Reality & Fake News

By Alon Cohen: Jan 7, 2018

I did not write any blog posts for a while. Part of it is probably laziness or the fact that if I have nothing to say I just don't say anything. This time is different. Google forced me to write something or they would delete my blog.

Last night I was given a warning shot when they blocked my access to a Google Form that I created, without any explanation. For those who know me in 2015 they completely shut down my Google account for three days and that almost erased my existence from the earth so I am taking that warning shot seriously. This shot was also probably related to a warning about deleting this blog if I don't post a new one.

So here I am.

So what is the reality? In the old days, it was history books, which told us about what transpired in the past and we thought this was the reality back then. History books were written based on printed documents and stories passed. Now we have Internet and TV that are so up-to-date that we tend to believe that this is the reality.

It is clear to everyone that create content that whatever is recorded on the Internet will be the historical documents that will tell the story years to come.

Yet how real that story will be is debatable.

There are researchers that claim that the Bible is Fake News. They ask why there are no Jewish ruminants in Egypt? They claim the Bible is just a collection of stories.

We know from our own life experiences that reality whatever it is, it is different for every observer. One can only assume that back then without Internet and fast way to propagate and record information it is possible that the core of the stories happened but the rest was just embellishments and gap closing of the storyteller.

Well, this is the best they could do back then.

We don't have to go that far, 40 years ago or so there was an article about my Dad in the newspaper. Apparently, someone thought he was getting paid too much for keeping few hundred passengers safe on for 12 hours cross-Atlantic flight (before the days of the computers). Ohh well. However, the inaccuracies in the article about him our family and his work were so profound that I asked my Dad about how real was everything else you read in the newspaper. His answer 40 years ago was “Don't believe anything you read, the only true thing is the date”. We checked the date and on that day even the date on the newspaper was incorrect.

Maybe a thousand years from now, people would debate if that day even existed since there are no Israeli newspapers on that date.

Over the years I also had the opportunity to see articles written about me and again and again, the embellishments were so profound that you could almost miss the reality. You know what is true and what is not when it is about you. Everyone else, however, who kind of knows you, think this is all true. After all, it is in black and white. Apparently, and I have tried it few times, reporters do not like you to see the article before they publish it even if you just promise to do a good fact-checking.

Well, I thought they just don't “like” it but hey, when you invent everything you write there is really nothing to check, it is all fiction.

Moving to the now. It is clear that objectivity does not exist. Even in court, they would change your offense from speeding to improper lane change if you get a nice prosecutor. Or change your speeding from 20 above to 15 above in order to "help" you keep your insurance cost at bay. In NY city they don't even care if you committed any offense or not, you are always guilty. That modified reality is what eventually makes it to an official record.

So fake reality and real reality, are just not related, and the fake is the only thing, which is being recorded or saved. Even if the real reality is recorded it is mostly edited to its fake state and this is what is stored.

For that reason, it is so important that we always try to question what we read or see on TV and the Internet. I mostly like it when one TV stations expose fake video segment by playing back the real segment (but who knows maybe it is just another fake segment that seems real).

As technical people it is important is that we start thinking about how to record reality in a way that is immutable, signed, accessible to anyone (not just Google and other media outlets who can both alter, delete and hide what they don't like) but rather technology that provide access to raw footage that cannot be doctored so that innocent people, can prove innocence, and people who like real over fake can go back and see what actually transpired.

(Liquide metal or Halloween? - Gal & Jen)

Most importantly since AI will be very instrumental in defining our future we need that AI to be built (and trained) based on the real historical data and not base its future decisions and predictions on the Fake News being created every minute in this day and age.

What are your thoughts about this? Let me know.

From VoIP via UC to WebRTC

By: Alon Cohen EVP/CTO Phone.com

I recently wrote an article which got published in CIO Review magazine under the title "From VoIP via UC to WebRTC". The article is about how the telephone that dominated business communications for almost a century changed.

As the technology was advanced, it seems that each generation of new communication products and services was more and more determined to block any chance for real-time synchronous voice communications.

Starting with the answering machine in the late 20th century, then email, and finally, enterprise voicemail and messaging.

The phone call went from universally synchronous to universally asynchronous communication.

To read the full article click here:

Do you prioritize or multitask?

By: Alon Cohen

I keep hearing the word prioritization. We need to prioritize and focus. But do we really? Is taking a sip of coffee while driving considered a change of priority on the road?

Many employees in different organizations find themselves in a situation where they need to perform simultaneous tasks. If you find yourself in this situation you face the usual dilemma of what to do first. Most people in this situation go to their boss and ask the boss to set priorities for each task. The boss prioritizes your tasks, and you are happily working on your top priority task.

You can now focus on your single task and do not need to consider the company or other people in the organization. If someone asks why you are working on A and not B, your ass is covered.

Your boss is happy since you are out of his/her hair, and most importantly, you are working on what’s essential for your boss’s career advancement.

However, contrary to common thinking, you will find that prioritization, although it seems the right thing to do, must be done correctly. Doing this incorrectly will harm the organization rather than help it.

Why is that?

Extra tasks you were asked to perform while you work on your top priority are not getting done and, in many cases, block other people from doing their job until you can provide them with that missing piece they need from you. In essence, you are crippling your company by blocking other resources from being productive.

Now, say a new fancier task for a larger customer comes along. It is now given the highest priority; you drop everything and start working on the new, more lucrative task. All that until the next highest priority task comes along, causing you to drop the task you’re now on. Before you notice, you have spent a whole year starting new tasks but never finishing any of them.

Not only that you cripple others by not performing tasks they need from you, you yourself have become a complete waste of resources for the company by doing all you were asked but not finishing any task you were given.

Our standard prioritization tends to starve all other tasks but the top one. Exclusively working on your top priority task will render many otherwise effective employees that need your input worthless and hence can and will bog down the whole company.

The analogy is that every time you take a picture on your smartphone or update an APP, your music will stop until the smartphone finish’s storing, installing, or updating the picture or APP. In fact, maybe the music will never start until you restart it. Clearly, if your phone behaves that way, it is not as "smart" as you want it to be.

The issue is that the people, who prioritize tasks, need to consider the length or complexity of the interrupting task. They also seldom consider the people dependent on those tasks as a prioritization factor. 

In most cases, the prioritizers see only their own KPIs or global company priority list as the main factor in the prioritization process. As I have shown, operating in the above fashion, in most cases, yields terrible results.

Here is what I propose: 

Start thinking like a Smartphone! Look at the global picture!

While you work on your highest priority task, an interrupting task may come and require your attention. If that interrupting task is relatively short and blocks other resources in the company, you should give that task higher priority. In reality, if you save your current context, perform an organized fast context switch, and work on the interrupting task to enable other resources in the company to be productive, you are doing the correct thing.

Once that interrupting task is done, recall your saved context, switch back to your main task, and work faster to recover lost time.

The company and management can keep all of its priorities the same. You should not consider that as the general complaint of "my priorities keep changing." This mode of operation is called Interrupt Handling. As an analogy, think that when driving your car, you do not stop on every sip you take from your coffee.

For SW developers: any event-driven software or code that handles interrupts works that way. This is why the ability to perform asynchronous API calls (vs. blocking API calls) in any code is critical to achieving higher performance. 

Suppose you consider yourself ambitious and aspire to climb fast in your organization. In that case, you should master the art of Interrupt-Handling and fast Context-Switching, even in cases where one interrupting task happens inside another (recursively). The key is to be able to maintain the integrity of the context of your work at each level, “inception style,” and be able to come back to it and finish the interrupted tasks.

In fact, if you are a programmer working on a big complex project while bugs are discovered in your currently published SAAS (Service) product, and you still think like a single-core, single-threaded, non-real-time operating system with a simple task priority list, there are probably more suitable jobs than programming for you.

After all, if you need help understanding how to handle interrupts correctly, how can you program your APP or SAAS to handle those situations. And if you have already launched your SAAS, how would you be able to handle the ongoing customers’ requests for bug fixes or integrations without being able to handle Interrupts?

As an employee, if you find yourself saying to your boss or co-worker, “I know you need this, but do you want me to drop A and work on B?” or if you say, "I can only help you in two weeks because my first priority is my sprint ticket list," you just defined yourself, for your co-worker who needs your help and tomorrow might be your boss, as an undependable, non-ambitious, non-coperative employee who should be looked over in the next round of promotions.

The good news is that interrupts happen all the time. You might have another chance to redeem yourself. If you see an Interruption coming, do yourself and your company a favor and handle it!

Thoughts?

20 Years of VoIP

By: Alon Cohen EVP/CTO Phone.com - 2015

It is not often that your name is mentioned in the same sentence with the name of a legend like Alexander Graham Bell. Well, since it happened to me this morning, I thought that a thank you is in order.

So, thank you, Rich Tehrani, for the kind words. Rich is the CEO of TMCNET a media organization that not only covered but also propelled the VoIP industry in many ways since it’s inception, by providing a consistent home for all industry members to meet and discuss ways to make the industry better. I think the upcoming panel in ITEXPO with many of the VoIP veterans, that Rich has put together, is going to be an amazing event.

I also want to thank the people that enabled me to stay humble (as Rich wrote) and yet be remembered like my friends Ari Rabban, the CEO &Co-Founder of Phone.com and a VoIP / VocalTec veteran himself, as well as Dan Berninger who keeps telling people about my contribution and the history of VoIP, so thank you Ari & Dan.

And last but not least I want to thank those who made that history possible, Lior Haramaty my friend and VocalTec Co-founder, along with a very talented group of developers, engineers, marketing and business people some of which are Rami Amit, Ofer Shem-Tov, Dror Tirosh, Ofer Kahane, Elad Sion, Daniel Nissan, Elon Ganor, Scott Wharton, that took the core VoIP technology and worked days and nights to deliver the first commercial VoIP product that we launched during Feb 1995 named “Internet Phone” or “iPhone” that really placed VoIP on the map.

Thank you guys, and all the other amazing people who worked at VocalTec at the time. 

As a final note: like all of us who knew Elad, I wish that Elad Sion was here, with us today, to celebrate those 20 years of VoIP history, Elad’s amazing talent in Math and Computer Science could have made our world a better place.

Unified Communications, Benefits & Challenges

By: Alon Cohen EVP/CTO Phone.com

Generally speaking UC is not a very well defined term. The term has lingered for many years; it morphed over the years as telecom technologies that can be unified evolved and became more conducive to unification.

I was recently asked by WatchIT.com to discuss different aspects of UC in order to make it simpler for companies that think about updating or replacing their communication systems, do so. If you have free 30 minutes enjoy the following video.