Discover how mastering email communication can boost business efficiency, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure secure, respectful online interactions.
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No Love for 2FA
Everyone has gone to the ATM to grab some cash. Swipe your card – enter your PIN and out comes your cash. We have been doing this for years. Using the ATM is one of the most established uses of the IT security best practice of two-factor authentication (2FA). Lets break that down.
- You present your ATM card to the machine (something you have),
- Next, you enter a secret PIN (something you know).
- Without both of these things (authentication factors), you don’t get your cash.
Two-factor authentication (2FA) provides an extra layer of protection for system access, by asking a user for a second means of identification. 2FA also called multi-factor authentication (MFA), requires at least two authentication factors, including:
A knowledge factor (something only the user knows, such as an ATM PIN);- A possession factor (something only the user has, such as an ATM card);
- An inheritance factor (something the user is a fingerprint or retina pattern).
The most popular forms of 2FA include answers to secret questions, a code sent to your phone, or one-time password-generating tokens.
2FA is a way to mitigate risks associated with unauthorized access, especially in the current COVID-19 era of increased work from home (WFA). And yet, despite these benefits. Computer Economics has posted a report, Two-Factor Authentication Adoption, and Best Practices, which studied the adoption and practice of 2FA. The report says that firms are not using 2FA to the extent they should be to ensure organizational security:
- 18% do not use 2FA;
- 25% are implementing 2FA for the first time;
- 34% practice 2FA formally and consistently.
Why is 2FA needed? Because as followers of the Bach Seat know, username and password pairs as authentication factors suck. CE writes that passwords can be “phished,” stolen, discovered, and cracked in many ways. Humans are as bad at making good passwords and changing them regularly as they are at eating their daily requirement of vegetables.
In the presser Tom Dunlap, director of research for Computer Economics, said,
The big picture is that 2FA is inconvenient, and users just want access … Users often rebel against it because the extra layer is seen as onerous or unnecessary. However … companies face a wide array of security and privacy threats and 2FA can go a long way to protecting a company
Inconvenience isn’t the only issue. As I have chronicled on the Bach Seat each form of two-factor authentication has its own weaknesses. For instance, security questions can often be easily guessed. tokens can be lost and SMS can be hacked.
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Another issue with 2FA is that it is unevenly implemented and there’s no central place to check if a firm has enabled it on its public-facing site. However, a website, Two Factor Auth (2FA) is trying to fill that void. Two Factor Auth (2FA) is a list of websites and whether or not they support 2FA.
Most of the well-known and commonly used sites and services are listed. The site explains what types of 2FA the firm supports. There’s even a Twitter or Facebook link where you can poke them on social media to start using 2FA – if they don’t support 2FA.
Only 1/3 of firms love two-factor authentication to use it well, despite the security benefits it provides to the firm and their customers.
Related article
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2020, 2FA, 800-63B, Computer Economics, COVID-19, MFA, Multi-factor authentication, NIST, Security, WFH, Work from home
Elephants on the Internet
The global COVID-19 lockdown is now taking its toll on endangered wildlife like elephants and rhinos around the globe. Global lockdowns have caused a sharp drop in Africa’s wildlife tourism revenue. Wildlife tourism in Africa is a $169 billion industry. It employs 24.6 million people and is often the only employer in areas where wildlife thrives. The tourism business has helped curb poaching in several ways. First, tourists act as a deterrent to poachers. However, with fewer tourists, there are fewer tourist vehicles in parks. They are no longer a deterrent to poachers.
Africa’s wildlife tourism revenue funds help to sustain wildlife reserves across the continent. At many of the reserves more than half of the budget comes from tourism revenues. Matt Brown, with The Nature Conservancy’s Africa program, told ABC News that tourist fees support rangers. Fees such as bed-night, and conservation fees help pay for the rangers‘ salaries. The fees also pay fuel for airplane patrols, and more – hampering security and opening the game reserves to poachers.
Vulnerable to poaching
Without money to support the rangers — and the highly endangered animals they protect – elephants gorillas and rhinos — are left vulnerable to poachers. The amount of poaching is on the rise because COVID-19 has reduced funding for law enforcement in wildlife areas.
CNBC reports that highly organized illegal poaching threatens to send African wildlife into extinction over the next several decades. Most vulnerable to extinction are the black and white rhinos, lions, and elephants. The black rhino population has plummeted 97.6% since 1960. The lion population is down 43% in the last 21 years, according to the World Wildlife Fund. At least 35,000 African elephants are killed each year. There are only 1,000 mountain gorillas and 2,000 Grevy’s zebras that remain on the continent.
According to reports, six elephants were killed on one June day in Ethiopia’s Mago National Park. That compares to 10 in that nation for all of 2019. Officials suspect that most elephant tusks and finished products are shipped to China and south-east Asian countries. To make matters worst, in 2017 the Trump administration rolled back the ban on hunting elephants. The Trump policy allows elephant remains to be imported into the United States. Conservationists believe that elephants in the wild could be extinct within 10 years due primarily to poaching.
Using IoT to protect elephants
Extinction does not have to be the “new normal.” FierceElectronics reported on a collaboration using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to protect elephants in the wild from extinction by developing a next-generation elephant tracking collar. The collaboration between Phoenix-based electronic components firm Avnet’s developer community Hackster.io, and conservation group Smart Parks which focuses on technology to protect endangered species, are running a design competition called ElephantEdge.
The ElephantEdge challenge asks developers to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that can help humans protect elephants from extinction. ElephantEdge will combine software, machine learning (ML), and hardware to build the next generation elephant collars. The next generation collars will have better battery life, longer range, and accuracy that can be worn by elephants in the wild.
Elephant IoT collars
The elephant IoT collars will have sensors for audio pickup, location, and position as well as low-power, wide-area antennas that provide wireless connectivity. The new collar will use hardware and software from different vendors:
- Bluetooth 5.0, Thread, and Zigbee connectivity via Nordic Semiconductor chips.
- GPS by u-blox.
- Low-power wide-area (LPWA) antennas by Taoglas;
- microSD storage by Western Digital.
- Ultra-low-power LoRaWAN transceiver from Semtech.
- Accelerometer, eCompass, and audio sensors from STMicroelectronics.
The ElephantEdge Challenge requires developers to build machine learning models with Avnet’s Edge Impulse Studio and tracking dashboards with Avnet’s IoTConnect– which will provide useful tracking, health vitals, motion, environmental anomalies, and more. ElephantEdge challenge looks to create machine learning models like:
- Poaching Risk Monitoring: Identify an increased risk for poaching by learning when an elephant is moving into a high-risk area and send real-time notifications to park rangers.
- Human Conflict Monitoring: Prevent conflict between humans and elephants by sensing and alerting when an elephant is heading into an area where farmers live by detecting if any mobile phones or WiFi hotspots are near.
- Elephant Musth Monitoring: Detect and alert when an elephant bull is in musth by using motion and acoustic sensors to discern this state of erratic, loud, and aggressive behavior.
- Elephant Activity Monitoring: Collect data on the general behavior of the elephant, such as when it is drinking, eating, sleeping, etc. by using accelerometer data.
- Communication Monitoring: Listen for vocal communications between elephants via the onboard microphone.
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This is an example of when IoT tech can do good for the world – protect animals like elephants, gorillas, rhinos, lions, and polar bears which cannot protect themselves from extinction.
Nobody is going to get rich doing this work – challenge winners will receive an Apple Watch 3 and a collectible t-shirt as prizes – but the world will be a better place.
By the end of 2020, ten next-generation elephant collars will be produced for Smart Parks to deploy in selected African parks, in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund. Final software and hardware will be documented and shared freely under an open-source license.
Related articles
- Guarding the Giraffe (Michigan Alumnus)
- Photos: Donald Trump’s Sons Awesome At Killing Elephants And Other Wildlife (Gothamist)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2020, Africa, Artificial intelligence, Broadband, COVID-19, ElephantEdge, Elephants, Extinction, Green, Internet of Things, IOT, Machine learning, Open Source
Can Cisco be XaaS-y ?
It’s not news that these are unprecedented times. No one has seen anything like COVID-19 — or the global response to the virus – before. Many people worry about how this situation will evolve and how it will affect economies, careers, and personal bottom lines. The long-term economic fallout after the crisis passes is unknown. It’s possible it will be bad and last a couple of years. It may be shorter. There’s no way to tell.
The tightening of the purse strings has led tech prognosticator IDC to lower its 2020 guess forecast for the Ethernet switch and wireless LAN markets. The research firm expects the WLAN market to grow less than 1% from 2019, while the switch market will shrink 0.7%. The revised numbers represent a 3.7% point drop from IDC’s earlier 2020 forecast for Ethernet switches and a 4.8% point decline for WLAN revenue. In dollar terms, IDC says the switch market will reach $28.5 billion this year while WLAN revenue will be $6.2 billion.
To prove IDC’s point, Cisco (CSCO) just announced its ’20Q4 earnings report and it was not pretty. During the fourth fiscal quarter that ended June 30, the tech giant‘s product revenue fell 13% year over year to $8.83 billion. After the presser, CSCO slid by more than 11% – the worst day since February 2011.
As an answer to declining revenue Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announced layoffs a restructuring plan was underway:
Over the next few quarters, we will be taking out over $1 billion on an annualized basis to reduce our cost structure.
The San Jose, CA-based company Cisco, which employees 75,000 people, worldwide, did not say how many employees would be laid off restructured going forward. Cisco has been laying off employees over the past few quarters. CEO Robbins said on the earnings call, that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the company to “re-examine” its entire portfolio and nothing is off the table.
In theory, Cisco is using the restructuring to accelerate its R&D to focus on delivering everything it can as a service as it transitions to generating more of its revenues from software rather than hardware. In the last quarter, FierceTelecom reports that Cisco now generates half its revenue from software and services.
CRN reports that Cisco‘s infrastructure segment, which includes the core switching and routing businesses as well as wireless and data center products, continued its double-digit decline, falling 16% during the quarter to $6.62 billion. Overall, this segment dropped 10% for the full year.
Revenue was down across all customer and geographic segments. In terms of customer segments, Cisco saw revenue decline in all segments:
Public sector fell by 1%,- Service provider down 5%.
- Enterprise declined 7%,
- Commercial tumbled 23%,
Regional sales also fell:
- EMEA fell by 6%,
- APJC was down 7%, and
- Americas, declined by 12%,
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Besides COVID, other factors have stopped tech spending including technology shifts into 5G cellular networks, 400-gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6. The fact is that Cisco wants to transition the majority of its portfolio to an as-a-service consumption model. Cloud expansion could support Cisco’s business. BUT– Cisco has never been a major player in the cloud. Their go to cloud story proves it
In 2014, Cisco’s first cloud strategy, InterCloud based in OpenStack was abandoned in 2016. Cisco’s next cloud strategy was to become the Switzerland of the cloud. This strategy was to work across multiple public and private cloud environments – to be a neutral player. It focused on: management, security, analytics, and being Cisco – advanced networking. This Cisco Cloud phase has morphed again.
Cisco’s current approach to multi-cloud is network-centric and its centerpiece is an architecture called Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – which formerly only ran on Nexus devices. ACI focuses on policy, management, and operations for applications deployed across cloud environments.
I’m sooo confused about the Cisco cloud story, are you?
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Co-creator of Computer Mouse Passed
William English, who helped build the first computer mouse, has died at the age of 91. Mr. English built the first mouse in 1963, in collaboration with his colleague Doug Engelbart while they were working on at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).
Wood mouse
#/media/File:SRI_Computer_Mouse.jpg "First mouse")
The first version of the mouse was contained in a wood case. The mouse consisted of two potentiometers – rolling wheels at 90-degree angles that would interpret the wheels’ X and Y coordinates – vertical and horizontal positions – of the wheels as they moved across a desktop. Prior to the development of the mouse laborious and error-prone keypunch cards or manually set electronic switches were necessary to control computers. “We were working on text editing – the goal was a device that would be able to select characters and words,” Mr. English told the Computer History Museum in 1999.
Mr. English explained in an interview, that he could remember who decided the call the device “mouse” – or exactly why…
In the first report, we had to call it something. ‘A brown box with buttons’ didn’t work … It had to be a short name. It’s a very obvious short name.
The mother of all demos
D
uring 1968, in what some have described as “the mother of all demos” the mouse made its public debut. The mouse was a part of a demo by Mr. Engelbart, at a computer conference in San Francisco. He used SRI’s connection to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the primary precursor to the Internet to show off a working real-time collaborative computer system known as NLS (oN-Line System). Using NLS, the colleagues publicly demonstrated many of the technologies we take for granted today – video conferencing, multi-person document collaboration, screen-sharing and an early form of hypertext.
Mr. English left SRI in 1971, moving to Xerox’s PARC research center (PARC). At PARC, he continued to develop the features of the NLS into the Alto, including replacing the wheels on the original mouse design with a rolling ball – the design that became familiar to most end users over the next decades.
From here, the story is well known— Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both toured PARC, both saw the Alto, and implemented much of into their own products.
No money for the developers
Neither Mr. English nor Mr. Engelbart were made wealthy by their invention. The mouse was patented but owned by their employer – and the intellectual property rights expired in 1987 before the mouse became one of the most common tech devices on the planet. Speaking to the BBC after Mr. Engelbart’s death, Mr. English said:
The only money Doug ever got from it was a $50,000 license from Xerox when Xerox PARC started using the mouse … Apple never paid any money from it, and it took off from there.
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In 2008 Gartner declared the mouse is an endangered species with less than five years before it joins the ranks of the green screen, punch cards, and other computer technologies now honorably retired to technology museums but the market for Bill English’s computer mouse continues to grow.
Related article
- Razer wants you to know that 10 million computer mice weigh about the same as 8 blue whales (Notebook Check)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2020, ARPANET, Doug Engelbart, Hardware, Mouse, PARC, SRI International, video conference, William English, Xerox
Pizza and the PM
One of the implications of the COVID-19 virus has been that most in-person meetings are getting moved online or canceled as we continue to shelter in place and work from home. As a project manager, I schedule my share of the 11 million meetings that take place every day in the U.S. – all of which are now online thanks to COVID-19. One of the factors I consider when setting a Microsoft (MSFT) Teams or Zoom online meeting is pizza.
That may sound goofy. Pizza can help the PM decided how to shape a meeting. The PMI PMBOK does not venture any suggestions on how many is too many participants for a meeting. My experience says that too many participants over-complicate a meeting and make a video call unwieldy and not enough of the right people prevents decisions from sticking. PMs are looking for a meeting that is just right.
The Bezos rule
One way to get the right number of project meeting members comes from Jeff Bezos. While not a PM – you really can’t argue with his cred’s – richest man in the world – Amazon (AMZN) – second billionaire in space. TargetTech says that Mr. Bezos uses the 2 pizza rule to decide how many attendees should be invited to a meeting.
While, sadly, the 2 pizza rule does not mandate that pizza be present at meetings, it means that every meeting should be small enough that attendees could be fed with two large pizzas. Mr. Bezos is known to have used ‘two pizza’ meetings and small project teams to foster a decentralized, creative working environment when Amazon was a startup.
The article explains that Mr. Bezos’ decision to keep meetings small in order to encourage productivity is backed up by science. The late Harvard researcher J. Richard Hackman devoted nearly 50 years studying team performance and concluded that four to six is the optimal number of members for a project team and no work team should have more than 10 members.
2 pizza rule advantages
According to Professor Hackman, this is because communication problems increase “exponentially as team size increases.” Ironically, the larger the team, the more time will be spent on communication instead of producing work.
The author points out that the 2 pizza rule has several other advantages.
- It helps prevent groupthink. Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs when a large group’s need for consensus overrides the judgment of individual group members.
- It discourages HiPPO, an acronym that stands for the “highest-paid person’s opinion.” HiPPO describes the tendency for lower-paid employees to defer to higher-paid employees when a decision has to be made.
- It cuts down on social loafing. Social loafing occurs where more people on a team means less social pressure, which could lead to less engagement.
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The optimal number of team members is 5. You can feed them with 2 large pizzas and if there is a vote, it will not end up in a tie.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Project Management |
Tags: 2020, Amazon, AMZN, COVID-19, Groupthink, HiPPO, Jeff Bezos, Pizza, PMBOK, PMI, Productivity, Social loafing, Work from home