Stephen Lawson
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Worm on the sensor: What happens when IoT data is bad?
Enterprises trying to use the internet of things already face a deluge of data and a dizzying array of ways to analyze it. But what happens if the information is wrong?Bad data is common in IoT, and though it’s hard to get an estimate of how much information streaming in from connected devices can’t be used, a lot of people are thinking about the problem.About 40 percent of all data from the edges of IoT networks is “spurious,” says Harel Kodesh, vice president of GE’s Predix software business and CTO of GE Digital. Much of that data isn’t wrong, just useless: duplicate information that employees accidently uploaded twice, or repetitive messages that idle machines send automatically. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Worm on the sensor: What happens when IoT data is bad?
Enterprises trying to use the internet of things already face a deluge of data and a dizzying array of ways to analyze it. But what happens if the information is wrong?Bad data is common in IoT, and though it’s hard to get an estimate of how much information streaming in from connected devices can’t be used, a lot of people are thinking about the problem.About 40 percent of all data from the edges of IoT networks is “spurious,” says Harel Kodesh, vice president of GE’s Predix software business and CTO of GE Digital. Much of that data isn’t wrong, just useless: duplicate information that employees accidently uploaded twice, or repetitive messages that idle machines send automatically. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Jury rejects Cisco’s damages claim against Arista
Cisco Systems suffered a major defeat in its long legal fight against rival Arista Networks on Wednesday when a federal court jury rejected its demand for damages.The jury in the Northern California district court in San Jose also ruled Arista didn’t infringe a Cisco patent, nor Cisco’s copyright on its user manuals, Arista said in a statement. Other patents had been removed from the case earlier.Cisco sued Arista, an upstart maker of enterprise network gear, for patent and copyright infringement in 2014. It alleged the company had copied Cisco’s products and the CLI (command-line interface) that engineers have long used to configure and manage Cisco switches and routers. Arista was founded by former Cisco executives in 2004.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Jury rejects Cisco’s damages claim against Arista
Cisco Systems suffered a major defeat in its long legal fight against rival Arista Networks on Wednesday when a federal court jury rejected its demand for damages.The jury in the Northern California district court in San Jose also ruled Arista didn’t infringe a Cisco patent, nor Cisco’s copyright on its user manuals, Arista said in a statement. Other patents had been removed from the case earlier.Cisco sued Arista, an upstart maker of enterprise network gear, for patent and copyright infringement in 2014. It alleged the company had copied Cisco’s products and the CLI (command-line interface) that engineers have long used to configure and manage Cisco switches and routers. Arista was founded by former Cisco executives in 2004.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM goes to Trump Tower pledging 25,000 US hires
IBM will hire 25,000 workers in the U.S. over the next four years, the company's CEO said Tuesday on the eve of a meeting between technology industry leaders and President-Elect Donald Trump. The pledge comes just over a month after Trump criticized IBM for moving some jobs out of the country, an allegation IBM denied.Domestic job creation is likely to be a major topic at the meeting. Trump has called for U.S. corporations to keep jobs in the country and last month asked Apple CEO Tim Cook to build iPhones in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google’s taking Brillo into smart homes with Android Things
Android is headed to the internet of things in the form of Android Things, an operating system that grew out of Project Brillo and will be able to get updates directly from Google.With the home IoT industry still emerging from the hobbyist realm to mass market, Android’s traction in the smartphone realm could make it a popular platform for devices like lights, locks, thermostats, and household appliances that consumers want to manage through their phones.On Tuesday, Google announced a developer preview of Android Things, which will be able to run on the Raspberry Pi 3, Intel Edison, and NXP Pico hardware platforms. It will be easy for developers to scale their prototypes up to large production runs using custom versions of those boards, Google says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google’s taking Brillo into smart homes with Android Things
Android is headed to the internet of things in the form of Android Things, an operating system that grew out of Project Brillo and will be able to get updates directly from Google. With the home IoT industry still emerging from the hobbyist realm to mass market, Android’s traction in the smartphone realm could make it a popular platform for devices like lights, locks, thermostats, and household appliances that consumers want to manage through their phones. On Tuesday, Google announced a developer preview of Android Things, which will be able to run on the Raspberry Pi 3, Intel Edison, and NXP Pico hardware platforms. It will be easy for developers to scale their prototypes up to large production runs using custom versions of those boards, Google says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Bluetooth 5 is out: Now will home IoT take off?
Bluetooth is aiming straight for the internet of things as the fifth version of the wireless protocol arrives with twice as much speed for low-power applications. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which gains the most from the new Bluetooth 5 specification, can now go as fast as 2Mbps (bits per second) and typically can cover a whole house or a floor of a building, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said Wednesday. Those features could help to make it the go-to network for smart homes and some enterprise sites. The home IoT field is pretty open right now because most people haven’t started buying things like connected thermostats and door locks, ABI Research analyst Avi Greengart said. Bluetooth starts out with an advantage over its competition because it’s built into most smartphones and tablets, he said. Alternatives like ZigBee and Z-Wave often aren’t.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Bluetooth 5 is out: Now will home IoT take off?
Bluetooth is aiming straight for the internet of things as the fifth version of the wireless protocol arrives with twice as much speed for low-power applications. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which gains the most from the new Bluetooth 5 specification, can now go as fast as 2Mbps (bits per second) and typically can cover a whole house or a floor of a building, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said Wednesday. Those features could help to make it the go-to network for smart homes and some enterprise sites. The home IoT field is pretty open right now because most people haven’t started buying things like connected thermostats and door locks, ABI Research analyst Avi Greengart said. Bluetooth starts out with an advantage over its competition because it’s built into most smartphones and tablets, he said. Alternatives like ZigBee and Z-Wave often aren’t.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco Meraki sees the hotel of the future in its new Wi-Fi gear
The days when hotel Wi-Fi just connected travelers to the Internet are going away. Now it can be part of a system that helps give guests more personalized service – if they don’t mind the hotel tracking their location on the property.The new MR30H access point from Cisco’s Meraki division will work with Bluetooth beacons - small wireless location devices that stores and other businesses are starting to use so they can tell where people are.The benefits, as long as guests are willing to opt in, could include things like having an attendant walk up and offer a drink or a towel as you go out to the pool, thanks to your frequent-guest status, said Pablo Estrada, Meraki’s director of marketing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco Meraki sees the hotel of the future in its new Wi-Fi gear
The days when hotel Wi-Fi just connected travelers to the Internet are going away. Now it can be part of a system that helps give guests more personalized service – if they don’t mind the hotel tracking their location on the property.The new MR30H access point from Cisco’s Meraki division will work with Bluetooth beacons - small wireless location devices that stores and other businesses are starting to use so they can tell where people are.The benefits, as long as guests are willing to opt in, could include things like having an attendant walk up and offer a drink or a towel as you go out to the pool, thanks to your frequent-guest status, said Pablo Estrada, Meraki’s director of marketing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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AT&T means business with a 5G trial at Intel
5G and its multi-gigabit cellular speeds probably won’t hit the market until 2020, but one corporate customer of AT&T is about to taste what it may be like.AT&T is launching its first customer trial of 5G technologies – the first 5G trial for any business user in the U.S., the carrier believes. But this is no average customer that happened to draw a golden ticket. The trial will take place at an Intel facility in Austin, Texas. It will last about a month, use just one cell site, and cover an area with a radius of approximately 300 meters, AT&T said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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NetSuite’s going global under Oracle’s flag
Lashed to the much bigger ship that is Oracle, cloud software provider NetSuite is setting sail for a new market near you.Until now, the 18-year-old company based in San Mateo, California, has focused on English-speaking countries and Japan. As part of Oracle, it plans to localize its products for many more countries while expanding its data-center capacity, sales operations, partner channel and other assets to reach customers in those new areas.Oracle announced plans in July to buy NetSuite for $9.3 billion, and it closed the deal on Nov. 7. On Thursday, executives laid out some of their plans following the takeover.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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2016 will be 1 second longer: Google can help you cope
Like a man eager to show off his new watch, Google is encouraging anyone running IT operations to ask it for the time.The company will let anyone use its NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers, a move to help IT shops cope with the next “leap second,” which will be tacked onto 2016 just after midnight on Dec. 31.Leap seconds help to keep clocks aligned with Earth’s rotation, which can vary due to geologic and even weather conditions. But an extra second can wreak havoc with applications and services that depend on systems being tightly synchronized.Most Internet-connected devices get their time through NTP, an open-source technology that's used all over the world. NTP has its own problems, mainly around funding, but it's long been the standard. Google runs its own NTP servers and uses them to ease its systems through leap seconds, according to Michael Shields, technical lead on the company’s Time Team, in a blog post on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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2016 will be 1 second longer: Google can help you cope
Like a man eager to show off his new watch, Google is encouraging anyone running IT operations to ask it for the time.The company will let anyone use its NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers, a move to help IT shops cope with the next “leap second,” which will be tacked onto 2016 just after midnight on Dec. 31.Leap seconds help to keep clocks aligned with Earth’s rotation, which can vary due to geologic and even weather conditions. But an extra second can wreak havoc with applications and services that depend on systems being tightly synchronized.Most Internet-connected devices get their time through NTP, an open-source technology that's used all over the world. NTP has its own problems, mainly around funding, but it's long been the standard. Google runs its own NTP servers and uses them to ease its systems through leap seconds, according to Michael Shields, technical lead on the company’s Time Team, in a blog post on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How to make home IoT more secure: Assume the worst
Sometimes the truth hurts but you just have to face it. The internet advisory group BITAG lays it on the line for the IoT industry in a new report: No, consumers aren’t going to update the software on their devices.“It is safe to assume that most end users will never take action on their own to update software,” the Broadband Internet Technology Advisory Group said. Its recommendation: Build in mechanisms for automatic, secure updates.That bit of human nature is just one of the harsh realities BITAG acknowledges in the report, which came out on Tuesday. It also points out that some consumer IoT devices ship with weak built-in usernames and passwords like “admin” and “password,” can’t do authentication or encryption, or can easily be taken over by malware that turns them into bots.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How to make home IoT more secure: Assume the worst
Sometimes the truth hurts but you just have to face it. The internet advisory group BITAG lays it on the line for the IoT industry in a new report: No, consumers aren’t going to update the software on their devices.“It is safe to assume that most end users will never take action on their own to update software,” the Broadband Internet Technology Advisory Group said. Its recommendation: Build in mechanisms for automatic, secure updates.That bit of human nature is just one of the harsh realities BITAG acknowledges in the report, which came out on Tuesday. It also points out that some consumer IoT devices ship with weak built-in usernames and passwords like “admin” and “password,” can’t do authentication or encryption, or can easily be taken over by malware that turns them into bots.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Look what GE can do with industrial IoT
Look what GE can do with industrial IoTImage by Stephen LawsonGeneral Electric showcased its industrial internet of things solutions and partnerships this week at its annual Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco this week. The industrial powerhouse is transforming itself into an IoT software and services company focused on improving customers' efficiency, productivity and revenue streams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IoT gear will need better security to win a Z-Wave badge
Tighter security will soon be mandatory for IoT devices that use the popular Z-Wave wireless protocol.Starting next April, the Z-Wave Alliance will require all products to include its S2 (Security 2) framework before they can be certified as Z-Wave compliant. S2 is designed to prevent hackers from breaking into IoT devices that are on Z-Wave networks.Home IoT has recently proved to be a dangerous vector for internet-based attacks, such as the one that corralled thousands of IP cameras and other devices into the so-called Mirai botnet that disrupted internet service last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IoT gear will need better security to win a Z-Wave badge
Tighter security will soon be mandatory for IoT devices that use the popular Z-Wave wireless protocol.Starting next April, the Z-Wave Alliance will require all products to include its S2 (Security 2) framework before they can be certified as Z-Wave compliant. S2 is designed to prevent hackers from breaking into IoT devices that are on Z-Wave networks.Home IoT has recently proved to be a dangerous vector for internet-based attacks, such as the one that corralled thousands of IP cameras and other devices into the so-called Mirai botnet that disrupted internet service last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here