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| May 15, 2012
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Internet of Things

Internet of ThingsThe Internet of Things is a world where everything can be both analog and digitally approached. It reformulates our relationship with objects – things- as well as the objects themselves.  Any object that carries an RFID tag relates not only to you but also through being read by an RFID reader nearby, to other objects, relations or values in a database. In this world, you are no longer alone, anywhere.

The Machines Are Talking a Lot

The Machines Are Talking a LotCisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011-2016 reports that Internet traffic continues to grow at unprecedented rates. Cisco says that the second leading source of internet traffic will be the Internet of Things devices.

The networking giant says the source will be from machine-to-machine communications, or “M2M.” Brian Bergstein at MIT‘s Technology Review says to think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they’re detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. Cisco says M2M will grow, on average, 86 percent a year, reaching 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes by 2016.

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New ARM chip for Internet of Things

ARM logoARM (ARMH), the semiconductor company whose chip technology powers most modern smartphones, has come up with a chip for the Internet of things (IoT). Om Malik at GigaOM reports that the Cortex-M0+ is an energy-efficient chip, optimized for use in everything from connected lighting to power controls to other home appliances. In a press release, the company explains:

The 32-bit Cortex-M0+ processor … consumes just 9µA/MHz … around one-third of the energy of any 8 or 16-bit processor available today, while delivering much higher performance …[to] enable the creation of smart, low-power microcontrollers to provide … wirelessly connected devices, a concept known as the ‘Internet of Things.’

At GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 event ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky said that “ubiquitous network connectivity, cloud-based services, cheap assembly of electronics, social design, open collaboration tools, and low-volume sales channels create an innovation ecosystem that is the foundation for an Internet of things.”

GigaOM says Freescale and NXP (NXPI), both are major suppliers to the automotive and home automation industries have signed up for the new ARM Internet of Things chip technology. Freescale and NXP have locations in the Farmington Hills, MI area.

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A new chip for the Internet of Things

Atheros logoOm Malik at GigaOm recently noted that Atheros, a division of Qualcomm (QCOM) launched a new very low power consuming Wi-Fi chip. The AR4100P, is focused on the “Internet of Things.” He predicts that soon, there might be Wi-Fi in everything around us, including Samsung’s (005930) Wi-Fi-enabled washing machines, which Malik wrote about earlier.

According to the blog, the new “highly integrated 802.11n single-stream Wi-Fi system-in-package with integrated dual IPv4 IPv6 networking stack” is focused on smart home and building controls and appliances. Atheros and other chip companies such as ARM are betting that the Internet of Things will prove to be a new giant market opportunity.

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The new Atheros chip also includes an IPv6 stack as well as 802.11n to give end-to-end control of your home appliances.

Related articles
  • Marvell chip makes appliances and LED lights ‘smart’ (ces.cnet.com)

The Web Connected Smelly Robot

olly logoThe Internet of Things now has smell-o-vision from Olly. Olly takes services on the Internet and delivers their pings as smell according to his website. Whether it’s a tweet or a like on Instagram, Olly will be sure to let your nose know about it. Mint Foundry, a graduate design lab at Mint Digital dedicated to exploring the potential of web-connected objects developed Olly.

It is possible to change Olly’s smells in an instant. It has a removable section in the back which can be filled with any smell you like. It could be essential oils, a slice of fruit, your partner’s perfume, or even a drop of gin.

Olly is stackable, so if you have more than one, you can assign each one to a different service with a different smell. Connect one to Twitter and another to your calendar. Before you know it, you’ll have a networked Internet smell center claims the website.

Olly is not yet in production, but Mint is glad to offer the source files to anyone who’s got a 3D printer and a nose for adventure.

 

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.

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| February 9, 2012
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Social Network Safety Tips

Social Network Safety TipsIn case you have lived under a rock, social networking sites are very popular. LinkedIn (LNKD) has over 100 million users; 1 billion tweets are posted on Twitter each week and Facebook is approaching 1 billion users. Despite these numbers, they also open users up to more computer viruses and online threats according to a report from Webroot. A Help Net Security article details a few of the threats social network users face. They include:

Social networking malwareBogus e-mails from “friends”: The blog warns that hackers lure users into taking actions they shouldn’t. They do this by making it seem as if a friend within their social network has sent them an in-network e-mail. Only the e-mail is from a hacker who’s hijacked the friend’s account.

Malicious links or bait: This type of scam involves personal messages to users. The messages encourage victims to click on a link. Doing so can do a number of things including sending users to a fake website. There they are prompted to download and install an executable file that turns out to be a virus that infects the user’s PC explains the author.

Identity theftIdentity theft: Social network users who share personal information with their entire network of friends leave themselves vulnerable to hackers. Oversharing details like birth dates, addresses, pets’ names, and other details make it easier for attackers to guess your password and access Yout profile based on the personal information shared reports Help Net Security.

To help increase your PC protection, Webroot advises users to install updatable Internet security software and keep a few simple rules in mind, such as:

Be skeptical – E-mails, friend requests, Web site links, and other items from sources you do not know could be malware.

Social networking privacyUse privacy settings – Social Networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, offer privacy settings that let you control who sees your posts and personal information. Use them to control who access to your page, contact information, etc.

Protect your password – Choose your passwords wisely, incorporate numbers, letters, and special characters, and never use the same password at more than one site.

For those who may need new internet security software, you should select a program that has a multi-level security program to:

  • Block viruses, spyware, spam, Trojans, worms, rootkits, and keyloggers;
  • Make your PC invisible to hackers;
  • Encrypt passwords and remember them for you;
  • Offer multi-layer identity protection;
  • Provide firewall security.
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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.

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| February 2, 2012
Comments Off on Never Check Email First Thing In The Morning

Never Check Email First Thing In The Morning

– Updated 03-18-12 – Science writer David Bradley on his blog ScienceText also recommends, “Avoid social networking and email first thing.” I know it works for me, I walk around and talk to staff before I get tangled up in the work everybody else wants me to do.

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Never Check Email First Thing In The MorningSid Savara a widely regarded personal development trainer published 7 Reasons You Should Never Check Email First Thing In The Morning at his site sidsavara.com.

#1 – Ignorance Is Bliss … fully Productive – When it comes to email, ignorance is bliss. That’s why if you’ve got something important you want to make progress on, the author offers these four words for success:

SPAM computerDon’t check your email – As soon as you get in, work on something important for 30-45 minutes, and only then check your email. If you can stand it, wait even longer. The article suggests that as long as you’re ignorant of everything else that’s going on outside, you can concentrate on what you want to work on.

Any new information you get can cause you to get distracted.

#2 – It’s Not Your Todo List – Mr. Savara you know what is most important for you to work on the first thing in the morning you should go ahead and do it! By checking email, you risk doing what someone else wants you to do. Or more bluntly, when you check your inbox, the emails you get are a to-do list someone else makes for you.

Who is in charge of your time – you, or the person emailing you?

Lack of Direction#3 – It’s An Excuse To Lack Direction – The author says that checking email is a low-priority activity and that you may be checking email first thing in the morning because your to-do list has gotten off track somewhere. He argues that when you don’t have a clear list of priorities, checking email becomes an urgent activity that you do at the expense of your important ones.

#4 – Reaction vs “Proaction” – When you check your email, you end up with more work to do – and because we’re in “check email” mode, we start replying to them at the expense of the task we were just working on. Rather than actively setting an agenda, email forces you to react to items as they come in – regardless of their true priority.

Mr. Savara says he prefers taking proactive actions. Work on the things that are important to you, regardless of whether they’re urgent or simply at the top of your inbox. Stop wasteful actions, and focus on productive actions instead.

social networking#5 – Searching For Excuses Blindly checking email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or any number iTime wasters) is usually just searching for an excuse to not do the work that must be done according to the author. Don’t fall into that trap. Don’t give yourself an out by checking your email for an excuse to fail. He urges, don’t check your email  – acknowledge the task you need to get done and do it.

Cross that bridge – it’s not going away.

#6 – There’s No Set Time Limit – Meetings get a bad rap for being a waste of time – but at least you usually know how long a meeting will last. But do you know how long you’re going to spend on email once you open your inbox, odds are you don’t know – or you’ll underestimate it.

The problem is, checking email only takes a minute but you can get sucked into follow-up activities that result from opening your email, and there’s no way of knowing how much time these will take. You have a set time limit for how many productive hours you have in a day don’t let email suck you in and cause you to devote more time to it than you can afford.

#7 – It Builds Expectation – A lot of people say, “But I have to check my email! People expect a response from me in the morning!” The author believes that there are some requests that need immediate responses, but they’re much less frequent than you might think.

TimeHe argues that people expect a response from you in the morning because you’ve always responded first thing in the morning and you’ve built that expectation. The more often you check email, the more often people will expect you to check it. Just stop checking it first thing in the morning, and people won’t expect it anymore.

Mr. Savara recommends the following email rules:

  • Only check if there is something specific you are looking for. Most important – don’t go fishing around. Check it with a specific plan, a specific email you’re looking for from a specific person.
  • Separate low-value emails via filters (“rules” in outlook) or separate email addresses so you don’t even see them in your inbox when you check
  • Set a time limit. Commit to checking for 5 minutes, just to look for that one piece of information – and have your exit strategy ready. Before you open your inbox, decide what you’ll do if 1) the email is there 2) the email isn’t there 3) the email is incomplete. Don’t be reactionary – proactively decide what action you will take based on the outcomes you expect.
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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.

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| January 10, 2012
Comments Off on Are You on the Pwnedlist?

Are You on the Pwnedlist?

Are You on the Pwnedlist? Pwnedlist.com will tell you if your email has compromised. The site checks emails against a collection of nearly 5 million possibly compromised accounts. Brian Krebs at Krebs on Security reports that a user can enter a username or email address into Pwnedlist.com’s search box, and it will check to see if the information was found in any suspicious public data dumps.

PwnedlistAlen Puzic and Jasiel Spelman, two security researchers from DVLabs, a division of HP/TippingPoint created Pwnedlist.com. Mr. Puzic said. “… I could create a site that would help the everyday user find if they were compromised.”

Pwnedlist.com currently allows users to search through nearly five million emails and usernames found online at sites like Pastebin. The site also often receives large caches of account data that people directly submit to its database. Mr. Puzic told Krebs on Security it is growing at a rate of about 40,000 new compromised accounts each week.

EncryptionThe researcher said information contained in these data donations often makes it simple to learn which organization lost the information. “Usually, somewhere in the dump files there’s a readme.txt file or there’s some type of header made by a hacker who caused the breach, and there’s an advertisement about who did the hack and which company was compromised,” Mr. Puzic in the article. “Other times it’s really obvious because all the emails come from the same domain.”

DVLabs’ Puzic said in the article that Pwnedlist.com doesn’t store the username, email address, and password data itself; instead, it records a cryptographic hash of the information and then discards the plaintext data. According to the blog, a “hit” on any searched email or username only produces a binary “yes” or “no” answer about whether any hashes matching that data were found. It won’t return the associated password, nor does it offer any clues about where the data was leaked from.

Advice from the Pwnedlist developers

If Pwnedlist says your email or user ID is in their database, they offer the following advice:

Shocked woman

  1. “Don’t panic! Just because your email was found in an account dump does not mean it has been compromised.
  2. Immediately change any passwords that might be associated with listed email accounts.
  3. Go through all your accounts and create new passwords for each of them, just in case. “Better safe than sorry.”

The two researchers plan to publish regular updates to their Twitter account (@pwnedlist) when new data dumps are discovered. Longer-term, Mr. Puzic told Krebs that he plans a longitudinal study on password security.

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I have several emails, professional and personal which thankfully Pwnedlist does not have in their databases. Follow password best practices and use an 8 character or longer password with at least one letter, number, and special character. Also, change your passwords regularly.

End-user password best practices:

  1. Passwords should be something you can remember but difficult for others to guess. That means avoid information anyone can pick up from Facebook.
  2. Use at least 8 characters. Some authentication systems will ask for more, but 8 well-chosen characters is usually enough.
  3. Mix letters, numbers, uppercase, lowercase, and even symbols when possible. 1GrdDC@82 is stronger than letter22
  4. Avoid dictionary words. Many brute force attacks are designed to guess them. ”Password” is not a good password.
  5. Use a unique password for each account. Your password at work should be different from your Facebook password.
  6. Do not share your password.
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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.

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| August 4, 2011
Comments Off on 10 Security Reasons to Quit Facebook

10 Security Reasons to Quit Facebook

10 Security Reasons to Quit FacebookJoan Goodchild wrote an article for CSO Online that said Baby Boomers quit Facebook faster than they join based on information from Inside Facebook. The data indicate that after a huge growth in Facebook membership among the over-55 age group that same demographic began to defect in large numbers, just months after signing up. The CSO Online article quotes Scott Wright, a security consultant based in Canada and runs the site streetwise-security-zone.com says Boomers leave Facebook because they have discretion.

10 ways Facebook does not allow discretion

Here are 10 ways that Facebook does not allow for discretion, driving Boomer permanently off of Facebook.

Facebook1. Your Privacy is History Mr. Wright recalled an academic claim that the notion of privacy differs widely among generations. “The 20-something view of privacy is basically that their parents not see what they are doing. That’s about it,” he said. Apparently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg agrees. He claims that openly sharing information with many people is today’s social norm. He went on to say “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.” Many have translated this to mean Facebook doesn’t think its users want much privacy, and the policies of the site show that view. “If you can’t maintain privacy online and off, then you can’t speak freely,” said Bethan Tuttle, an Washington-based independent consultant and privacy advocate. Tuttle says in the article that the massive and quick growth Facebook has experienced, coupled with a lack of privacy-centric leadership has left end-user privacy as casualty.

2. They don’t have your best interests in mind Tom Eston, creator of the website socialmediasecurity.com points out, the business model of Facebook and Twitter, is to make user information as public as possible to generate new ways to make money. Mr. Eston said in the article;

They are really startups if you think about it. They don’t have a true business model … Their philosophy is the more you share, the more information they have to make money with. With that in mind, can you really count on them to protect you?

And do you know just how much information you are sharing that can be used not only by Facebook, but by the application developers that create those fun quizzes and games? Wright says most people don’t. (I wrote about this problem here).

3. Frequent redesigns affect privacy settings Mr. Wright in the CSO Online article said,

Just when people figure out the privacy settings on Facebook, they go and change them again … It always seems like it is being done in everyone’s best interest, but if you really examine it, they have never done anything other than to try to get people to share more information.

Facebook redesigns often make public, and searchable, certain user information that was previously private, and many of the features you can make private are left public unless you go in and adjust your privacy settings. This is no small task, according to Ms. Tuttle, “I am really good online but it took me several tries to get my Facebook privacy settings where I needed them to be.”

Phishing4. Social engineering attacks are getting more targeted Most Facebook users have received messages on their wall asking “Have you seen this video?” or “Is this you in this photo?” By clicking on the link, the user runs the risk of being infected by malware. These are known as social engineering attacks, and they are becoming more sophisticated said Mr. Wright. “They are becoming very targeted. Even seasoned security professionals are falling for them,” he said. The more information you share, coupled with a decrease in privacy, only means it is even easier for cyber criminals to get information about you that can be used to trick you into clicking on a bad link.

5. You can’t trust the ads Most web users think advertisements are harmless, unfortunately, some contain malicious links. One common scenario involves a pop-up from the ad that claims your computer is infected and prompts you to download software to fix it. Instead of helpful software, you end up downloading something nasty. This is now commonly known in the security community as “scareware,” and it’s still a very effective way to snare unsuspecting users.

6. Spam Spam claiming to be from Facebook has increased according to the article. “I think it’s a security concern,” said Mr. Eston. “Mostly because spammers can use that vulnerability to make you think the message is coming from Facebook when it is not. Many users simply wonder “Why is Facebook sending me this?” and instinctively open the message and log in to what turns out to be a fake screen that steals credentials.

7. You don’t really know your friends The author cites a report from security firm Cloudmark which concluded that close to 40 percent of new Facebook profiles are fakes.  Having lots of friends is dangerous because it opens you up to more security risks. Mr. Wright said those who get targeted for hacking are the users who have lots of friends (here is an example). The more friends you have, the more reach a criminal will have when he breaks into your profile and sends out a bad link to everyone.

8. You can’t help yourself from being dumb The attention around the site pleaserobme.com brought to light the safety concerns around social networking. Pleaserobme aggregates the Twitter feeds of people who play Foursquare, a location-sharing application. The problem is while playing the game, many users are also publicly broadcasting that their home is likely unattended and a good “opportunity” (as the site terms it) for thieves. As Ms. Tuttle put it, you need to think about what you are doing and many people are not. You’re putting yourself out there in potentially dangerous ways, particularly if you don’t know all of your “friends” that well.

9. The great unknown CSO Online says there is a lot of speculation about a Facebook IPO and future business strategy. What does this mean for users? Mr. Wright said some fear it means an increase loss of privacy as the social networking site inevitably looks for ways to make money by offering up valuable user information to advertisers and developers. Mr. Wright said,

One of the things I find most interesting is that there are still many people who are scared to death of social networking sites. These are usually the people who don’t see value in them. In the end, they may be the wisest of us all.

Bill Clinton i angry at you for using social media

10. Ex’s, creeps and parents Facebook is making it possible for people to be cyber stalked, even if they aren’t friends anymore, said Mr. Eston. Although the physical and virtual connections are broken, having mutual friends makes it easier for your ex to keep tabs on you. The same goes for any creepy guy or girl you are trying to avoid. Or you may get a friend request from a parent, which Mr. Wright claims many 20-something users consider the worst thing that could ever happen in the history of social networking. “That is a big driver for quitting,” he said. “Once the parent friends some of these people they immediately think ‘I’ve got to get out of this!”

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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.

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