Bit of a surprise seeing this article today. A little while back I was made aware of some interesting business practices from the entrepreneur Alex Hawkinson[1], probably best known for being the founder and CEO of Physical Graph; later rebranded to “SmartThings” and sold to Samsung.

Being the co-founder and CEO of SmartThings, Alex clearly has an understanding for the IoT space at large. It would make sense then that when CSC ServiceWorks wanted to “modernize” their fleet of washers and dryers that they would pull Alex in to help guide them - providing him with a seat on their board[2]. CSC ServiceWorks is a company that knows how to run laundromats - not a tech company. To avoid having to hire employees and manage the software for a fleet of IoT washers and dryers, CSC ServiceWorks instead contracts a small startup company called BrightAI to develop this IoT solution for them[3@44:30]. Interestingly, Alex is also the founder and CEO of BrightAI[4].

BrightAI CTO, Robert Parker[4], also has a history of dismissing security concerns in IoT, inferring that traditional security practices could be replaced with AI [5@34:30].

The two students here seemed to do everything “right”, from adhering to a disclosure period and even going as far as reporting the issue to the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon would not have needed to go far to report this to the appropriate parties, given that Alex holds an advisory role at the university[1].

The original reason I went down this whole rabbit hole was after someone tipped me off to how Alex structures these business relationships - I won’t go into this now as it isn’t relevant for this, but maybe someday I’ll get all the thoughts together in a consumable format.

As a little bit of an unrelated "fun fact", according to LinkedIn, a handful of the engineers from OceanGate now work for Alex at BrightAI

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alex-hawkinson

[2]: https://www.cscsw.com/press-release/iot-thought-leader-alex-...

[3]: https://staceyoniot.com/podcast-speed-queens-and-matter-drea...

[4]: https://www.bright.ai/company

[5]: https://appliedai.buzzsprout.com/1101152/10528308-building-i...