Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 6

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Robert A. Heinlein’s award-winning SciFi-novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” depicts a mutiny at a Lunar penal colony. It envisions that sending criminals and politically unwanted individuals “up there” is not an issue, and that the Moon would be a feasible place where the “civilization” sends their unwanted masses, ...

Selling a lot, but with a loss

When Nokia still made mobile phones and was in search of a “killer OS” for the latest generation of smartphones, Nokia’s marketing wizard Anssi Vanjoki commented on a potential move to use Android as the equivalent of “peeing in your pants in freezing weather”. For those who have lived in ...

Apple to the rescue?

Companies like Samsung have taken the lead in bold and radical new designs for portable gadgets with devices like Galaxy Fold, although clearly with too much rush in that particular case – Galaxy Fold will be relaunched next month, hopefully without the earlier slack in mechanics that allowed destructive particles ...

Old idea revived with new technology

In my earlier blog I described the earliest attempts to provide an airborne radio transmitter setup. The advantage of such a system is that you can reach further along the curvature of the Earth’s surface than what is possible by using a conventional radio transmitter on ground. But ...

An apparently profitable extortion scheme

In recent months there's been a massive flood of messages with varying subject lines and slightly different contents, all sharing a common theme: A claim is made that the recipient's computer has been hacked and malware inserted on it. The computer has thereafter been used to covertly record video on ...

Fighting Internet Spam

When you control several domains for your various Internet activities, it is common to set up a “catch-all” email handler: mails sent to [whateveraddress]@yourdomain.com are collected into a single trash email inbox, where they are separate from your valid correspondence and easy to junk in bulk. The benefit of such ...

The new most expensive software failure

The very first Ariane 5 rocket blew up in 1996, with an estimated loss of 370 million dollars. The cause of the accident was Ariane 5's Inertial Reference System software, which was lifted as-is from the earlier, flawlessly functioning Ariane 4 and installed without comprehensive re-testing. Unfortunately Ariane 5 accelerated ...

"Sun's rays prove that the Earth is flat"

During my walk to work two weeks ago I witnessed the infamous “Sun Ray Phenomenon”, a situation in which the rays of the Sun that were filtered down through the holes in the cloud cover appear to converge at a not-so-distant point. I snapped the adjoining picture of what I ...

It started 50 years ago...

The Soviet Union followed the Apollo missions with their radars and radio telescopes, all the way from the Earth orbit to the Moon and back. The British followed just as carefully, listening to the transmissions and locating their origins. The television broadcasts from the first Moon landing were handled by ...

Baby steps towards online security

As I explain in my book, the horror stories over online security too often follow the same path: some innocuous device has security flaws, like unauthorized “backdoors” for remote access, which are exploited by scrupulous hackers, resulting in various negative consequences to either the owners of the devices, or even ...