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Visions of the future...written in the past :)

Chapter 12 of "The Windows CE Technology Tutorial", by Chris Muench

Written on October 9th, 1999

In the past 11 chapters you learned a lot about the features and possibilities of Windows CE. But what can you do with it besides writing cool tools or games for the mobile companions? This chapter wants to give you some ideas on what you could do with this knowledge.

You might wonder why this book includes a vision statement at all. Well, as you know people like Bill Gates have often surprised the industry with new and exiting visions that have changed the world. In the area of Windows CE and the "tiny-devices" I believe these visions are currently not expressed very loudly so as not to shock the public or hurt partners in the PC OEM community.

But believe me, there are new visions and Microsoft and other companies like Siemens, Compaq, NEC, GE and many Japanese companies like Sony, Mitsubishi and Sega are already working on realizing them.

Just sit back, look around and think about what devices even in your closest vicinity could be intelligent and networked in the future. While I am writing this paragraph I am sitting in the business class on a United Airlines flight in one of those newly designed multi-function chairs. If I used a laptop I could plug it into the power outlet of the chair. But because I am using my fully charged Windows CE based H/PC Professional I do not worry about power for the next 8 hours. Inside this fancy chair I have a phone that would allow me to connect with my H/PC directly to my server at home and start a terminal session surfing the web using my full T1 line. Just the fact that the phone company still charges an arm and a leg for every minute prevent me from doing so. This chair would have much more potential if it would become "intelligent". So far the integrated video system allows me to select one of eight different video programs. The color screen embedded into the seat has a resolution of 640x480 and could be used for Web Browsing perfectly. Instead of renting only headphones to the customers the airlines could also rent out keyboards like many hotels have started to do.

Lets not stop here. I am a very big fan of personal customization features. I already have a travel profile with United and could find my personal settings of the chair, position of the foot rest, head rest, the setting of the new massage in the chair, volumes and language of the radio and so on, set already when I sit down. The chair could also connect to my home automation system via the Internet and check if I have mail and if my house alarm system is working properly. With the web browser inside the video entertainment system I would than connect to my home server and read my email that of course also shows my voice mails using unified messaging. In case I have to return earlier than expected from my trip - happens to me all the time- I would change the temperature of my air conditioning at home to feel comfortable as soon as I arrive. On my way from the airport to my home I could pick up some groceries that my Palm-size PC downloaded automatically from the comfortable chair in the airplane and was transmitted by my fridge at home.

This fridge knows exactly what's in it, what you like most, what you had for dinner and lunch the last couple of months (his brother the oven and his sister the microwave told him). It registers every "inventory" change of the fridge if you put new items into our out of the fridge by scanning a new wireless tag that contains information on the item like expiration date, item category and even recipes of what you could cook with it.

Of course in the future you will no longer use the unfriendliest tool - the keyboard - to communicate with your computer but natural language. To hear those commands all over your house there will be microphones in tiny devices that preprocess the speech and transmit it either directly to the target device or to the central home computer. There will be always other input methods in addition to voice recognition for environments that do not allow for voice input like libraries, loud factories or the chair in the airplane mentioned in the beginning. Still, my estimation remains that the keyboard will undertake a huge evolution towards intelligent touch displays that transform themselves with every touch and therefore use much less space.

Because we do not like it very much if we cannot switch on the lights just because the central computer is down, we are talking distributed intelligence here. A light switch will talk directly to the light bulb and, of course, can be routed to another light bulb very easily. Have you ever tried to rewire a light switch? Well, you will love that feature. The same applies for your stereo and video equipment. Firewire (IEEE 1394) outlets in every room allow plugging in a TV set, DVD player or video camera anywhere and streaming the media to all the other rooms.

Speaking of the TV, we finally get to your main input device. Guess what is the most ergonomic, most easy to use and most widely spread electronic device in the consumer market? You are right, the TV. And even your mom can handle a remote controller for you TV set.

If you have monitored recent mergers of telecom with cable companies you can easily forecast what the next conversion will bring. Web TV, Game consoles, Home Automation controlled via your TV remote and digital MP3 audio are just the beginning.

Coming back to the distributed intelligence, a customer will never accept not to be able to open his garage, change the temperature of his air conditioning or cook a meal without having turned on his TV before. All appliances will have to act and react independently of a central managing device and still be able to talk to each other.

How small will it become?

Processors and RAM will not only become smaller and cheaper, they will reduce their power consumption over time to such small consumption, that a single solar cell with the size of a needle head can power it for some days. The sensitivity of measurement sensors will increase in a way that regular power lines can be used even for high-speed data transfer. Universal Plug and play (UPnP) will allow the upgrade, exchange or expansion of any setup without the hassle of configuration, programming or other human intervention. To answer the question: smaller than a dime.

The dark side of the new world

But of course all that has its dark sides. If you have seen movies like "Enemy of the state", "The Net" or " Fair-Game" you have seen pictures of the negative side those technologies would bring with it. The old fear of the "big brother is watching" could come back. Nothing will ever be 100% safe from hackers or crackers, it will just become more difficult. But as soon as you have the means to access your home security system over the web it is potentially exposed to hackers.

What can we do to protect ourselves?

It is my strong belief that total protection will not be possible. But there is also no sure protection against a sudden death by a falling rock, a drunken car driver or an insane shooter. The trick will be to make it as difficult as possible without reducing the features of this new freedom again.

As we have learned in this book, Windows CE only provides a basic set of security mechanisms. It basically moves the responsibility up to the application to include its own security. Microsoft will have some work here to improve that state without creating such a complicated security that the only way to figuring it out is to switch it off.

Security must be distributed as well, even down to the smallest light switch and motion sensor. If a device enters a new domain space, or in other words you buy a new lamp, the device has to be registered in this domain. Again, this registration must not be complicated or the average user will not do it. Data transfer from and to any device has to be encrypted and any device must be able to function without a central server. Given the fact that you probably do not want to buy all your devices from one vendor, the encryption, security and data transition protocols have to be unified and standardized -- in the competitive world of information electronics, a tough task.

Another big threat is software viruses. With open and remote interfaces through the Internet a new bread of viruses could spread through your home automation network and cook spaghetti all the time, buy food you hate or just turn on the lights in the middle of the night.

What can you do to participate?

If you have to design a device, look out for industry standards, network protocols and security standards that are relevant for the area where you want to deploy the device. Integrate as much as you can even if it might not make sense at the point in time you want to deploy.

Do not falsely save on RAM or ROM space. Check out the market, sometimes a chip with higher capacity is even cheaper than a smaller one.

Design a good remote update strategy, especially in home automation customers do not want to update their toasters with complicated web downloads but if the toaster could offer an update by telling the user to just press a button, he is very likely to do so. But do not forget security because having a software virus in the toaster would not be too good as well.

Protect your code with certificates or other protection mechanisms to prevent or at least decrease the opportunities for viruses.

Where is the technology now?

Guess what... nearly all devices and ideas mentioned before are already possible with today's technologies. Just the price and the size are not yet in the area a mass deployment would require. Once those two features come down, you will see an explosion of those devices on the market.

I am pretty sure that Bill Gates has already revised his vision "A Computer on every desk in every home" to "A Computer IN every desk in every home... and light switch, and light bulb, and TV, and stereo and garage door and fire alarm and and and..."

What is life?

You might wonder what this topic has to do with WE-DIG. Well, read on and you will find out. I am trying to bring a couple ideas on the table that might sound farfetched at first, but once looked at closer, will make you think twice about several aspects of life.

Let me introduce you to a couple of concepts and assumptions and then try to validate and verify that these assumption may actually be true. But before I dive in, I want to explain that I have not studied, researched or validated many of my statements below. Everything is based on experience; monitoring and reflection of these learned impressions, as well as talking many hours with good friends of mine. Dwayne, Karin, Mike, Paul and Ron helped a great deal to put these thoughts in order and context and this thesis would not have been possible without them. Thank you my friends, for your excellent input and keeping me on track.

To find out what love is, we first have to find out, who we are or better what we are. Here is assumption number one: We are highly sophisticated machines, very similar to computers and follow strict logical rules, bound by the laws of physics, chemistry, magnetism and wave harmonics.

Let's find out why I came to this conclusion and find some common parameters between us and the computers.

When we are born, we do have a set of "hardware" that is determined by our DNA, if you like a blueprint for our "human computer". This specification is very detailed and has many "pages" (Chromosomes). It defines, if we have an AMD or Intel CPU, a NVidia or Intel Northbridge Chipset, how fast our memory bus is, what Graphics Co-Processor NVidia or ATI, how our Harddrive is connected to the motherboard what speed it has and how much capacity is has, what and how many ports we have and how we are "connected" to the outside world. We have a gut feeling that monitors our ports and internal organs and even shuts them down if necessary. Modern servers and PCs have watchdogs that do the same with the internal and external peripherals.

You could not build the EXACT same computer twice, even if you were to duplicate each and every bit of the system: Including the serial number of the BIOS (VGA and Motherboard) and the MAC address of the Ethernet cards, because even the distances between the cards and cables could change the temperature and current flow of the PC. Additionally, you would have to put the USB devices in the PC in the EXACT order you plugged them in the first time, with all those USB devices to have the exact same physical and power consuming properties. The more complex your computer is that you are assembling, the more likely it becomes that the next one you are building, even with the same parts of the same manufacturer, will be different.

There are some things even the manufacturer cannot exactly determine to make identical, even if you would take the next instance of the hardware coming off the manufacturing line. A good example is the dual-channel RAM behavior. A good hardware vendor will try to sell you always two strips of RAM chip from the same manufacturing batch. Several vendors of RAM have started selling them only in pairs to avoid the "Dual-Channel" synchronization blue-screens. If you ever had a PC randomly rebooting or crashing and hanging unexpectedly, you will know what I am talking about. Another far simpler example is the Ethernet card of course. It is mandated that each card has its own unique MAC address. So each instance of even the same brand and batch of Ethernet cards has a different MAC address.

In conclusion, we have established, that not one computer, no matter how hard you will try, will be 100% identical to the next computer. They are all "Individuals"! Oh yes, this is true for Macintoshes as well, although proprietary design does limit the possibilities of "Individualism" somewhat - serial numbers and MAC addresses are still unique for every Mac.

So, now we are born, the hardware is set and the bios, the "instinct", will run its initial run, initializing all the base hardware and ports. At the end.it is asking for "input".and sits there. In case of the PC as a blinking cursor.

When we are born, we open our eyes and sit there too. Most likely we get our first input as a slap on our ass resulting in us crying. Well, and there we are at the second assumption: There is only Cause and Effect!

"Wow", you might say "What about choice?" well; we get back to this later. Dwayne and I had long discussion on this and we did not really achieved consent on this. Let's first get to our crying baby.

There is not really a choice here for the baby. It gets a stimulus on the ass area that resulted in nerve signals sent to the CPU resulting in a documentation of the pain by telling its environment about it, a little instinct program in our bios. From now on, our baby is collecting input by reading all the stimuli it gets via its sensors, touch, temperature, smell, sight, sound and maybe even many more that I will now classify as "wave harmonics": the aura of the mother. Our little baby is now starting to fill its memory (harddrive) with information and sensations but it has not yet learned to do anything with it. Bodies own stimuli like hunger, thirst..

.funny, just when I was writing these lines, somebody on my door knocked. It was two missionaries that try to tell me about Jesus! This has never happened to me before and I thought I mention it here briefly, because it will help me later to make a point.

Ok, where was I.Body stimuli! So our baby gets hungry or thirsty (Cause) and it starts to cry (Effect). The environment, if it has experience with babies, hears the cry (Cause) and will feed it (Effect). The Effect of the baby crying becomes the Cause for the feeding, which in turn becomes the Effect. Our computer at this time is still sitting there with a blinking cursor, if it still has power flowing through its "veins", the circuits.

Now to all you robotics and AI researchers: I am sure you are working on automatic ways of collecting information and sensations, but instead of letting a computer "grow" its knowledge, you feed it with predesigned programs, that handle certain "body functions" like walking or fighting (in the case of a SumoBot). "Learning" bots collect input, store it, retrieve it if a similar situation comes up, and try another solution path if the first one was not successful. In other words, if a Cause did not have an Effect that was desired, the next time the same Cause appears, another Effect is "chosen". The Effect is "valued" and prioritized and again stored. Over time, the memory has a series of Cause and Effect relations and can make "wiser" decision when the same Cause is coming up again. Valuing an Effect depends on the outcome: was it a positive outcome, or was it negative.

Search engines are trying a similar concept these days. They call it "Relevance". Unfortunately the relevance the search engines are using is too broad and uses statistics from many different users trying to average out the common interest. Even though somebody is looking for something and uses the same words as the next, he is looking maybe for something completely different. A statistical "most people were looking for that if they typed in those word" only works very rarely. Only personalized search engines that learn over time what you are looking for and how you formulate your questions will be able to provide better results over time. But this would require authentication of the user and huge amounts of storage for every user. I am sure the search engines will move towards this construct but all sorts of privacy concerns will always stall these efforts.

For a computer it is hard to decide what is positive and what is negative since it does not "feel" anything.yet. Feelings are chemicals in our body that are produced depending on the stimulus and our Basic Programming (DNA). These chemicals either create a good or bad sensation. While the good chemicals normally help us heal and make us stronger, the bad chemicals can cause illnesses and pain. Both chemicals can make addictive, the body even tries to "adapt" to the frequency of the chemical being produced. As I said before, our body is a highly developed machine, and no computer, android or other artificial machine has yet reached this ability to adopt on so many levels. But since all the adaptations in our body are chemical reactions, there is not really a limit here for engineers to come up with a similar adaptation "organism" for future machines.

Another fundamental difference between today's computers and robots is the amount of sensors we have and the amount of sensations we process each and every millisecond. The most common are smell, sight, sound, taste and touch. All of these senses are very complex and always in combination with each other. Therefore a memory that we store is seldom just a picture, smell or sound alone, it's a combination of multiple sensations plus a variety of other states that we have at the time of the memory like mood, weather, temperature, health, state of tiredness and most likely many more.

Try to remember back in time and recall a memory; try to find out what state your body was in when you had this memory. I bet with you, that it's either an emotional "high" or an emotional "low". Other memories will fade out very quickly. Memories therefore have an "emotional" state attached with it, and since emotions are nothing else than a series of chemicals produced at the time, our brain is somehow able to store these chemicals, with the memory. This also explains that some memory flashbacks are triggered by sounds, smells or a combination of emotions. You might also remember things from your past only, if a certain body state is recreated. Hypnoses can "fake" the body in those states and recall suppressed memories by recreating these states.

We lost our computers here totally; they are far away from such complex processing. Many physical "barriers" have to be bent in order to reach a similar complexity. I explicitly do not say "Broken" because there is nothing here, that is limited by the laws of physics to reach this complexity. 200 years ago, nobody would ever believe we could fly with airplanes!

Now let's recap to see if we are on the same page: Our body is a precise and complex machine that will be reproduced someday by a sophisticated machine. What about our mind? There are two big things we have to tackle here: What is love? And do we really have a choice?

Let's go back to the computers for a second. As you know, there is current flowing through a computer all the time, energy that the computer needs to run, without it, it's just "dead" hardware.

Well, we are not that different from that. Our current is much lower in voltage but its there. If you look at inductive working displays, you know that they are actually using our surface voltage to find the position on the touch screen. And other than pressure sensitive touch, the surface can even send back multiple location at the same time, as our skin does with touch. Some computers have started "learning" from this effect and now react to strokes, and other touch input like the iPhone. A combination of both, induction and touch comes closer to the way our skin works but there are still elements missing that makes touch the most elaborate sensation we can experience. We also feel the temperature of the touch and even the voltage/current of the one/thing that touches us. And depending on the other parameters described above (mood, health etc) we either store the touch sensation as something positive or negative. That also explains why we sometimes like to be touched and on other times almost explode, even though the touch was coming from the same person and was applied in the exact same way.

If you have ever programmed a robot or any other device that has to manage a lot of inputs, and I do not speak about simple inputs as a gamepad with just 12 buttons, you know that you cannot use "polling" to read your sensors. You have to use events and process them when they come in. As mentioned above, our body has way to many sensors for our brain to go off and ask each and every one "what is your state?". We, too, are processing our sensors event driven. At any given moment we are processing tons of sensations (events) coming in from our sensors. Most of them are handled by the brain without really involving the "consciousness". Only certain events are "brought to our attention".

Another interesting thing that happens is that if we get overloaded by events, meaning an event is coming too frequent, we are starting to "ignore" it, we adapt to it. Again think about someone petting your arm or other part of your body. If he/she strokes it over and over, at some point in time you either get annoyed by it, or you stop feeling it at all. Try this: Sit relaxed on your favorite couch and put two fingers of your two hands together. You will feel the touch of them once you do this. Now close your eyes and start thinking about your last weekend. What did you eat? What did you do? Where did you go? Try to drift away with your thoughts.now be honest.do you still feel you two fingers? If you have not moved them, I bet with you, that you do not feel them anymore. But as soon as you move them, they trigger another sensation, a "delta" to the last position that you can recognize in your brain.

In digital electronics that is called "Edge Trigger". We only react to edge trigger, not to constant states. In some countries, a torture method for prisoners was to have drops of water hit a metal surface close to their cell in irregular intervals. While we can get easily adjusted to sounds that are constant, like computer fans, traffic noise or other fairly harmonic noises, it is the constant "on" and "off" of a noise that can become extremely annoying.

While we are only "triggered" by edge sensations, we still store the state of our body (mood, health, surrounding temperature etc) with any event that is coming to our brain.

I mentioned before, that we have current flowing through our body. Our nerves system requires this current to transport the information to the brain. And we all know what happens if this nerves system gets interrupted by any sever impact, an electric shock, a stroke, an accident that paralyzes parts of the system. The information is not reaching our brain anymore and we do not "feel" our sensors anymore.

Now I am stretching out a bit, please do not hang up on meJ. Each and every computer and machine that has current inside, sends out a certain set of harmonic waves. There are even theories that all objects in the universe send out waves. It is believed that certain stones and minerals have "healing" effects because they send out waves to which our body reacts. As this time, I have not seen any conclusive material that proves or disproves this, but let's stick to the machines that we know send out waves. In reverse these machines are also sensitive to certain rays and waves that can render them useless. EMP is known to shut down all electronic equipment and a Microwave that is running close to a PC with a 2.4 GigiaHz CPU inside can cause "hiccups" in the pc. Pending on the shielding of a CPU and the PC, some PCs are more "sensitive" to such waves than others.

Every electronic field is submitting waves depending on the internal current flow and setup of the internal circuits. You could say that every PC has its own unique "wave fingerprint". Some are submitting rather far, others that have better shielding, not so far. As we all know from physics lessons, harmonic waves of the same frequency will add, and phase shifted waives will cancel out. This is the base for all noise canceling headsets on the market: Tiny microphones that pickup sound waves, invert them with a DSP or other means, and playing them back in the headset, canceling out the noise that the microphone picks up. While the microphones, DSP and the headsets are getting better, the noise cancellation will be better as well.

You probably have wondered sometimes, why you sometimes "clicked" with a person you just met, and other times you rather want to run away.

Here is another assumption that I draw as a conclusion from the statement above: We are able to "sense" the harmonic waves sent by another being.

People that have harmonic waves very close to our own are more close to us, than those our waves get canceled out by. In any case, wave addition or cancelation, our sensors get triggered and an event/sensation is sent to the brain. As kids we might still be able to consciously react to this event, but growing older, society and other artificial bounds limit our ability to react "instinctively" on these events and we know who is "good" or "Bad". Society has taught us to respect each other no matter the first impression, but our unconscious is still storing this information with the person. We often say that the first impression is the most important impression. And I do believe that this is very true. We have some means of influencing our waves we submit but I think only in some minor ways. The core of our harmonic wave fingerprint cannot be changed.

Now I am moving towards the "what is love?" question. Love in my experience is something you either "feel" or not. You are either in love, or you are not. But what is love then?

There are many different flavors of love, all described and discussed in many books and movies. And I do believe that everyone will define his/her own definition of what he/she considers love is. The love I am describing now is the deep felt love, the love that makes your body shiver when you get touched by your partner. The love that makes you feel in heaven when you are together with your partner and makes you feel miserable when you are apart. The love that can move mountains because you draw all your energy from it.

And don't get me wrong. I do not believe that this deep love alone can make a relationship work. There have to be many other factors that determine if a relationship has a future or not. Maybe you can call that the "logical" love. Logical love is based on the values one has accumulated over the years. What is important to you and your partner? Do these important things match? Do you have similar interests? Similar desires and wishes? It determines all aspects of life that should be considered and have to work before two people got together in a relationship. If both parts work out you find "real" love. It can hold forever and is most likely the most beautiful thing life has to offer.

Looking at all my statements above, you can explain this love logically and physically. Love is when two beings meet and their harmonic waves match perfectly or at least almost perfectly. The resulting wave is so strong that it creates chemical reactions in the body that make us "feel" good. This good feeling can cause some very intensive behavior because we are suddenly overwhelmed with energy that needs to be vented. And the more of this wave we are exposed to, the more our body adapts to it and "gets used to it". Since the body has a natural tendency to "equalize" a too frequent sensation, we start to "get used to" the partner and its presence. That does not mean we do love our partner less, just the sensation will not be as strong as it was during the first times.

If the wave is no longer present because the partner is away, our body does not create these chemicals anymore and our body reacts to the withdrawal of it. Like a drug addict, we are now craving for these good chemicals and the result is misery and pain. Pending the state of awareness we have about this "love state" our conscious starts to "compensate" for the missing wave and in severe cases can go nuts that again, can lead to very strange behaviors.

Meeting the person that has the exact 100% match of your own harmonic waves is very hard and statistically almost impossible. Also, there is the possibility that the addition of the two waves is not perceived by both partners equally strong. So finding this love sensation might be something not all of us have encountered in our lives.

And then there is another aspect of human beings: We can adapt to almost any given situation or environment. Some faster, some slower but we all have the ability to adapt. Even if the harmonic waves do not match with a partner right away, you can adopt to the waves of your partner. This could be labeled as "growing to love somebody". Once adapted to these waves, all the symptoms of addiction and withdrawal will arise, the longer you are "exposed" to the waves of your partner.

A couple years ago, I was already thinking about writing this thesis but I was missing a lot of bits to complete my picture. Then I did encounter this love I am talking about and I do now know, that is does exist and I am very happy that I still feel this love for my partner.

Well, now I am going a step further that is even a further stretch in my philosophy. I am sure this will create heavy discussion and I am already looking forward to good ones as I had with Dwayne a couple days ago.

The question that remains is: Do we have a choice?

What is choice? Each and every Cause has an Effect. Sometimes the effect is that we have a choice and we make it. The outcome is either an effect we have expected, or live throws us a curveball having a total different effect than we expected.

How do we make choices? We all do choices the same way: We follow our programming, our instinct, our experience and or "prediction" of what the choice will have as consequences/effects. For each and every choice we have to make, there are gazillions of parameters that we cannot all know or take in account. Even the tiniest choice, in example: lift an arm; we are considering an almost infinitive number of parameters. Most of which are in our sub-conscious and others we just ignore because we do not know them. But the fact remains; the choice we make is a sum of our experience, our programming (DNA) and our ability and wish to predict the outcome.

My last and final assumption is: "All choices we make are completely logical and at any given time predictable, if we would know ALL existing parameters".

Here I need you to stretch out your brain. "All existing parameters" this is not possible because there is an infinitive (minus one) amount of parameters every time we do a choice. The more parameters you know, the easier it is to make your choice. At the end there is logic everywhere. If you reduce the world to a simple binary statement you can get everything down to a NAND (not and): ( 1 NAND 1 = 0 ; 1 NAND 0 = 1 ; 0 NAND 1 = 1; 0 NAND 0 = 1). Each and every other logical comparison can be expressed with NAND (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_logic). The same is true for the NOR operator but for my argument that does not matter.

The NAND is therefore the most primitive and simplest of all logic operators existing. If you look at a computers and their computing power again, it is nothing else then a collection of gazillions of NAND operations. Even the most complex 3D Render calculation, that takes days to render a single picture, can be described in an almost endless appearing string of NAND operations. In that case, the renderer has a huge amount of parameters and will render the absolute same image every the time you start the render process again. There might be variations in the picture every time it's rendered because the computer is taking several parameters from a randomizer that produces "sort of" random numbers.

If you have ever programmed a randomizer, you know that random numbers are not really random. They are based on a "seed" value, most likely coming from the fastest Timer in the system, and then sent through a series of complex formulas to "disguise" the randomness. Clever randomizers additionally use the unique MAC address of the system and other unique properties of the PC. But in the end, all these numbers are not really random, they are known at the given moment in time when they were taken. Again the theory, if you know ALL parameters at any given time, you can predict the next "event" in time because it has to follow the logical rules of physics.

Can you follow so far? It's a big brain twist.but try to imagine, like the renderer of the picture, if you do know ALL parameters of life, your choice was already made before you did it. Decisions that seem clear to one do not have the same clarity to others. You do like beautiful romantic sunsets in a warm Hawaiian environment? Well, most people do, but what if you have bad childhood memories of beaches like that? You might look for the next tree to hit or even worse. Still, if you had known these parameters, the tree hitting becomes less of a "strange" choice. The more parameter you know, the less likely you will be surprised about choices people make. And would you know them all (Memories, Mood, Weather, Health, Harmonic Wave, Electric Current of your surroundings, the butterfly in china and many gazillion more), you could predict exactly what choice would be made.

I therefore conclude that Choice is a closed illusion that we are all trapped in (Thanks to Karin for this analogyJ). Our life has been pre-determined by logic and "carved into time". We are living on a single thread of time that runs from the past through the future. No matter what choice we think we are making, this thread is continuing pre-determined. Like a movie, the outcome of a movie is always the same, no matter how hard we try to skip chapters forward or backwards. The man always falls of the roof, no matter how many times, we rewind the tape and see things appearing we have not seen the first or second time we watched the movie. They have always been there.

Please do not ask me who created this "life-thread" or where it started and how it will end. These are questions I cannot answer, yet, and lead to religion and other believes.

Another important statement I have to make at this point. We do not know the future because we will never know all parameters; we might be able to predict it better and better over time. Many professions even exist around predicting the future like weather analysts and traffic planners. But we as individual will (hopefully!!) never be able to predict the future, even our immediate future. And we keep on making choices, choices that will determine our lives. Once you find out that I am not contradicting myself, you will understand me.

I made a lot of bad choices in my life that hurt many persons that are even very dear to me. Looking back, I did these choices because I evaluated parameters wrong because I gave them the wrong value at the time. Looking back at that time, I am sure I could not have made any other choice given the parameters visible to me at that time. It does not make sense to think about the "What if" because we already did the "what if" then, but we did not have all the clarity we have now looking back.

Life is wonderful and fascinating. And because we do not know what is happening next (like the missionaries appearing on my doorstep EXACTLY at a time I was writing this thesis), we still make our choices, we live with our choices and we enjoy seeing what the outcome of our choices are (well, most of the timeJ). It simply does not matter that there is a time-thread, telling us after each and every choice we made..told you so!

So go on, make your choices, make them wisely or just go with the moment. Enjoy love and life and its endless facets and possibilities that could arise from your choices. It is way too beautiful to get depressed or lost by philosophies. Also, there is always the possibility, that I could be wrong.. J

WWhere does this all lead us to? Well, one of our human basic instinct (bios) routines is, to satisfy our curiosity. We are always thriving to learn more, experience more and research things we do not know about.

Looking at the next frontier of computing, after Home Computing, Multimedia and the Internet it is now the area of "AI/NI" area (Artificial Intelligence/Natural Intelligence). We will research and experiment with it, no matter if it becomes dangerous because the curiosity will drive us. We are working on the next step of evolution because if the machines will learn and reach similar consciousness as we have, they will become the next step.

If you have any comments to this, please do not hesitate writing here. I am eager to hear your feedback and love to discuss this topic.

Chris Muench

9/28/2007 1:18:56 PM - by Chris Muenh

Just checking if feedback works

So fire away with your comments :-)

10/13/2007 3:14:45 PM - by Chris Muench

Here is a very cool video on YouTube...fits very well the thoughts above and...goes a little beyond :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Have fun!

Meeting Notes: Security Analysis and Windows Embedded [mtg #35]

WE-DIG / Seattle - Meeting #35

Meeting Report by Paul Yao

Security Analysis and Threat Modeling

A Presentation by Steven Yee,

bSquare Corporation

The topic at the August 2007 meeting of WE-DIG/Seattle was security. The speaker who gave the main presentation is someone who currently works at bSquare, which is known as one of the bigger consulting shops for Windows Embedded development. At least, that is how I introduced Steven Yee at the start of the meeting. In fact, my brief introduction did not do justice to his experience and time spent working in the area of software security. Fortunately, Steven was quite happy to fill in the blanks.

Steven worked at Microsoft for 3+ years, as a program manager for Windows Live One Care. This Microsoft product watches over a desktop PC for a wide range of threats, from wicked malware to the semi-innocuous threat of you forgetting to back up data. After he described his experience on the Windows Live One Care team, Steven pointed out that good security practices are the same whether you are developing for the desktop or for devices. Since he was speaking at the WE-DIG/Seattle group, however, he used an example of a Windows Mobile phone. [By the way, this is similar to the talk that Steven delivered in May 2007 at the Mobile and Embedded Developers Conference (MEDC) in Las Vegas.]

While the media gives a lot of coverage to security failures on desktop and server systems, embedded and mobile devices are not completely immune to threats. By way of example, Steven showed a chart that listed the malware which has been identified on mobile phones. From the first virus that targeted Symbian phones in June 2004 until today, his chart showed a total of 170 different types of malware. Compared to the number of threats on desktop and server systems, this amounted to little more than a rounding error. But we should not grow complacent, because as mobile phones and other embedded devices become more sophisticated, so will the number of attacks against them increase. For example, within a week of its introduction, there was already a malware attack against the Apple iPhone.

Just how big an impact has there been from malware? Steven showed us a graph which suggested that the overall cost to business from malware has grown from US$ 500 million in 1995 to US$ 14.2 Billion in 2005. What exactly was covered by such a huge figure? Steven gave a list which included:

Recovery - time spent restoring the attacked systems,
Productivity - what was lost while such systems were down,
Direct Revenue Lost - Steven mentioned that Amazon sells something like US $1 million every hour, and so downtime for amazon.com directly translates into lost revenue (this was simply by way of example; no specific downtime for Amazon was discussed),
Tools - Infrastructure and utilities needed to backup, restore, and protect against future attacks,
Consultants - Hiring security consultants to help design and implement good security practices, and
Loss of customer trust - sometimes referred to as an intangible or "goodwill", customers who have been burned will probably go look for another vendor - presumably one who is able to operate a more secure computing environment.

===== The Security Analysis Process

Steven described a five-step process for analyzing the possible threats to a system. Ideally, these steps should be undertaken during a project's design phase, when the impact on project costs and schedule are lowest. However, this approach can be retrofitted to a project that is underway or even to an existing system. These steps are integral to the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), which describes the approach that Microsoft has adopted in developing all of its software. The five steps are as follows:

1) Identify Assets to Protect

2) Estimate the Value of the Assets

3) Identify Potential Threats

4) Evaluate the Likelihood of Threats

5) Define the Mitigation Plan / Strategies

The more you learn about security, the more you realize that nothing is ever perfectly secure. Or, as Steven put it, security is never about protecting everything 100%. Instead, it is about identifying potential threats, weighing the costs of protection, and putting in place measures based on a systematic cost/benefit analysis. While such knowledge might make you feel uncomfortable, having a false sense of security is the greatest problem to worry about. From such a position, it would be easy to justify not doing anything to improve the situation. And yet, compared to inaction, almost any action that attempts to mitigate potential threats will improve the intrinsic security of a system.

To help illustrate the use of the security analysis process, Steven walked through the five steps in the context of a Windows Mobile phone. The accompanying table summarizes his comments.

Step	Windows Mobile Phone
1) Identify Assets to Protect	Cost of the device itself. And while substantial (upwards of US$ 500), the assets that truly need protecting are probably the data on the device, plus whatever network access might be possible using the device. Data. Financial data such as credit card numbers, bank account information, or social security numbers. Some data may be protected by privacy laws (such as HIPAA for medical data), by corporate accountability laws (such as Sarbanes-Oxley). Applications. The ability to run some applications may allow access to the data on the device, or on a corporate network.
2) Estimate the Value of the Assets	Q. Can data that is lost be recovered? Q. How long does it take to recover the data? Q. What is the cost to recover the data? Q. What is the impact of disclosure of data to third parties (which may include your competitors, or bad guys intent on doing illegal activities)?
3) Identify Potential Threats	Device Loss. With a mobile phone, device loss is clearly a threat. By one estimate, 100,000 mobile phone were lost in London in the year 2005. In the USA, the FBI loses 3 to 4 laptops every month. Data Disclosure. When a mobile phone is lost, the contents of the phone might be accessible - especially if the phone is not password protected. A device might contain emails, documents, spreadsheets, etc.
4) Evaluate the Likelihood of Threats	As Steven pointed out earlier, nothing is 100% secure. Whether owing to neglect or to malevolent intent, lapses in security do occur. There is no way to protect against every possible lapse. But because resources are limited, it is important to think about the probability of various kinds of threats, and to use such an estimate to help decide the priority by which the various threats need to be addressed.
5) Define Mitigation Strategies	The end result of this analysis will be a set of strategies, rank-ordered by priority, for mitigating each of the threats. Some suggested mitigation strategies include things like: Password - use passwords for mobile phones, laptops, and other systems which contain sensitive data. Enforce a policy of automating password protection, such as with an inactivity timer. Encryption - protect important data using encryption. Secure authentication is needed, of course, since encryption relies on having a method of distinguishing authorized users from unauthorized users. Remote Wipe - allows a signal to be sent to destroy data on lost or stolen device.

===== Mitigation Strategies for Windows Embedded

While most of the talk applied to all kinds of computing devices, Steven commented on some features which are specific to Windows Embedded operating systems. From the standpoint of security, some have argued that Windows-based desktop PCs are an attractive target because of the large installed base - 95% of desktop PCs run some version of Windows. The thinking goes that a virus that affects one Windows PC can potentially affect all Windows PC. And the large number makes them an attractive target to malware creators.

Unlike Windows-based desktop PCs, Windows Embedded devices are not homogenous; there is, instead, a high degree of customizability that is possible for all Windows Embedded operating systems. If you buy into the "homogenous means more vulnerable" argument, then by extension "customizable means more secure."

In both Windows Embedded CE and in XP Embedded, each platform can be configured with just the set of components which are required for the needs of that platform. A headless industrial controller, for example, does not need the GUI elements that Windows CE provides, and so those components can be omitted. A thin client with no need for local storage can be configured to have no available storage space. These kinds of variations help reduce the risk - but does not completely eliminate - the possibility of having malware targeted at a broad range of embedded platforms.

The reality, however, is that threats exist that target mobile and embedded devices. Like on desktop and server PCs, where there is something of value, someone will attempt to gain control of that value. As such, threats against mobile and embedded devices will continue to grow and evolve. Windows Embedded provides mechanisms for locking down devices, including the following:

Windows Embedded CE supports (but does not require) a trust model, to allow only trusted modules to run on a platform.
Windows XP Embedded has its Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) feature, to allow devices to be deployed with a static, unchangeable operating system image.
Network Firewalls - For network-connected devices, Steven suggested that firewalls are a necessity. Both Windows Embedded CE and Windows XP Embedded suppport software firewalls. For the maximum protection, a hardware firewall is also suggested.

===== Summary

Once upon a time, computer security meant simply the physical security of the hardware. Today, physical security is still important, but is insufficient by itself. Physical security must be supplemented by electronic measures - meaning both hardware and software - to more fully protect computing assets. Steven briefly mentioned something called the "Botnet", to refer to the collection of Internet-connected computers which are "owned", meaning controlled by someone other than their rightful owners. As long as there are assets of value, there will be someone attempting to harvest and use them. Security is not an optional or extra part of the software development process. Your software - and the hardware it runs on - has value, and it adds value; protecting that value is a necessary and crucial part of how you design, develop, and deploy your systems.

Other Resources

Software - Microsoft Threat Analysis & Modeling Tool (click for Download page)

Book - Writing Secure Code, by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc

Book - Threat Modeling, by Frank Swiderski and Window Snyder

The Tangle of Wires

Most technical types do not read the Wall Street Journal, prefering instead to read more technology-oriented magazines. I enjoy reading the WSJ for the great business articles, which are the best bar-none.

The one nod that WSJ gives to technology is in the form of a weekly column written by Walter Mossberg. He gives grandfatherly advice about how to pick a mobile phone, fix problems with hooking up peripherals to computers, and other end-user-oriented advice. Walt seems to me to have an anti-Microsoft bias, so I generally ignore his column.

Quite by accident, though, I happened to read this one. Walt has almost redeemed himself in my eyes. And - especially if we get some STANDARDS that help solve the rats nest of charger wires - I will completely absolve him of all past trespasses. [Note to Walt: this is not a get-out-of-jail card for whatever future articles you may write!]

A brief excerpt of that article appears below. If you want the full story, you'll have to buy the paper. Or better yet, do like I do and subscribe to the online edition.

Respectfully,
Paul Yao

=========================================================

June 29, 2006

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY

By WALTER S. MOSSBERG

It's Time to Reduce
The Tangle of Wires
We Use for Gadgets
June 29, 2006; Page B1

I was interviewing Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony, on stage at The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference a few weeks ago, when domestic guru Martha Stewart rose to ask a question. Dipping into a shopping bag full of charger cords and electrical adapters for the electronic devices she carries -- laptop, cellphone, digital camera, BlackBerry -- Ms. Stewart asked Mr. Stringer why each device requires a different, and incompatible, charger.

"Why can't this thing be this thing?" she asked, holding up two identical-looking, but very different, charger cables. The audience of high-tech executives, identifying with her complaint, applauded.

Mr. Stringer, to his credit, said he, too, sometimes felt he was drowning in cables. He said he had been unable to locate some medication in his briefcase on his flight to the conference because the pills were buried under a rat's nest of cables and adapters for his various Sony gadgets. "So, I'm my own victim," he said. "I think it's a fair question."

(For the complete text, please see the June 29, 2006 edition of the Wall Street Journal)

Event Report: The Microsoft Feature Community Summit

WE-DIG at the Windows Feature Summit

Last week, Microsoft invited the web-master of several community and user group web-sites to Redmond and briefed them on the latest Windows client technologies.

While the focus of the summit was on the desktop side of the Windows Client, nearly all of the web-masters had mobile device interest, too. And to my very pleasant surprise there were even two sites represented that are like WE-DIG in the embedded space: MobiDogs.com and WindowsForDevices.com.

Most of the presentation were around the Digital Media part of the Windows Client like the new Media Player 10, the Windows Media Center Edition, the Portable Media Center and the new MSN Music service on MSN.com. Many of the technologies shown will not have an immediate effect on Windows Embedded or Windows Mobile until their next releases with the exception of the new Media Player 10 that is shipping with some of the new Smartphones (i.e. the AT&T Audivox) and Pocket PCs (i.e. the Dell Media Pocket PC). XP Embedded SP2 is shipping with the Media Player 9 and so did Windows CE 5. Both embedded OS could ship an addon-pack for MP10 if there is enough demand from device manufacturers.

As you will see in upcoming articles from me, my passion area, the Windows Media Center Edition (MCE), had a big focus on the summit and most of the attendees had a MCE installed already. The new version 2005 that had just been released in October is Microsoft's first good shot at the HTPC (Home Theatre PC) market. As usual it took Microsoft three versions to get it right. But if you look how much activity around MCE is on the web or the newsgroups is just ramping up these days, you will find that they are no minute too late. Next year HDTV will be the "consumer driving" technology and MCE2005 has already quite good support for OTA (Over the air) HDTV. Additional, HD gaming has entered the home and titles like Doom3, UT2004, FarCry and the brand new Half-Life2 are titles just demanding to be played on a big-screen TV with 1080i resolution.

What is the embedded story of MCE?

well...as of now ...simply non existent!

If you have been attending the XPE WE-DIG meeting, you know that I am an advocate for adding the MCE components to XPE in order to give device vendors the opportunity to build really cool set-top boxes. MCE 2005 is still a PC and once you start installing broken codec packs your stability goes down. For a good MCE solution to reach mainstream home market, a "closed" or better locked-down set top-box is required. Check out the Denali Edition HDTV Media Center PC from Niveus Media (http://www.niveusmedia.com). This box is currently the highest end MCE you can buy and if you look closely on Niveus' website you will find an interesting Pocket PC remote control solution for the MCE.

The new MCE Extender (MCX)....

The MCE Extender is an optional component for MCE 2005. Its either a standalone set-top box (aha! so for your bed-room you can get a closed-lock-down box, so why not for the living room as well?), or software title for the X-Box in conjunction with the MCE remote and the old DVD-Addon. I ran into a store and bought myself the X-Box MCE Extender to be able to play my videos and DVDs in my kids room. Unfortunately I was pretty disappointed by it because it could not handle the exact three things I am using my MCE for:

HDTV Recorded TV (well, I can accept this. Neither the XBox nor the standalone set-top MCE are powerful enough to decode this huge stream on-the-fly)
DVD (such as family DVDs) stored on the PC. The MCE in the family room can do it just fine, the extender does not show anything
Videos compressed in a different format than WMV. Well, if the WME9 encoder would work flawlessly there might be more content out there in WMV but right now Divx is the first choice for any media encoding and not supporting this format is a big oversight. It is also a bit strange since the family version of the MCE supports Divx without codec pack since version 2005.

Another problem with the MCX is the fact that I have not yet been successful accessing any content on a server. The reason is that each MCX (and you can have up to 8) has its own user account on the main MCE PC. During the installation of the extender Software this account gets created automatically and a unique password is created as well. Without a password, I cannot give permission to that account on any other PC/Server. I have started a thread in the newsgroups on how to make this possible (some extender startup scripting that creates a mapped drive to the other PC ....or what ever we will come up with). Also watch www.thegreenbutton.com and www.microsoftusernetwork.com for updates on this topic.

I am preparing another article about my MCE experiences here at WE-DIG in my crusade to bring the MCE components to XPE.

Summary

All in all it was a great summit and the most important aspect of the summit as the networking between the different web-masters. I am hoping that Microsoft will continue this effort and we can see each other at least once a year in Redmond.

3/2/2005 8:47:04 PM - by Chris Muench

This was good!

What's News, Dec Meeting (restricted access)

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Sygate Security Agent 4.0 for XPE Press Release

Sygate Technologies introduced today version 4.0 of Sygate Security Agent for Windows XP Embedded, expanding its market leadership position by offering the most advanced security solution for Microsoft Windows XP Embedded devices. In addition to enhanced virus protection and anti-application hijacking, other key enhancements increase performance and manageability of the solution. These include a dramatically reduced, single-agent footprint, seamless integration with Microsoft's Target Designer and the availability of a run-time version of the agent. Sygate Security Agent 4.0 for Windows XP Embedded is the second in a series of releases that began in May. Sygate will continue to roll out new releases in an aggressive strategy to protect solutions built on Windows XP Embedded. Sygate Security Agent 4.0 for Windows XP Embedded will be available to OEM vendors, financial institutions, major retailers and other end-user customers deploying Windows XP Embedded devices, by September 30, 2004. Read the whole press release here.