During the last week of March went to a geek conference to deliver a talk. While my focus was on Multicore processors, the conference had seven different tracks including Android, Multicore, Embedded systems design, Black hat, design for medical devices, etc. You can check out the conf site at http://www.ubmdesign.com/conference/keynotes/.
The keynote speakers were interesting chaps.
Thomas Dolby is a musician from UK, who had started a company in US/UK, developed the RMF file format for music files (Rich Midi Format similar to Rich Text Format), created the beatnik music engine that got designed into pretty much all the phones (to play ring tones) in the late 90's and early 20xx (http://cloud-call-center.tmcnet.com/news/2005/Feb/1116860.htm). In the stage he talked for a while, played music, sang, demonstrated as to how he creates music, etc. Though it is easy to understand conceptually that using modern synthesizers and a bunch of audio clips, you can create music that sounds very elaborate as if put together by a 100 people orchestra, seeing it being done live is quite impressive. You can see some excerpts posted on the site. While his company's inventions helped resource constrained phones to play music/ringtones using Midi, as the constraints started easing up (due to faster processors/more memory/more bandwidth), now phones can play actual music itself obviating the need for his music engine and so it has become obsolete. After a decade or so now he is back fulltime composing music. To promote his new music venture, he has created a site called http://www.floatingcity.com/ that creates a mythology of melted icecaps, floating city in the ocean that seems to have been a result of an apocalypse letting site visitors explain how it got to that stage. It has become a community where people do different things, exchange ideas, post conspiracy theories and so forth. In the end Dolby and others seems to have settled on a theory where when Nicholas Tesla's idea of providing free power to everyone on earth was implemented in this imaginary world, Edison got in between to steal ideas and in the process created a catastrophe resulting in that post apocalypse earth. :-)
On the second day the co-founder of the electric car company Tesla Motors spoke. While so far their cars have been great in performance (0 to 60mph in 3.6 seconds, can drive 300 miles in one charge, etc.), they have been awfully expensive (in the ~$200K range). But in 2013 they are planning to deliver a new model that will be their first entry into the mass market priced around $30K. He pointed out that while there may not be Moore's law type improvements in battery technology year to year, there still is about 10% improvement in battery performance every year. So, if you wait about 7 years performance doubles and the current technology is biting at the heels of gas engines. While Tesla has been designing all their components themselves, on the exhibition floor there was a Chevy Volt gas-electric hybrid car that has been torn apart on display showing how GM uses a "outsource as much as possible" approach. There were couple of guys who were giving 1.5hr long lecture on each one of the three days about what they found inside the car as they opened it up (first day about batteries, second day about drive train and third day about infotainment system). Sounded like an interesting job, if you can make enough money this way..!
Third day speaker spoke about how the firmware in washing machines and toasters that will be connected to the internet soon are not being designed with security in mind. There was an interesting demonstration by Black Hat group where an engineer demonstrated as to how Medtronics insulin pumps can be hacked remotely via WiFi, taken control of and asked to pump in all the insulin available into the person it is attached to..! When they contacted Medtronics with the findings, they were told to effectively get lost. So, they have handed over the information to FDA which is taking up an investigation to assess the seriousness of this vulnerability.
There was another session where an Black Hat member was describing as to how he hacks silicon chips. Just search for Christopher Tarnovsky on the net. He runs a company called flylogic (http://www.flylogic.net/) that helps silicon vendors assess vulnerability issues in their design. You can find posts like http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/12/christopher-tarnovsky-hacks-infineons-unhackable-chip-we-pre/ on the net. It is interesting to see how much you can find out about a device without having the datasheet by your side, by carefully shaving off the layers of a silicon chip, pumping in clock and power and probing the buses. See http://www.flylogic.net/blog/?m=201203. Such steps could be used by hackers to figure out the details of a smart card used to pay for services so that fake cards can be used to cheat the system. Guys like Chris being on the legitimate side of the business, help develop things like security mesh for silicon chips (see http://static.usenix.org/events/smartcard99/full_papers/kommerling/kommerling.pdf particularly Section 3.6) that make hacking them more difficult. Interesting world to peek into.
If all this doesn't excite you, you can go to http://www.multicoredevcon.com/common/session.php?expo_seq=12&track_seq=160&pres_seq=947 to see what I was blabbering about in the conference. :-)
-sundar.
