Blockchain, the Distributed Ledger Technology behind Bitcoin, has attracted interest across many industries including financial services, legal, real estate, digital rights, identity management, healthcare, asset tracking, supply chain management, and the Internet of Things (IoT). A disruptive technology, it has the potential to transform the way many transactions are conducted.

Nearly every industry vertical stands to be transformed by the coming IoT revolution. The IoT technology is creating enormous opportunities for new services as well as more efficient delivery of existing services. The rapid pace at which this technology is evolving is also giving rise to major privacy/security risks for individuals, institutions, and public infrastructure — creating new vulnerabilities and giving rise to not-as-yet-thought-of attack modalities, including those of remotely engineered death and destruction.

This is a web-based video recording of the 3-hour long course webcast live on Oct 22, 2009. It’s aimed at those who need a quick, “technical light” introduction to IPTV.

I really enjoy watching the TV show House. Not for Hugh Laurie’s award-winning sarcasm – which I find formulaic and annoying – but, rather, to watch the diagnostic process unfold. House is truly unique because the real star of the show might turn out to be leishmaniasis or schistosomiasis rather than Brad Pitt or George Clooney. I watch the team meetings and brainstorming with great interest, the whiteboard filling with symptoms, while the team postulates the cause.

The fad these days is make-overs. The first in the trend were fashion make-overs where some hideously unattractive and under dressed person was transformed, through the miracle of modern cosmetology and fashion science, to a hideously over-made up and over-dressed person.

Thursday, June 8th, 2011 was the Internet Society’s World IPv6 Day. Years from now will you remember where you were and what you were doing on this important day? While the events of World IPv6 Day are not etched as deeply into my memory as, say, the day Ronald Reagan was shot or the day…

At its most basic level, IoT just connects simple devices over the Internet or other network which could be private and/or wireless. Common examples include the ‘program-from-anywhere’ thermostats and security systems already in use. At the mid-level, IoT is an enabler of new business and technology models, not just incremental improvement of existing ones. For example, autonomous vehicles will require very high levels of communication among devices in the vehicle (e.g., LIDAR, sensors, cameras, computers) and most likely devices/sensors outside the vehicle (e.g., other vehicles, fixed cameras, servers with detailed maps). At the highest level, the interconnection of devices could lead, over time, to new technologies that will reorganize the society, much as the automobile and the Internet have. One possibility is the “Smart City”, where IoT is used not only in autonomous vehicles, but where all types of transportation are linked to provide optimized people movement. Private self-drive cars, in this scenario, would rarely be needed. This could lead to entirely different land use patterns, for example.