Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Dan Kaminsky has developed a technique he calls “TCP-based active probing for faults” which can be used to determine if some carriers are treating some packets better than others.  First shown at BlackHat, he expects to release a commercial tool later.

Inquiring minds want to know if this is intended to be an end-user tool, or merely something for the netop.  Will I be able to use this personally to figure out what the heck is wrong with my hotel WiFi connection?

Great stuff!

With all the panic over the last few days around air travel, I thought I would arrive early for my flight from SFO today.  Despite my best intentions, I only managed to leave myself two hours and fifteen minutes, not the three hours being advised.  I was getting a little concerned because I’m supposed to be meeting Janice in San Diego at 6:30pm.  I did NOT want to miss this flight.

It was a breeze.

There was no line at the America West check in, no line at security, and the search on the other side of the screener was no worse than any other search I’ve ever had.  Moreover, despite wide reports that the National Guard had been called out, there wasn’t a soldier in sight.

The situation may be different in the international terminal, but domestic flights don’t seem to be that different from normal, except for the brisk business at the refreshments stand inside the secure area.

Andy Abramson made the local news in Santa Clara this past week, when he was part of a KTVU segment on VoIP and cellular phones.  It’s worth a view. 

Andy is actually talking at the beginning of the segment using Sightspeed.  Sightspeed is a great product, but what’s it doing in a segment on VoIP and cellular phones?  And why’s he doing that when he’s got a perfectly good Nokia E61 (a WiFi / Cellular device) sitting on the table beside him?  As it turns out, the E61 couldn’t connect to the public WiFi network in the hotel. He needed to go through one of those ubiquitous login / charge screens that you see at every hotel and public hotspot out there today. So he made the demo call from Sightspeed for reporter Pam Cook.

When asked about this later in the segment, he made the statement that the cellular carriers weren’t ready, and didn’t want to do this. Ms. Cook then spoke with AT&T VP Melba Muscarolas who made the statement on air that AT&T, in fact, would provide a converged network, and that it would be available, initially only on AT&T hotspots, next year.

Geek trivia: Andy reveals on his blog that all the phones in the segment were his.  Jealous?  Nope.  Not me.  Never. Unh unh… not at ALL. Besides, who’d want his bill?

The two big drivers of iotum’s functionality are context and relevance.  Context is the set of circumstances in which an event occurs.  Relevance is pertinance to the matter at hand. Today, iotum is capable of considering contextual inputs such calendar (are you in a meeting, what time of day is it, and so on), location, and presence.  It evaluates one kind of event — a telephone call — and based on context, predicts relevance. 

So far, so good.

I had a very challenging meeting with a couple of the smartest people I know in the industry, yesterday.  Among the many questions posed was the simple question of how we could actually know, with certainty, how relevant a particular call is to each and every individual.  The short answer is that we can’t.  Human beings are simply unpredictable.  But what we can do is use contextual clues to provide richer and more varied sources of inputs to the relevance engine, allowing it to better situationalize individuals.  And, based on the heuristics in the system, which imitate a human assistant, we can help it to make better decisions based on that richer and more varied contextual information.

The challenge is in deciding what is valuable input, and what not.  For instance, this evening I learned that long time friend Phil Holden is also an accomplished photographer, and will shortly be mounting a show of his work in downtown Seattle.  I’m a bit of an amateur photographer myself.  So, how should I use this new information, and in what contexts is it meaningful?  Is it meaningful to anyone else who isn’t interested in photography?

Just as the use of context is revolutionizing search, retailing, and music, by providing more relevant results, we expect to see the same impact in voice.  What isn’t clear yet is how large the potential taxonomy of inputs might grow.