packed a bar was. Even better would be if they could include simple demographics such as age and gender. But, I realize this might be a bridge too far, not to mention that people would consider it creepy.

Having patrons check in at a venue won't work. An alternative solution would be to have Bluetooth beacons ping patrons' smartphones. Let's call it a beacon cookie. The beacon cookie doesn't even need to connect to a person's phone. All the beacon needs to do is ping a person's phone for their Bluetooth address (BD_ADDR). Discovery mode is ideal for this, but not practical. Perhaps a passive discovery mode? Over time, people's Bluetooth addresses could be matched to profiles much like DoubleClick with anonymous cookies. Now we'd have interesting demographic data to use, even if it's only for a venue heat map. Google knows a lot about me in the virtual world (that's why, when I search for something on Amazon, I see related ads in my Facebook feed), why not apply that same data to brick and mortar stores via Bluetooth beacons?

One Meal, One Transaction

In this day and age, I'm surprised that restaurants still need to process a customer's transaction twice. First, for the full price of the meal, and second for the tip. This is a different situation than a gas station which needs to run an authorization, to see if you have enough credit, before pumping the gas. At a restaurant, the customer has already eaten the meal by the time they're presented with their check.

How should the restaurant payment process work? Instead of the food server bringing over a paper receipt, s/he could simply present a QR code with a UUID for the receipt. The customer would scan the code and see their detailed meal receipt with tip and payment options. At this point, the receipt is linked to the customer (much like Uber). Even better, why wait until the end of the meal to scan the meal receipt's QR code. The QR code could be presented by the food server at the beginning of the meal. As the customer orders more food, it shows up in real-time on their phone. At any point, the customer could walk out and, like Lyft, they could complete the payment anytime within 24 hours, otherwise it would automatically be processed with a default tip (say 18%). What's more is that everyone at the table could scan the same QR code and then, at the end of the meal, they could choose what they ate and split the check so that everyone pays for only their food.

I'm sure there are apps that do something similar to what I'm describing, but I'm not aware of any that are mainstream. These apps wouldn't have to be created by a single company if a public API is developed for secure data interchange. We only need one holistic system to make it work.