Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 4

Preface for the Chinese Edition

A little over a year after the publication of the English version of “A Brief History of Everything Wireless”, I got the news that the Chinese translation rights were acquired by Turing Book, and that the Chinese edition would be coming out in 2020. In close collaboration with the translator, ...

To VPN or not to VPN?

In my book I go through the history of the numerous efforts of providing feasible security to something that is publicly visible for anyone: Wi-Fi communications. To some extent, this quest has been a hit and miss: there has been issues in providing such a layer of secrecy by software ...

Base station bonfires

There’s an old joke that says: “Ice cream consumption and deaths by drowning go up at the same time. Eating ice cream must therefore cause deaths by drowning”. This kind of causation because of correlation is of course plain wrong: hot weather both increases the sales of ice cream and ...

Lockdown in Spain

As the world is getting in terms with the new, global threat from the coronavirus, the final effect on the overall economy is still unknown. But as restaurants, cafes and many shops are closed and airlines dramatically cut their capacity, it is clear that we are talking about an economic ...

RIP Mike Hughes

It was always going to be just a publicity stunt: what could possibly be proven by a view of the Earth from an altitude of 1.5 kilometers, when there are plenty of easy-to-climb mountains two-to-three times higher than that? After all, those of us who accept the physical realities of ...

Bluetooth's coming of age

Bluetooth started as a humble effort to replace the cable between a device and the headset. In this kind of use case, the main drivers were low power consumption and tiny physical size, and these limits dictated also short distance connectivity, which in the headset use case was good enough. ...

“Tomorrow or in the next 100,000 years”

The constellation of Orion is one of the most easily recognizable ones, and it is well visible right now in the evening sky around the world. In my book, Flat Out Wrong, I used Orion as a real-life, easily verifiable example on how your point of view of ...

The tech mishap of the decade

Several major tech company missteps have occurred during the past decade, ranging from Nokia’s fall from handset grace to Theranos’ fake blood test bubble, but Boeing’s continuing sad saga over their 737MAX takes the cake in terms of overall costs. So how did Boeing make the #1 position? In eight ...

MAXed out

Boeing’s misery over the self-inflicted 737 MAX wound does not seem to be able to come to a conclusion. The company has now announced a halt of production, as the Federal Aviation Administration has made it clear that the MCAS system will not be validated this year, and thus the ...

Internet tracking and what to do about it

There’s no escape from the fact that the shady players on the Internet want to attach as much information to you as they can while you leisurely waste your time browsing the various sites. As usual, if something is offered for free, there tends to be a catch. In the ...