What is Industry 4.0?

At its heart, Industry 4.0 is digital transformation applied to manufacturing – bringing with it all the change, opportunities and challenges that represents.Industry 4.0 connects the supply chain and the ERP system directly to the production line to form an integrated, automated and, potentially, autonomous manufacturing processes that make better use of capital, raw materials, and human resources.At the moment, Industry 4.0 is a bit of a fuzzy concept because it goes well beyond just connecting machines to other machines or automating another step in a production line with a robot, said Ned Hill, an economist at The Ohio State University who focuses on manufacturing and economic development.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Internet Shutdowns Are Not a Solution to Africa’s Challenges

IDG Contributor Network: Bank battle for innovation and market share needs huge live data crunching

When there isn’t much else to choose between brands, customer service becomes an important differentiation, and in financial services the situation has become acute. As regulators continue to make it easier for customers to switch providers, financial institutions must spend as much time keeping existing account holders happy as they do wooing new ones. Issuing apps and making it easier for customers to bank and source products online is a good start, but account holders will soon notice and defect if such moves are really a thinly disguised attempt to reduce costs and close branches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Bank battle for innovation and market share needs huge live data crunching

When there isn’t much else to choose between brands, customer service becomes an important differentiation, and in financial services the situation has become acute. As regulators continue to make it easier for customers to switch providers, financial institutions must spend as much time keeping existing account holders happy as they do wooing new ones. Issuing apps and making it easier for customers to bank and source products online is a good start, but account holders will soon notice and defect if such moves are really a thinly disguised attempt to reduce costs and close branches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Tolerance

The idea of tolerance is that reasonable people can disagree. You still believe you are right, and the other person is wrong, but you accept that they are nonetheless a reasonable person with good intentions, and that they don’t need to be punished for holding the wrong opinion. —Errata Security

The post Worth Reading: Tolerance appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Cumulus co-founder featured on Packet Pushers!

A couple weeks ago, our co-founder, JR Rivers, sat down with the guys at Packet Pushers, in order to discuss how to build a better network with web-scale networking. We were so excited to be featured, that we decided to use this opportunity to launch a giveaway!

The podcast goes into detail covering the benefits of web-scale networking, but we want to hear your thoughts on it. We’ve put together a quick survey to hear what you think of web-scale principles and how you may have incorporated them into your organization. Simply fill out the survey to enter for a chance to win a free Apple Watch!

The podcast covers:

• The emergence of web-scale IT
• The traditional way of doing things and how it compares
• Free Range Routing
• Open networking and Linux
• How organizations can get to SDN
• The role of NetDevOps
• The how and why of automation

Sound interesting? Grab your headphones and take a listen! You can hear the podcast now by visiting PacketPushers.com

And don’t forget to enter to win an Apple Watch!

The post Cumulus co-founder featured on Packet Pushers! appeared first on Cumulus Networks Blog.

Dealing with NIST’s about-face on password complexity

NIST's new guidelines for password complexity have reversed many of rules on what defines a good password

Dealing with NIST’s about-face on password complexity

In the last few years, we've been seeing some significant changes in the suggestions that security experts are making for password security. While previous guidance increasingly pushed complexity in terms of password length, the mix of characters used, controls over password reuse, and forced periodic changes, specialists have been questioning whether making passwords complex wasn't actually working against security concerns rather than promoting them.Security specialists have also argued that forcing complexity down users' throats has led to them writing passwords down or forgetting them and having to get them reset. They argued that replacing a password character with a digit or an uppercase character might make a password look complicated, but does not actually make it any less vulnerable to compromise. In fact, when users are forced to include a variety of characters in their passwords, they generally do so in very predictable ways. Instead of “password”, they might use “Passw0rd” or even “P4ssw0rd!”, but the variations don't make the passwords significantly less guessable. People are just not very good at generating anything that's truly random.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T’s purchase of Vyatta Software bolsters its virtualization push

Last week, AT&T agreed to buy Vyatta Software’s network operating system, distributed services platform, software still under development, existing software licenses, and related intellectual property and other assets—including the vRouter product line. It will also acqui-hire some Brocade workers, mostly in California and the U.K.All about virtualization The point, it seems, is to further boost AT&T’s industry-leading virtualization efforts, particularly in the and areas of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ethereum: The “Next New Internet?”

According to this article, we now have a new Internet being developed: Ethereum (thanks to Chase Mitchell, one of my regular readers, for pointing this new development out). In fact, it’s called “web 3.0,” in a bid to become “The Next New Internet.” Given I tend to be a little concerned about the future of the Internet, I thought I’d look into this new one a bit to discover what it’s all about… Pardon the length of the ensuing investigation.

To begin to understand Ethereum, you have to understand block chainsbecause Ethereum is a type of block chain. To understand block chains, you must begin with the hash. A has is a simple concept that is actually quite difficult to implement in a useful way: a hash takes any a string of numbers of any size and returns a fixed length number, or hash, that (more or less) uniquely represents the original string. The simple to implement part is this—one rather naive hash is it simply add the numbers in a set of numbers until you reach a single digit, calling the result the hash. For instance…

23523
2 + 3 + 5 + 2 + 3 ==  Continue reading

Headcount: The Latest in Hirings, Firings And Retirings — June 5, 2017

BT cuts 4,000 jobs; CenturyLink's new CEO plan; Intel's new DCG leader.

NEC/Netcracker’s Controller Gives a View Over Other Controllers

It controls others’ IP and optical SDN controllers.

Oracle Adds Machine Learning, AI to Cloud Security Services

Adds Slack to list of CASB Cloud Service-supported applications.

OpenStack, CORD Remain Central to AT&T Virtualization Plans

CORD is considered a key part of the operator's 5G plans.

Research: Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report

Anyone working in IT Infrastructure need to have some awareness of what is happening on the Internet. This is the fastest, densest, most compressive information you can get in 30 minutes. You can see into the future if you look hard enough, this is a major source.     Link: 2017 Internet Trends — Kleiner […]

The post Research: Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report appeared first on EtherealMind.

Network Virtualization Makes it Easier to Enforce Security Policy

Defining a set of security and compliance policies is a key first step. But enforcing security policy is not as easy.

SD-WAN Monitoring Won’t Become an Independent Segment, Analyst Says

The technology will either be integrated into the product itself or will be complementary.

Worth Reading: Tainted Leaks

This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign. It provides evidence of how documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of Russia was tampered with and then “leaked” to achieve specific propaganda aims. We name this technique “tainted leaks.” The report illustrates how the twin strategies of phishing and tainted leaks are sometimes used in combination to infiltrate civil society targets, and to seed mistrust and disinformation. It also illustrates how domestic considerations, specifically concerns about regime security, can motivate espionage operations, particularly those targeting civil society. —Citizen Lab

The post Worth Reading: Tainted Leaks appeared first on rule 11 reader.

15% off Battery Tender 12 Volt 1.25 Amp Plus Battery Charger and Maintainer – Deal Alert

Ideal for automobiles, ATVs, boats, motorcycles, lawn mowers and jetskis, the Tender will offset the draw electronics have on your battery, even when it’s off. The Battery Tender Plus High Efficiency model operates using less electricity while producing the same amount of output, and switches from charge to float as needed to keep your battery strong all the time. The very popular Battery Tender Plus typically lists for $49.99 but is currently discounted 15% to $42.49. If dad has a recreational vehicle, this is a good consideration for Father's Day as well. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lack of Experience May Plague IoT Security Startups

Eighty-five percent of businesses plan to implement IoT by 2019.