Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 11

New material for conspiracy theorists

One of the conspiracy theories on the wackiest side of the scale is the claim that the Moon landings were fake: some really believe that in a highly competitive, internationally and politically tense space race situation, all other countries, including the bitter rival Soviet Union, would just have sat on ...

Satty McSatface?

“No means no” has been the mantra of the ardent supporters of Brexit, and the European Union has not seen any reason to diverge from that same message: if you don't want to be part of the club, you will not have access to the club spa either. As the ...

Wanted: 5G Killer Apps

As I wrote last week, one of the issues holding back 5G upgrades is the lack of imminent “Killer Apps” for this new technology: in many respects, the offering provided by 4G is “good enough”, and outside of obvious super-high density cases, like sports arenas and music festivals, there is ...

Opening shot for 5G upgrades?

Nokia got the first major 5G deal from T-Mobile. Will it open the floodgates for 5G? It's been a roller-coaster ride for Nokia in the past couple of days: last week's quarterly results were below expectations, and despite promises of a “robust end of 2018”, the stock plunged almost 10 ...

The book is now out globally

The book is now available in 30+ countries. The list of bookstores by country can be found here. Thanks to all my friends around the world for the pics that made it to the collage, and also for those that did not.

Facebook wipeout

Facebook has been facing some serious headwinds lately, not least due to its apparently nonchalant approach to fake news dissemination during the US Presidential Election. I'm not referring to the kind of “fake news” that President Trump is making noises of daily, but “real fake news”, fed through Facebook to ...

D-Day for HTTP

Today is the D-Day for Chrome in its attempt to reduce the use of HTTP on websites: any sites that do not use the secure HTTPS protocol will be flagged as unsecure by the newest version of Chrome. This change was originally supposed to happen in June, but got delayed ...

The slow death of live television

Television used to be the bullet-proof way of gathering huge crowds of consumers to share the same experience in real time: whether it was the final game of some favorite sports, yet another talent competition or a highly anticipated episode of Big Brother, people used to plan their life around ...

Hedy Lamarr - the unknown heroine of secure communications

One interesting story that eventually got omitted from the book was the story of the Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr. In hindsight, I should have included it, so here it is - better late than never. Hedy, who was born in Austria and who's name was originally Hedwig Kiesler, was one ...

Devuan: Debian without systemd

A new release of Devuan, which is a systemd-free Linux distribution, is now out. This should make many sysadmins happy. Linux, like its “model parent” Unix, was designed to be modular, with applications doing just one thing, but doing it well. This mode of operation was well established over the ...