Keep it Sweet and Simple

3D printers present a whole new range of opportunities for users and telecommunications companies. They could also completely shape the landscape of factories and shops as we know them today.

They look like basic printers (a bit bigger) and they can produce a 3D object from a digital model of the object by laying down layers after layers of a special material until complete. You can use different materials, ranging from polymers, titanium, or even gold powder.

What could you print? I can think of things such as industrial components (pipes, parts for cars), clothes (e.g. shoes), furniture, jewelry, and why not, chip designs for electronics, and food!! (see this article for a printer that produces sugar objects)

For now they are mostly used to build models for architects and fashion designers, and they are a bit slow, but you can imagine how the technology could improve over the years to come.

I first saw one working last year at the Renacer conference and since then I have been thinking about their possible implications.

How many times you have waited for a product that is out of stock? What if you could just download a detailed digital design of the product and have it printed at home?

At that point, a lot of factories and shops could well disappear! Everything would be intellectual property and data flowing around. We would just spend time thinking and designing, not so much doing hand labor. Finally, human kind would be freed to do what they can do best, thinking. That would be a revolution!

And for Telcos and networking companies that would be a great opportunity too. Imagine how many terabytes of data would need to be shipped from one corner of the world to another to describe with the finest level of detail a given product so that the printer could build it. Huge volumes of data would be flowing from designers directly to user’s homes, and that would need to happen in a timely manner. We would be talking about shipping bits, not physical goods anymore, and Telcos would then become the FedEx of the Internet! Who said that networking was a dead field? J

For more info you can also see this Economist article.

Has the iphone really been hacked or just a “particular software” version of the software has been compromised? For the latest versions of the software you are basically temporarily (or permanently) stuck. If you want a more permanent solution, you need to go into painful hardware-based solutions.

The reason I am saying this is because a friend of mine recently bought an iphone in the US hoping to use it in Europe with some unlocking software and give it as a Xmas present. However, the iphone is still sitting in the box hoping that somebody breaks the new bootloader (see this blog for some efforts related to this http://11246unlock.com/index.asp).

Even if somebody manages to unlock the latest software (which surely will happen eventually), the rate at which iphone software versions are being hacked is slowing down and Apple could easily keep turning the screw releasing new functionalities more often and making life harder and harder. And things could get worse if Apple decides to use some sort of revocation system, e.g. similar to those used in many DRM systems. With DRM, content owners or distributors can revoke access to all previous hacked DRM software versions forcing you to keep your deviced updated.

So I guess, after too much hassle, hackers having proved their point will just give up, and eventually consumers will do to.

After three years of our initial research efforts with Avalanche, Microsoft is today making the resulting technology available as a public customer technology preview (CTP) under the name of Microsoft Secure Content Distribution (MSCD). See announcement at the Microsoft Research site for more details.

The MSCD technology is being used to distribute Visual Studio 2008 Beta-2. You can try it out and read more about MSCD by clicking here.

A major part in this success is due to the efforts that over these years Mitch Goldberg and John Miller’s incubation team (including my dear friend Armando Garcia Mendoza) have done at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Apart from what or what not Microsoft will do with the technology in the future, the fact that anyone can now experience a secured P2P system using Network Coding is a great step forward for the research community. If you get to use it, please do not hesitate to leave your comments below.

John Miller is also running a blog where he is talking about MSCD and addressing some questions.

Yesterday I saw a BBC Panorama program on the risks of WiFi radiation. According to the BBC journalist, the measured WiFi radiation in a UK city center is about three times higher than the radiation produced by a GSM cell station about 100 meters away. The journalist was trying to make the case that if cellular GSM masts are required to be located away from schools, then, why encourage kids to use WiFi-enabled laptops or why deploy city-wide WiFi networks, including at schools and homes.

I have always been very skeptical about the risks of such low power radiation devices. After all, a WiFi router radiates about 100,000 times less than a domestic microwave. Nevertheless, the program showed people that claim to get sick with WiFi radiation. If this picks up with the public opinion, it could be a serious problem for WiFi systems, regardless of whether the problem exists or not.

The methods used in the program were far from being “scientific”, and there is a lot to debate about the results presented. Still, the reason I am concerned about this is because I had hoped that the WiFi revolution (both when being used as base stations and to create mesh networks) would not only provide wireless networks with greater capacity (in the information theory way), but would also be perceived as a “greener” wireless technology, since less powerful base stations have to be deployed. However, this seems to be under debate now. Not a good start…