Feeling lost in the maze of modern technology? 
Look no further! Updated version of “Rethinking ComplexITy” delves into the cutting-edge technological advances and highlights the significance of adopting a human-centric approach in business.
Without reading, what factual basis will you rely on to construct your worldview?
The book Rethinking Complexity by Tomislav Milinović provides a thorough and practical exploration of complex systems theory applied to contemporary business practices. The author aims to bridge various disciplines such as behavioral science, evolutionary economics, and agile programming to foster new collaborative approaches, organizational processes, and mindsets necessary for dealing with uncertainty and risk.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses building a stimulating environment in organizations, focusing on creativity, inclusion, purpose, and leadership. The second and third parts delve into crucial areas supporting modern businesses, including IT alignment with business strategy, cloud computing, and blockchain.
Milinović uses historical and philosophical lenses, referencing leaders like Ashoka and Marcus Aurelius, to illustrate timeless leadership principles applicable in modern business contexts. Through these lenses, he underscores the importance of ethical leadership and continuous improvement in navigating complex environments.
The book also covers the limitations of traditional best practices in solving wicked problems, emphasizing the need for innovative “next practices.” It argues for an adaptive, multi-layered approach to problem-solving, which is sensitive to initial conditions and capable of evolving amidst complex, dynamic conditions.
Overall, Rethinking Complexity is insightful for leaders, managers, and professionals seeking to understand and navigate the complexities of modern technological and business environments. It balances theoretical insights with practical applications, providing a robust guide for strategic thinking and organizational adaptation.
In Japan, the concept of “Muda” is a crucial aspect of lean manufacturing, emphasizing the elimination of wasteful actions to enhance efficiency and productivity. Muda specifically refers to wastefulness, encompassing activities that do not add value. This includes overproduction, overprocessing, excess inventory, unnecessary motion, waiting, and defects.
It has its historical background in Japanese culture. For example, in 1886, a Russian novel appeared in Japan with the title “Weeping Flowers and Mourning Willows”. The booklet was thin, 150 pages. The translator, Mori Tai, stated that there was “a lot of excess” in the original, so he shortened the original a bit. That’s how the Japanese got to know Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. They may have taken it a bit too far 😊.
AI models generate new content by discerning patterns and relationships within data, rather than simply storing information like a traditional database. Once training is complete, these models do not retain access to the data they analyzed. However, to address ownership concerns, OpenAI is developing Media Manager, a tool that will enable creators and content owners to identify their works and specify how they want them to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training.
The diversity of applications, programming languages, and innovative approaches faces a threat from the imposition of uniform security measures, often adopted for their simplicity. However, enforcing strict control and limiting the use of certain applications stifles any opportunity for innovative breakthroughs.
The issue lies in the absence of exceptions and a failure to balance the unique contributions of each individual. Roles are predefined, and application usage is restricted. The negotiation process can be quite frustrating when explaining the necessity of an additional application to the security team, who may not fully grasp its significance.
This post was created after two weeks of negotiating with the security team to install Python on my computer. In my book Rethinking ComplexITy, I touched on such a narrow-minded view:
Due to the large variety of programming languages, there is a lot of debate in the programming world about what the best programming language to learn is. But there’s no need to argue about which programming language is better because there are pros and cons. Programming languages are tools, and we choose different tools for different jobs. Mao Zedong once said, “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.”
During an interview with a television station, a journalist asked Mike Tyson if it was true that he got up at 4:00 a.m. to run. He replied, “No, at 4:00 a.m. I’m already running.”
“But you are the world champion; why do all this?” asked the reporter.
Tyson responded, “That’s precisely why. At this time, all my opponents are sleeping and gaining weight. If I learn that one of them is running at 4:00 a.m. too, I will start running at 2 a.m. If someone runs at 2 a.m., I will stop sleeping to train. That’s why I stay on top… It’s my responsibility, not theirs.”
Like Tyson adapting his training times to stay ahead, companies must also evolve and adjust strategies based on market demands to maintain industry leadership. Tyson’s commitment to surpassing the norm reflects how corporate leaders should continuously strive for innovation and preempt challenges to maintain a competitive edge. His readiness to make personal sacrifices, such as losing sleep to train, mirrors the sacrifices business leaders often make—sacrificing personal time or making tough choices for the good of the organization.
But even with this approach, we cannot have any guarantee that we will achieve the goal. Below is an excerpt from my book Rethinking ComplexITy.
Jim Whitehurst (ex-CEO at Red Hat and now ex-President of IBM) emphasized on keynote at a Red Hat Summit:
As the world moves faster and becomes more ambiguous, our ability to predict the future is becoming less and less. In fact, I’ll argue that the human mind is not very good at predicting the future. In short, the world is moving too quickly; plans are outdated before they are even complete. Rather than proscribe activities and try to figure out where the future is, you create the context for individuals to try things, learn from those things and quickly modify and fix problems, moving forward at a different pace.
Quoting former boxing champion Mike Tyson, Whitehurst added, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. In my opinion, aggregated form of this quote is contained in another Tyson quote: “You’re smart too late and old too soon.”
On April 25, 2024, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 in favor of returning Net neutrality principle that internet providers should treat all traffic equally and not throttle or block certain traffic for whatever reasons.
This excerpt is taken from “The War for Net Neutrality,” a chapter from my book Rethinking ComplexITy.
An Internet service provider (ISP) is a company that provides you with access to the Internet, like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Comcast. Content providers include companies like Netflix and Amazon that create and/or distribute videos and programs.
Net neutrality means that ISPs should treat all data that travels over their networks fairly, without intentionally slowing down certain classes of internet traffic, without blocking or replacing content and without charging more for it.
People have been divided over net neutrality for years, as there are pros and cons to both sides. For those people who argue for net neutrality, they say that it enables freedom of expression, promotes innovation and competition, and gives unblocked access, whereas those who oppose net neutrality argue that there is less network innovation, questionable content thrives, and there is no free internet access.
Sometimes an ISP is also a content provider — and that’s one of the big points of contention. Traditional content companies, which include Google and Facebook, are worried that telecom and cable companies that increasingly own news sites and streaming entertainment services will give preferential benefit to their own subsidiaries. As we will see through examples from the past decade, this concern is not without foundation.
The term Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was created in 1934 as part of the Communications Act of 1934 and refers to an independent U.S. government agency that oversees all interstate and international communications. The FCC maintains standards and consistency among types of media and methods of communication while protecting the interests of consumers and businesses. The agency is accountable to U.S. Congress and its actions are monitored closely by investors.
The agency is headed by a chair, who is one of five commissioners appointed by the president. Each commissioner is confirmed by the Senate and serves a five-year term. The FCC and other government agencies are required by law (the Administrative Procedure Act 1946) to provide the public with an opportunity to participate in the rule-making process by establishing an “notice and comment” procedure. The Agency provides notice to the general public, allowing people to comment, and then takes into account the “relevant matter presented” in those public comments before any rules are established, amended or developed.
Following several legal battles that demonstrated the need for the FCC to clarify that Net Neutrality principles- which have long been the de facto standard of the internet were binding commission standards, the FCC took its first steps toward the current Net Neutrality order in 2010 by proposing an Open Internet order with net neutrality rules that prohibited mobile broadband providers from “block[ing] applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services.” The rule applied except when blocking an application could be justified as “reasonable network management.”
These rules follow the basic principles of open internet established in 2005, but they embody specific language that regulates fixed-line broadband more closely than wireless internet. The reason that “wireless carriers are regulated far more loosely” is because by the virtue of their service, these carriers are much more constrained than fixed-line connections. FCC officials claim that technical limitations of wireless internet necessitate looser regulations.
Let’s look at two examples of how ISPs have understood the term “reasonable network management”.
AT&T blocked Apple’s FaceTime video chat application over cellular on iPhones in 2012 and 2013. AT&T said it would only enable FaceTime on cellular if you bought a “Mobile Share data plan.” If you didn’t have the right data plan, you had to use Wi-Fi for FaceTime. AT&T customers have to pay for a feature we can’t or won’t even use to use a feature we want to use.
A coalition of liberal advocacy groups has announced plans to challenge AT&T’s policy of blocking FaceTime video chat over its cellular network. Three of those groups—Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute—are planning to make the knee-jerking official with a formal complaint to the Federal Communications Commission. In September 2012, they accused AT&T of violating the no-blocking rule, saying that the reasonable network management exception shouldn’t apply. “There is no technical reason why one data plan should be able to access FaceTime, and another not,” Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer said at the time.
Of course, AT&T disagreed. There is no “blocking issue” because FaceTime is pre-loaded on iPhones, Senior Executive VP Bob Quinn wrote in November 2012:
With the FaceTime app already pre-loaded on tens of millions of AT&T customers’ iPhones, there was no way for our engineers to effectively model usage, and thus to assess network impact.
Free Press countered that “AT&T is inventing words that are not in the FCC’s rules in a weak attempt to justify its blocking of FaceTime.” The word “pre-loaded” did not appear in the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality order. Finally, AT&T lifted all these limitations on pre-loaded video apps in the second half 2013.
In 2014, T-Mobile introduces new initiative it’s calling Music Freedom, a handful of music services will be blessed by the carrier so that they don’t hit subscribers’ monthly data allowances. The list of Music Freedom-compatible services currently includes Pandora, Rhapsody, iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, Slacker, Spotify, Samsung’s Milk, and Beatport. It’ll also be taking votes from customers through its website and on Twitter for other services to add to the list of exemptions.
T-Mobile has arbitrarily decided that some data traveling through its pipes counts as a restriction, while other data does not. What will prevent T-Mobile from using the data restriction exemption as a punitive measure against content providers who do not have a good relationship with the company? The carrier, naturally, doesn’t feel it’s an issue. “Our position on net neutrality — our regulatory position is that we don’t think this industry needs to be regulated with such a heavy hand,” said T-Mobile’s Senior VP Andrew Sherrard at the time.
In addition to problems with understanding the Open Internet Order by the ISPs, this order was subsequently struck down by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2014 Verizon v. FCC ruling, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated portions of the order that the court determined could only be applied to common carriers. The court’s decision emphasized the FCC’s distinction between information services (broadband providers) and telecommunications services, which are treated as common carriers. Because the FCC had previously chosen not to classify broadband providers as a telecommunications service, the court ruled them exempt from treatment as common carriers.
After that verdict, the agency no longer had official authority to protect an open Internet. The broadband providers hold all the tools necessary to deceive consumers, degrade content, or disfavor the content that they don’t like. The 2010 rules helped to deter such conduct while they were in effect. But, as Verizon frankly told the court at oral argument, except for the 2010 rules, it would be exploring agreements to charge certain content providers for priority service. Indeed, the wireless industry had a well-established record of trying to keep applications within a carrier-controlled “walled garden” in the early days of mobile applications. That specific practice ended when Internet Protocol (IP) created the opportunity to leap the wall. But the Commission has continued to hear concerns about other broadband provider practices involving blocking or degrading third-party applications.
The court nonetheless vacated the no blocking and antidiscrimination provisions of the Order as imposing de facto common carrier status on providers of broadband Internet access service in violation of the Commission’s classification of those services as information services.
The court also left open the possibility of the FCC issuing a statutorily justifiable Net Neutrality rule by reclassifying broadband services as “telecommunications services” under title II of the Communications Act. In response, the FCC published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in May 2014 that fell short of adopting the reclassification of broadband services as “telecommunication services” but explicitly left open the possibility of doing so in the final rule.
In November 2014, then-President Obama called on the FCC to “reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Communications Act.” After a robust public comment period that generated millions of public comments, the FCC released a final Report and Order in February 2015 that established strong net neutrality protections. In a 3-2 vote, the FCC classified ISPs as utilities or “common carriers” like the traditional landline phone system. The reclassification of broadband into a service akin to telephones and electricity provided the legal foundation for net neutrality rules, including prohibitions on site and app blocking, speed throttling, and paid fast lanes.
The FCC’s Net Neutrality rulemaking process was a true success in two respects.
First, the agency received almost 4 million comments on the proposed rule through the public comment process (mostly in support of FCC’s adoption of Net Neutrality). This is the largest number of comments ever submitted in a federal rulemaking process-something that should be both celebrated and emulated. The notice and comment rulemaking process are predicated upon “democratizing” the way in which government agencies craft rules by encouraging broad and diverse participation from the public through submission of written comments. Done well, notice-and-comment provides a crucial way for government agencies to hear from the public and offsets the influence of powerful industries with developed channels of access to the government.
Second, the Net Neutrality rulemaking constituted an example of a government agency taking feedback from the public seriously, as is their legal requirement under the Administrative Procedure Act, and when appropriate making changes to their rules to respond to that feedback.
It is the kind of responsiveness that should be celebrated by those who worry that public comments are ignored, and notice-and-comment is meaningless because the outcome of the rulemaking is already pre-determined.
The FCC Order concludes that the retail broadband Internet access service available today is best viewed as separately identifiable offers of (1) a broadband Internet access service (BIAS) that is a telecommunications service (including assorted functions and capabilities used for the management and control of that telecommunication service) and (2) various “add-on” applications, content, and services that generally are information services. This finding more than reasonably interprets the ambiguous terms in the Communications Act, best reflects the factual record in this proceeding, and will most effectively permit the implementation of sound policy consistent with statutory objectives, including the adoption of effective open Internet protections.
The FCC make clear that this is response to the Verizon court’s conclusion that broadband providers “furnish a service to edge providers” (and that this service was being treated as common carriage per se). As discussed further below, we make clear that broadband Internet access service encompasses this service to edge providers. Broadband providers sell retail customers the ability to go anywhere (lawful) on the Internet. Their representation that they will transport and deliver traffic to and from all or substantially all Internet endpoints includes the promise to transmit traffic to and from those Internet endpoints back to the user.
The Order establishes that ISPs cannot “unreasonably interfere with or unreasonably disadvantage” the ability of consumers to select, access, and use the lawful content, applications, services, or devices of their choosing; or of edge providers to make lawful content, applications, services, or devices available to consumers. While the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet rules had limited applicability to mobile broadband, the new rules protects consumers no matter how they access the Internet, whether on a desktop computer or a mobile device and grounds open Internet rules in multiple sources of legal authority—including both section 706 of the Telecommunications Act and Title II of the Communications Act.
Viewed properly, the Net Neutrality rule is fundamentally a pro-market and pro-business rule. It removes not only the government control, but also the corporate goliath ISP gatekeepers that, in the absence of the rule, could stifle market competition and consumer freedom and liberty (as can be seen from the two examples mentioned earlier). The opposition to the rule came from a powerful vested interest, the broadband ISPs, but one year’s time since the Order was issued has already dispelled their claims that the rule would impose catastrophic costs on them. In fact, analysts have found that the “Profits and profit margins are at historic, monopoly like levels, and they continue to grow as ISPs exercise market power in an increasingly uncompetitive market.” Broadband ISPs are increasing their capital investment as compared to the period before the rule.
Another battle was over, but the war continued. In January 2017, newly inaugurated president Donald Trump designated Ajit Pai, a former lawyer for Verizon, as FCC chairman. Ajit Pai has aggressively moved to roll back consumer protection regulations created during the Obama presidency. He argued that his predecessor, Tom Wheeler, had rammed through a series of actions beyond the agency’s legal authority and disagreed with the move two years ago to declare broadband a utility. Pai has criticized the current net neutrality regulations as heavy-handed and an overreach of the FCC’s power that has stifled ISP investment in network expansion and faster broadband speeds. Released from the current regulations with more business-friendly rules, ISPs could more freely experiment with new services for customers and expand their networks, says Pai.
From April 27 to Aug. 30, 2017, the FCC allowed members of the public to formally submit comments on the subject. In total, 21.7 million comments were submitted electronically and posted online for review. On December 14, 2017, under a new presidential administration, the FCC reversed its own rules on net neutrality, essentially revoking common carrier status as a requirement for ISPs. The FCC ended utility style regulation of the Internet in favor of the market-based policies necessary to preserve the future of Internet freedom and reversed this misguided and legally flawed approach and restore broadband Internet access service to its Title I information service classification. The FCC concludes that a return to Title I classification will facilitate critical broadband investment and innovation by removing regulatory uncertainty and lowering compliance costs. Furthermore, the agency declines to adopt a ban on paid prioritization and expects that eliminating the ban on paid prioritization will help spur innovation and experimentation, encourage network investment, and better allocate the costs of infrastructure, likely benefiting consumers and competition. The FCC also finds the no-blocking and no-throttling rules are unnecessary to prevent the harms that they were intended to thwart. We find that the transparency rule we adopt today—coupled with our enforcement authority and with FTC enforcement of ISP commitments, antitrust law, consumer expectations, and ISP incentives—will be sufficient to prevent these harms, particularly given the consensus against blocking practices, as reflected in the scarcity of actual cases of such blocking. Ajit Pai pointed out that there are cases today and many more that will develop in time in which the option of a paid prioritization offering would be a necessity based on either technology needs or consumer welfare and he sees great value in the prioritization of telemedicine and autonomous car technology over cat videos.
I would like to quote a part of dissecting statement of commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel because I think that part touches upon the core of the problem:
Net neutrality has deep origins in communications law and history. In the era when communications meant telephony, every call went through, and your phone company could not cut off your call or edit the content of your conversations. This guiding principle of nondiscrimination meant you were in control of the connections you made.
As a result of today’s misguided action, our broadband providers will get extraordinary new power from this agency. They will have the power to block websites, throttle services, and censor online content. They will have the right to discriminate and favor the internet traffic of those companies with whom they have pay-for-play arrangements and the right to consign all others to a slow and bumpy road. Now our broadband providers will tell you they will never do these things. They say just trust us. But know this: they have the technical ability and business incentive to discriminate and manipulate your internet traffic. And now this agency gives them the legal green light to go ahead and do so. This is not good. Not good for consumers. Not good for businesses. Not good for anyone who connects and creates online. Not good for the democratizing force that depends on openness to thrive. Moreover, it is not good for American leadership on the global stage of our new and complex digital world.
Many state attorneys general filed suit against the FCC decision. The US Senate voted 52-47 to approve a resolution to invalidate the decision, however the legislation fell short by 46 votes in the US House of Representatives. The FCC’s removal of net neutrality rules was officially implemented on June 11, 2018.
The stakes were high, and the public comment period attracted a staggering 22 million submissions. In a press release on May 6th, 2021, the New York Attorney General’s office multi-year investigation uncovered the fact that 18 million out of the more than 22 million comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about 2017’s rollback of net neutrality to repeal its 2017 rules were fake. The NY Attorney General Letitia James outlined that on top of the 18 million fake comments sent to the FCC, 500,000 letters were sent to Congress, and that the U.S.’s largest broadband companies led and funded the fraudulent campaign that generated millions of fake comments. In doing so, these broadband companies managed to get 8.5 million fake comments that impersonated real citizens submitted to the FCC. On top of that, just one 19-year old student created and submitted 7.7 million comments by using an automated system, while the rest were submitted by unknown accounts.
“Americans voices are being drowned out by masses of fake comments and messages being submitted to the government to sway decision-making,” said NY Attorney General Letitia James. “Instead of actually looking for real responses from the American people, marketing companies are luring vulnerable individuals to their websites with freebies, co-opting their identities, and fabricating responses that giant corporations are then using to influence the polices and laws that govern our lives.”
So, the fact that 80 percent of the 22 million submissions to the FCC turned out to be fake is a huge blow to the entire process around net neutrality in the U.S.
For critics who claim that the comment process has been irreparably tainted by the large number of fake comments, Pai says that “this view reflects a lack of understanding about the Administrative Procedure Act. The Administrative Procedure Act requires that the agency consider and respond to all significant comments in the record. Millions of comments that simply say something along the lines of “keep net neutrality” or other colorful language we can’t say in public – whether they are submitted by real people, bots, or honey badgers – have no impact on the decision.“
In Sep. 2018, California passed a net neutrality law and was immediately sued by the Trump Administration Justice Department. On Feb. 8, 2021, the Biden administration Justice Department withdrew the lawsuit against California, and FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel indicated support for reinstating net neutrality rules.
According to the National Law Review, as of Mar. 1, 2021, “seven states have adopted net neutrality laws (California, Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington), and several other states have introduced some form of net neutrality legislation in the 2021 legislative session (among them Connecticut, Kentucky, Missouri, New York, and South Carolina).”
On May 24, 2021, Brendan Carr, the senior Republican FCC commissioner, wrote an article for Newsweek in which he removes the dust from the old claim from 2005 by former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre who complained that some people want AT&T to act as a “dumb pipe that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. […] There’s more and more content, and you need more and more bandwidth, and somebody’s got to build it. If you build it, you have to make a return on that. Nobody gets a free ride, that’s all.”
The commissioner explained that the online streaming services provided by just five companies—Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Microsoft—account for a whopping 75 percent of all traffic on rural broadband networks. The same study shows that 77-94 percent of total network costs are related to adding capacity or otherwise supporting the delivery of those streaming services. Ordinary Americans, not Big Tech, have been footing the bill for those costs. Many consumers are unaware that the federal government collects roughly $9 billion a year through a tax on their monthly bills for traditional telephone service—both wireless and wireline. The FCC then uses that pot of money, known as the Universal Service Fund, to support internet builds in rural areas and on other efforts to close the digital divide. Yet Big Tech derives tremendous value from these high-speed networks. Indeed, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google generated nearly $1 trillion in revenues in 2020 alone—an almost 20 percent increase over the prior year. It would take just 0.009 percent of those revenues to eliminate entirely the unsustainable 30 percent tax that currently hits consumers on their monthly bills.
As of June 2021, the commission remained deadlocked, following the resignation of Ajit Pai, who served as chair under then-President Donald Trump. The FCC currently has a 2-2 split of the Republican and Democratic commissioners. A Biden appointee could give Democrats the extra vote as they look to reinstate net neutrality regulations repealed in 2017 under the Trump administration.
Gigi Sohn was nominated by the White House in October 2021, and since then has been in Senate confirmation purgatory for the 16 months thanks to blanket opposition from the Republicans and key Democratic Senators like Mark Kelly (AZ), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), and Joe Manchin (WV), who kept her from getting the 51 votes needed in a Senate confirmation vote.
Sohn found herself in an unprecedented fight that included three Senate confirmation hearings, a series of ads, op-eds and a billboard criticizing Sohn as “extreme” and “partisan” amid dissection of her social media posts. In the end, Sohn drew the line by announcing her decision to withdraw, pointing directly at the telecom and media industry smear campaign as a major factor:
It is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries, with assistance from unlimited dark money, get to choose their regulators. And with the help of their friends in the Senate, the powerful cable and media companies have done just that.
It is obvious that the war continues with relentless ferocity. On September 25, 2023, the agency just got its third Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez. Just one day later, FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel announced plans to restore the Obama-era policy, saying that the Trump-era repeal of net neutrality “put the agency on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the public. It was not good then, but it makes even less sense now.”
In the meantime, Europe is fighting its own battle. On November 29, 2021, the CEOs of leading European telecommunications companies (A1 Telekom Austria Group, Vivacom, Proximus Group, Telenor Group, KPN, Altice Portugal, Deutsche Telekom, BT Group, Telia Company, Telefónica, Vodafone Group, Orange Group and Swisscom ) in a joint letter call on EU policy makers to rebalance the relationship between the global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem.
They wrote:
Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model—which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation—can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to network costs.
In September of 2022, Commissioner Thierry Breton announced that his office would explore a proposal to make large Internet firms pay their “fair share” of telecommunications infrastructure costs. Several member states, including France and Spain, have endorsed the idea.
This is innovation.
Hyundai launched the world’s first application of Nano Cooling Film, a revolutionary vehicle window tint that offers a significant improvement in interior cooling performance compared to conventional tint films.
Nano Cooling Film reduced the temperature near the driver’s head by up to 10.98°C compared to conventional tint film, and up to 12.33°C compared to the same vehicle without window tinting.
In contrast, for BMW an innovation is how to charge the BMW adaptive LED headlights in their ConnectedDrive Store. To clarify, you already have it in the vehicle, but it is activated when you pay.
The following stories underscore the intricate balancing act of leveraging intelligence effectively to gain a tactical advantage, all while safeguarding the origins and methodologies of that intelligence. This strategic preservation is vital to avoid tipping off opponents and ensuring enduring advantages.
Say the US decided to attack Iran with a new stealth jet it hadn’t used before that evaded all radars? The attack was a success. Was it strategic?
It may not have been. But why? Because now your adversaries know your capabilities and it’s a matter of time before they find ways around them. If this attack could be done with conventional weapons, it’s better to keep your top weapons until you need them. Using them creates a disadvantage.
The scale of Iran’s attack, the diversity of locations it targeted, and weapons it used, forced Israel to uncover the majority of anti-missile technologies the US and it have across the region. The Iranians did not use any weapons Israel didn’t know it had, it just used a lot of them. But the Iranians likely now have almost a full map of what Israel’s missile defence system looks like, as well as where in Jordan and the Gulf the US has installations. It also knows how long it takes to prepare them; how Israeli society responds…etc.
This is a huge strategic cost to Israel. Crucially, Iran can now reverse engineer all the intel gathered from this attack to make a much more deadly one credible. While the US and Israel will have to re-design away from their current model which has been compromised. Its success in stopping this choreographed attack is thus still very costly.
Anyone assuming this is just theatrics is missing the context of how militaries assess strategy versus tactics. Theatre is an important factor but gathering intelligence of the “enemy’s” posture is more valuable, especially if one believes they’re in a long war of attrition. The Israel government prefer a quick hot and urgent war where they can pull in America. The Iranians prefer a longer war of attrition that bleeds Israel of its deterrence capabilities and makes it an ally for Arabs and the US that’s too costly to have.
The importance of not interfering with all messages at Bletchley Park during the World War II Enigma codebreaking was crucial to maintain secrecy and gather intelligence effectively. By avoiding interference, the British ensured that the Germans remained unaware of the code being broken, allowing them to continue deciphering messages and gaining valuable insights without alerting the enemy. This strategy helped prevent suspicion and enabled the Allies to exploit the decrypted information strategically, safeguarding the success of the codebreaking efforts during World War II.
Sometimes British field commanders — the handful admitted to the closely guarded secret — read enemy signals before their intended recipients did. In the Atlantic, they were able to find out U-boat positions, and to divert convoys of ships away from them. In the Western Desert Campaign battle of Alam el Halfa, Montgomery knew exactly where the German deployments would be, and positioned his own tanks accordingly.
As soon as the British cracked Enigma, they realized that this was exactly their problem. If they acted on everything that they learned based on reading Enigma, the Germans would soon suspect that the code was broken and change it. But what was the use of breaking the code if they couldn’t act on the intel they discovered?
So the British put together a dedicated task force for solving this problem: how do you strike the perfect balance, use the Enigma intel to gain maximum advantage, whilst never beating the Germans consistently enough or seeming to ‘get lucky’ enough that the Germans would suspect that their code was compromised.
They did this in a variety of ways. If, for example, they learned from Enigma intercepts about a convoy of ships that they really wanted to hit, they would arrange for a scout plane to spot the convoy so that the convoy also spotted the scout plane. Then they could hit the convoy and the Germans would assume they ran afoul of an ordinary patrol.
In early 1943, Dönitz was worried that the Allies were reading Enigma. Germany’s own cryptanalysis of Allied communications showed surprising accuracy in its estimates of wolfpack sizes. It was concluded, however, that Allied direction finding was the source.
The British became aware based on Enigma intercepts that their own merchant marine code had been broken. This was at a point in the war when the British sending Lend-Lease material north, around the coast of Norway to Russia was crucial to keeping the Eastern front supplied, and it was precisely that shipping code that the Germans cracked.
So obviously the British needed to change their merchant marine code ASAP, but there was no way that they could have known that it had been broken other than the Enigma intercepts. What to do?
They formulated a cunning plan. MI6 agents pretended to be the crew of a merchant marine ship sailing on the northern route to Russia. Off the coast of Norway they created just the right kind of disaster in the engine room of the ship. They abandoned the ship to sink, took lifeboats to the Norwegian coast and then escaped overland to neutral Sweden.
But the boat didn’t sink! The tide brought it in, and it was beached intact. Norway was occupied by the Nazis, so the wreckage of the ship fell immediately into their hands. At the same time that the British lost a copy of the codebook forcing them to write a new merchant marine code. Bloody brilliant.
Early in his pro tennis career, Andre Agassi couldn’t beat a player named Boris Becker. Agassi particularly struggled with Becker’s serve. “His serve was something the game had never seen before,” Agassi explained.
Studying film of Becker, “I started to realize,” Agassi said, “He had this weird tick with his tongue. I’m not kidding. He would go into his rocking motion, and just as he was about to toss the ball, he would stick his tongue out. It would either be right in the middle of his lip or to the left corner of his lip.”
If in the middle of his lip, Becker would serve the ball up the middle. If to the side, he would serve the ball to the side.
After he learned the way Becker revealed himself with a tongue tick, Agassi said, “The hardest part wasn’t returning his serve. The hardest part was not letting him know that I knew this. I had to resist the temptation of reading his serve for the majority of the match, and instead, choose the moments when I was going to use that information on a given point to execute a shot that would allow me to break the match open.”
Agassi won 9 out of the next 11 matches against Becker. After Becker retired in 1999, over a beer, Agassi said to Becker, “By the way, did you know you used to do this with your serve?” Agassi said, “He about fell off the chair. And then he said, ‘I used to go home all the time and tell my wife, it’s like he reads my mind! Little did I know you were just reading my tongue.’”
On 14th June 2023, a team at IBM published results from an experiment where they calculated ⟨O⟩ on a real quantum device, configured to approximate the behavior of a system known as the Ising model. This is a model that is used by physicists to study the behavior of ferromagnetic materials. The team claimed that this computation would be too difficult to perform on a classical computer to an acceptable accuracy, using the leading approximation techniques, and hence that it showed their quantum device could be useful.
This paper (page 199) is a response to a challenge set by Twitter user Dulwich Quantum to simulate IBM’s experiment using a Commodore 64.
The Commodore 64 is a computer first manufactured in 1982. It is based on the MOS Technology 6510 processor, which is a variant on the extremely popular MOS 6502 processor, introduced in 1975. The 6502 is an 8-bit processor with a 16-bit memory bus, that was widely used in early 8-bit home computers (e.g the Apple II, C64, BBC Micro) and video game consoles (e.g the NES, various Atari machines). In fact, modern variants are still in production. The Commodore 64 runs at 1 MHz and saturates the 16-bit memory bus with 64kB of RAM, some of which is also memory-mapped to various peripherals.
The author(s) rate how good of a quantum qomputer the Qommodore 64 is- first objectively: it is faster than the quantum device datapoint-for-datapoint (although whether this will stay this way is debatable), it is much more energy efficient (superconducting quantum computers need to be cooled by an extremely power-hungry dilution refrigerator), and it is decently accurate on this problem (although it misses some fine structure). On the other hand, it probably won’t work on almost any other problem (but then again, neither do quantum computers right now).
The 2024 Index is Stanford’s most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI’s influence on society has never been more pronounced.
Tmilinovic's Blog 