Presentation at the Technion Accelerator. You can download the slides from here.
Blog Posts
The story of the Tower of Babel (or Babylon) has always fascinated me as God got seriously threatened by humans if and only they would all speak the same language. To prevent that God confused all the words spoken by the people on the tower and scattered them across the earth. Regardless of the different personal religious beliefs of whether it happened or not the underlying theory of growing power when humans interconnect is intriguing and we live at times this truth is evident. Writing, print, the Internet, email, messaging, globalization and social networks are all connecting humans — connections …
Softbank acquired BostonDynamics, the four legs robots maker, alongside secretive Schaft, two-legged robots maker. Softbank, the perpetual acquirer of emerging leaders, has entered a foray into artificial life by diluting their stakes in media and communications and setting a stronghold into the full supply chain of artificial life. The chain starts with chipsets where ARM was acquired but then a quarter of the holdings were divested since Google (TPU) and others have shown that specialized processors for artificial life are no longer a stronghold of giants such as Intel. The next move was acquiring a significant stake in Nvidia. Nvidia is the leader …
Random thoughts regarding Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2017 report: Slide #5 The main question that popped in mind was where are the rest of the people? Today there are 3.4B internet users where the world has a population of 7.5B. Could be interesting to see who are the other non-digital 4 billion humans. Interesting for reasons such as understanding the growth potential of the internet user base (by the level of difficulty of penetrating the different remaining segments) as well as identifying unique social patterns in general. Understanding the social demographics of the 3.4B connected ones can be valuable as well …
IBM stock was hit severely in recent month, mostly due to the disappointment from the latest earnings report. It wasn’t a real disappointment, but IBM had a buildup of expectations from their ongoing turnaround, and the recent earnings announcement has poured cold water on the growing enthusiasm. This post is about IBM’s story but carries a moral which applies to many other companies going through disruption in their industry. IBM is an enormous business with many product lines, intellectual property reserves, large customers/partners ecosystems and a big pile of cash reserves. IBM has been disrupted in the recent decade by various …
The patents system never got along quite well with software inventions. Software is too fluid for the patenting system, a system that was built a long time ago for inventions with physical aspects. The material point view perceives software as a big pile of electronically powered bits organized in some manner. In recent years the patenting system was bent to cope with software by adding into patent applications artificial additions containing linkage into physical computing components such as storage or CPU so the patent office can approve them. But that is just a patch and not evolution. The Age of Algorithms Fast forward to …
Cryptography is a serious topic — a technology based on mathematical foundation posing an ever-growing challenge for attackers. On November 11th, 2016 Motherboard wrote a piece about FBI’s ability to break into suspects’ locked phones. Contrary to FBI’s constant complaints about going dark with strong encryption the actual number of phones they were able to break into was quite high. The high success ratio of penetrating locked phones in some way doesn’t make sense – it is not clear what was so special with those devices they failed to break into. Logically similar phone models have the same crypto algorithms …
Some random thoughts about WannaCry attack Propagation The propagation of the WannaCry attack was massive and mostly due to the fact it infected computers via SMB1, an old Windows file sharing network protocol. Some security experts complained that Ransomware has been massive for two years already and this event is only a one big hype wave though I think there is a difference here and it is the magnitude of propagation. There is a big difference when attack distribution relies solely on people unintentionally clicking on a malicious link or document and get infected vs. this attack propagation patterns. This is the first …
I had the privilege to present at the Netexplo observatory event at Unesco with a presentation about the danger of AI if and when it will adopted by cyber attackers. The full video is here and you can download my presentation from here.
CDA I had a super interesting visit to London for two cyber-related events. The first was a meeting of the CDA which is a new collaboration effort among the top European banks headed by Barclays Global CISO and the CDA themselves. The Israel Founders Group assembled top experts from the world of cyber security and gathered them as an advisory board to the CDA. CDA Group of Seven British Government The second part of the trip was no less interesting, I was invited by the Israeli embassy to participate in a thinking tank of the British government about how to …