(NOTE: If you don’t want to ruin what I am about to mention for yourself, don’t research it.  Stated more clearly, watch it first, THEN look it up on Wikipedia/IMDb.)

Primer.  It’s confusing.  It’s technical.  It’s good.

In a development that I think was inevitable, the New York Times published an article about hacking pacemakers from afar. Of course, “afar” in this case means a few inches, but it’s the principle of the matter that counts.

This article is laughable for a number of reasons:

First, we in the medical industry are well-aware of these “vulnerabilities” and have been for years. Older devices didn’t have the processing power to implement a meaningful encryption scheme. When your main processor is an 8-bit microcontroller running at a few hundred kilohertz, and your power budget is low enough to ensure operation from a primary-cell battery for several years, there isn’t a lot of headroom to address an impractical security threat.

Second, the attack requires extreme proximity to be functional. All older implanted devices incorporating telemetry do so using H-field communications; Maxwell tells us that these magnetic fields decay by the cube of the distance, as opposed to the square of the distance for E-fields. The signals are so weak that we had trouble making reliable connections from inches away, and we designed the things. It is possible to make receivers that can pick up the signal from much farther away (meters), but sending commands back to the implanted device still requires extreme proximity due to the design of the implanted receiver. Cutting-edge devices that use E-field telemetry in the MICS band (and thus a range measured in meters instead of centimeters) have much-improved security.

Third, the comments by Boston Scientific that they have “mitigated these risks” are misleading at best. Any sufficiently determined attacker can break any practical system. Plus, their older (and widely used) H-field devices are just as vulnerable as Medtronic’s older H-field devices.

That awkward phase in life has begun.  Not well publicized, it caught me off guard.

I don’t know how to address my friends.

Do I still use the nicknames/monikers/last names from undergrad for my friends from that era?  Do I just use first names for everybody?

For some indeterminate reason, I have always referred to some friends by their first names, so those situations are at least unambiguous.  Unfortunately, a large number of people remain in a problematic zone.

A similar problem is how I address myself, particularly in informal situations.  Do I use just my first name?  Do I use just my last name, which is how I was commonly identified in years past?

Among friends, neither issue is all that important.  Still, I don’t want to appear out of touch, like a middle-aged person still using the slang from his adolescence.

Ed posted a comment on the Bill Gates post that I think deserves more attention than what is usually given to comments; hence this plug. Have a read.

Bill Gates was on campus today, so I went to his speech about “Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Giving Back.”

It was decent. He played a longer cut of his hilarious “last day at Microsoft” video from CES 2008. Better yet, he didn’t use any PowerPoint slides!

The novice speaker will attempt to answer the actual question during audience Q&A. The expert speaker will simply use the question as a starting point to talk about some other topic with which they have greater comfort; a clear answer to the original question is not required. Bill was a professional: he didn’t give one straight answer during the Q&A part of the presentation.