Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: iot

  • Trust, security and the internet of things

    Trust, security and the internet of things

    I’ve spent the last week in Las Vegas attending the Black Hat and DefCon security conferences. Among much of the discussion about protecting oneself against the misuse of technology, one thing that stood out was the focus on the Internet of Things.

    Listening to some of the discussions and speaking to various people, it’s increasingly clear the consensus is the IoT is effectively unsecurable – the range of devices connected to the internet is just too great to be protected.

    Compounding the problem are the plethora of poorly designed devices where security is, at best, a vague afterthought along with an older generation of equipment that was never intended to be connected to the public facing internet.

    Given many of these devices are going to be critical to business and individual lifestyles, their reliability and quality of the data gathered by them is going to increasingly come into question and the systems that rely upon them are going to need ways to validate the information they receive.

    Perhaps this is where machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to be valuable in watching for anomalies in the information and flagging where problems are happening within networks.

    As those networks become more essential to society, we’re going to have build more  redundancy and robustness into our systems, the key component though may be trust.

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  • Google bets on artificial intelligence

    Google bets on artificial intelligence

    Breaking with the company’s tradition of the Sergi, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai writes this year’s founders letter laying out how the search engine giant is focusing of artificial intelligence and the machine learning.

    Pichai’s view of the world seems to tie in very closely with founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin with him laying out a vision of making the internet and computers accessible to all.

    The challenge for Google is the shift away from personal computers, something that the company is struggling with and a factor that Pichai acknowledges.

    Today’s proliferation of “screens” goes well beyond phones, desktops, and tablets. Already, there are exciting developments as screens extend to your car, like Android Auto, or your wrist, like Android Wear. Virtual reality is also showing incredible promise—Google Cardboard has introduced more than 5 million people to the incredible, immersive and educational possibilities of VR.

    Whether Google can execute on that vision and manages to diversify its revenues away from depending almost exclusively upon web advertising will be what defines Pichai’s time as the company’s CEO. He has a challenging task ahead.

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  • Tracking seals across the Southern Ocean

    Tracking seals across the Southern Ocean

    Tracking environmental changes across the oceans a huge undertaking. To deal with the scale of the task Australian researchers have started equipping seals marine animals with a maritime equivalent of a fitbit to monitor the effects of our changing planet.

    One of the interesting case studies that came across my desk in recent weeks was the IMOS animal tracking program. The Integrated Marine Observing System is a consortium of research institutions lead by the University of Tasmania that collects data for the Australian marine and climate science community and its international collaborators.

    The data is collected from ten different technology platforms including floats, ships, autonomous vehicles such as gliders and deep ocean probes, and by fitting tracking devices onto animals.

    Along with sharks and fish, seals are one of the animals IMOS use to track water conditions, one of the benefits of using seals is they can transmit data to a satellite when they return to the surface to breath and they never get stuck under ice.

    The tags themselves are made by a Scottish company and are designed to gather information on the depth, temperature, salinity of the seas the animals travel in. They are also useful for tracking the behaviour of the animals.

    Along with research into conditions across the vast Southern Ocean, IMOS is also being used to monitor the effects of port development in the mining regions of Western Australia and other areas where environments are undergoing dramatic change.

    Once the data is collected it’s open to use by the research community in their understanding the effects of a warming planet, that open data and the cloud storage it is based upon are critical to the program’s success as there’s little point in collecting the data.

    We have the devices to collect a tremendous amount of data on our environment, whether it’s our personal fitbits, financial records or information on agriculture or wild animals. The challenge though is to use that data effectively.

    In the case of a changing environment, understanding what is happening and the effects could be a matter of our survival. While the idea of a fitbit for seals seems cute, the data they collect could prove critical.

     

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  • Probing the weakest links of the banking system

    Probing the weakest links of the banking system

    The breach of the Bangladeshi banking network has been shocking on a number of levels, not least for the allegations the institutions were using second hand network equipment with no security precautions.

    Fortunately for the Bangladesh financial system the hackers could spell and so only got away with a fraction of what they could have.

    Now there are claims the SWIFT international funds transfer system may have been compromised by the breach, which shows the fragility of global networks and how they are only as strong as the weakest link.

    As the growth of the internet shows, it’s almost impossible to build a totally secure global communications network. As connected devices, intelligent systems and algorithms become integral parts of our lives, trusting information is going to become even more critical.

    The Bangladeshi bank hack was a lucky escape but it is an early warning about securing our networks.

    Update: It appears the hackers were successful in getting malware onto the network according to Reuters but, like their main efforts, were somewhat crude and easily detected. One wonders how many sophisticated bad actors have quietly exploited these weaknesses.

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  • The Internet of Things runs ahead of standards

    The Internet of Things runs ahead of standards

    A week or so ago we reported why LogMeIn’s CEO, Bill Wagner, wasn’t interested in participating in the Internet of Things industry groups as they are too bureaucratic and slow in a fast moving sector.

    Last week I asked John Stewart, Cisco’s Chief Information Security Officer, about how the networking giant thinks about this attitude given Cisco is a key member of a number of IoT standards groups.

    Stewart’s view is nuanced, “the notion of open operability versus standards is where the world needs to be. We’ve been pushing this notion of open interoperablity knowing that standards might take longer but yet you don’t want to create these islands of operational capabilities that need to be stitched together in weird ways. That would add friction to the world.”

    “There’s not much room for non-interoperable systems as they would have to connect with something else,” Stewart added.

    In this, Cisco’s Stewart agrees with Ericsson’s Esmeralda Swartz who believes device diversity will beat vendor’s attempts to lock customers into their IoT platforms.

    While it may be true that industrial and smartcity technologies will be interoperable in order to work within complex systems, it’s highly likely many consumers devices will be locked into proprietary systems so vendors can monetize them.

    For consumers, users and citizens the questions of interoperability and standards are going to be a pressing question as connected devices become common and in some cases unavoidable.

     

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