- Tridium Niagara (Wired) — A critical vulnerability discovered in an industrial control system used widely by the military, hospitals and others would allow attackers to remotely control electronic door locks, lighting systems, elevators, electricity and boiler systems, video surveillance cameras, alarms and other critical building facilities, say two security researchers. cf the SANS SCADA conference.
- Santa Fe Institute Course: Introduction to Complexity — 11 week course on understanding complex systems: dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modeling, and networks. (via BoingBoing)
- Terms of Service Changes — a site that tracks changes to terms of service. (via Andy Baio)
- 3D Printing a Replacement Hand for a 5 Year Old Boy (Ars Technica) — the designs are on Thingiverse. For more, see their blog.
ENTRIES TAGGED "Industrial Internet"
Four short links: 7 February 2013
SCADA 0-Day, Complexity Course, ToS Tracking, and Custom Manufacturing Prostheses
Go to Washington, build the industrial Internet
The next class of Presidential Innovation Fellows will include two people who will help define standards for the industrial Internet.
The White House has issued its call for the second round of Presidential Innovation Fellows, and it includes an invitation to spend a 6- to 12-month “tour of duty” in Washington, building the industrial Internet — or, more precisely, helping the National Institute of Standards and Technology find ways to connect proprietary intelligent machines to each other securely…
Hacking robotic arms, predicting flight arrival times, manufacturing in America, tracking Disney customers (industrial Internet links)
The next wave of manufacturing will be highly automated--and American. Also, a hardware hacking collective rehabilitated a pair of cast-off industrial robots.
Flight Quest (GE, powered by Kaggle) — Last November GE, Alaska Airlines, and Kaggle announced the Flight Quest competition, which invites data scientists to build models that can accurately predict when a commercial airline flight touches down and reaches its gate. Since the leaderboard for the competition was activated on December 18, 2012, entrants have already beaten the…
The driverless-car liability question gets ahead of itself
Who will pay damages when a driverless car gets into an accident?
Megan McArdle has taken on the question of how liability might work in the bold new world of driverless cars. Here’s her framing scenario:
Imagine a not-implausible situation: you are driving down a brisk road at 30 mph with a car heading towards you in the other lane at approximately the same speed. A large ball rolls out into the…
The bicycle barometer, SCADA security, the smart city in a disaster (industrial Internet links)
As more data from a sensor-laden world becomes available, we'll need better tools for reducing it to useful, simple, informed prescriptions.
The Bicycle Barometer (@richardjpope) — Richard Pope, a project manager at Gov.uk, built what he calls a barometer for his bike commute: it uses weather and transit data to compute a single value that expresses the relative comfort of a bike commute versus a train commute, and displays it on a dial. It’s a clever way of combining…
Broadening the value of the industrial Internet
Remote monitoring appeals to management, but good applications create value for those being monitored as well.
The industrial Internet makes data available at levels of frequency, accuracy and breadth that managers have never seen before, and the great promise of this data is that it will enable improvements to the big networks from which it flows. Huge systems can be optimized by taking into account the status of every component in real time; failures can…
Four short links: 23 January 2013
Thwarting Facial Recognition Software, Operations Security, Password Cracking SCADA Systems, and Wearables Evolved
- These Glasses Thwart Facial Recognition Software (Slate) — good idea, but don’t forget to put a stone in your shoe to thwart gait recognition too.
- opsec for Hackers (Slideshare) — how boring and unexciting most of not getting caught is.
- DHS Warns Password Cracker Targeting Industrial Networks (Nextgov) — Security consultants recently concluded that there are about 7,200 Internet-facing critical infrastructure devices, many of which use default passwords. Wake me when you stop boggling. Welcome to the Internet of Insecure Things (it’s basically the Internet we already have, but Borat can pwn your hydro dam and your fridge is telling Chinese milspec hackers when you midnight snack).
- The Evolution of Steve Mann’s Apparatus (Beta Knowledge) — wearable computing went from “makes you look like a robot who will never get laid” to “looks like sunglasses and promiscuity is an option”.
Seeing peril — and safety — in a world of connected machines
Industrial malware has captured the imagination of the tech industry, but efforts by security researchers are promising.
I’ve spent the last two days at Digital Bond’s excellent S4 conference, listening to descriptions of dramatic industrial exploits and proposals for stopping them. A couple of years ago Stuxnet captured the imagination of people who foresee a world of interconnected infrastructure brought down by cybercriminals and hostile governments. S4 — which stands for SCADA Security Scientific Symposium…
The software-enabled cars of the near-future (industrial Internet links)
Ford's OpenXC platform opens up real-time drivetrain data.
OpenXC (Ford Motor) — Ford has taken a significant step in turning its cars into platforms for innovative developers. OpenXC goes beyond the Ford Developer Program, which opens up audio and navigation features, and lets developers get their hands on drivetrain and auto-body data via the on-board diagnostic port. Once you’ve built the vehicle interface from…
Defining the industrial Internet
Some broad thoughts on characteristics that define the industrial Internet field.
We’ve been collecting threads on what the industrial Internet means since last fall. More case studies, company profiles and interviews will follow, but here’s how I’m thinking about the framework of the industrial Internet concept. This will undoubtedly continue to evolve as I hear from more people who work in the area and from our brilliant readers.
The crucial…
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