Alasdair Allan

Alasdair Allan is a Scientist, Author, Hacker, Tinkerer, and Journalist who has recently been spending a lot of his time thinking about the Internet of Things, which he thinks is broken.

He is the author of a number of books, and sometimes also stands in front of cameras. You can often find him at conferences talking about interesting things, or deploying sensors to measure them. A couple of years ago he rolled out a mesh network of five hundred sensor motes covering the entire of Moscone West during Google I/O.

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits, and a U.S. Senate hearing. Some years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

He sporadically writes blog posts, or more frequently provides commentary in 140 characters or less. He is a contributing editor for MAKE magazine, and a contributor to the O'Reilly Radar.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.