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ThingWorx Says IoT Marketplace Will Speed Adoption

November 18, 2013 Paul Roberts

ThingWorx, the ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS) vendor, has made empowering the Internet of Things (or Internet of Everything) its rallying cry. Now the company says it is the first to market with an IoT “marketplace” that it claims will speed development of smart, connected products. The company announced ThingWorx Marketplace at Salesforce.com’s “Dreamforce” event in San Francisco on Monday. The new platform will allow ThingWorx and third party firms to offer “components and services” that are needed to build full-featured IoT applications. Those may be things like new kinds of sensors, widgets, device connectors, protocol adapters, hooks into device clouds or integrations with enterprise management platforms, according to a ThingWorx statement. The platform will be accessible by ThingWorx partners, independent hardware and software vendors, and third party developers, the company said. Enterprises will be able to deploy private instances of the Marketplace to host internally developed applications, application templates, analytics, […]

Hack Uses Phone’s Camera and Mic To Best Anti-Keylogger

November 13, 2013 Paul Roberts

Smart phones these days are bristling with sensors. Forget about the camera and microphone – there are accelerometers, Global Positioning System components, not to mention Bluetooth and NFC transmitters. All those remote sensors enable all kinds of cool features – from finding the nearest Starbucks to mobile payments. But they also pose a risk to the privacy of the phone’s owner – as malicious actors (and the occasional national government) look for ways to turn cameras and other sensors into powerful, cheap and convenient spying tools. Now researchers at The University of Cambridge have demonstrated one possible, new attack type: harnessing the built-in video camera and microphone on Android devices to spy on an owner’s movements and guess his or her password. The technique could be a way for cyber criminals to defeat anti-keylogging technology like secure “soft” keyboards used to enter banking PINs and other sensitive information. The work […]

Week In Security: NSA Spies on Yahoo & Google, Adobe Hack and Healthcare.gov

November 3, 2013 Paul Roberts

There’s nothing like a Sunday morning for looking back over the week’s events and trying to make sense of at all – or at least what sense there is to be had. This Sunday was no different – especially after a week that saw continued revelations stemming from Edward Snowden’s leak of classified intelligence on NSA spying, the massive hack of software maker Adobe. Then there was the botched rollout of the federal Healthcare.gov marketplace – which morphed into an even bigger, uglier problem as the week progressed. To help me sort it all out, I called on Nick Selby, the CEO of StreetCred Software and an authority on cyber security, law enforcement, government procurement, Russia, Germany, aviation, travel journalism and all manner of other topics. I love talking to Nick because his wealth of life and professional experience make him predictably unpredictable when it comes to interpreting current events. […]

Microsoft Tests Glass Competitor. But Do Wearables Threaten Privacy, Social Norms?

October 22, 2013 Paul Roberts

Forbes has a really interesting article a couple of days back that posited the huge dislocations caused by wearable technology – including front-on challenges to social norms that are thousands of years in the making and contemporary notions of privacy. The applications for wearable technology like Google Glass are too numerous to mention. Just a few include “heads up” displays for surgeons in the operating room. Teachers (or their students) could benefit from having notes displayed in their field of vision, rather than having to resort to printed notes or the (dreaded) Powerpoint slide. But the devil is in the details of the wearable technology, Forbes argues. Unlike external devices – pagers, mobile phones, smart phones – wearable tech is more intimately connected to ourselves: in constant contact with our bodies and notifying us with vibrations and sounds in ways that it may be difficult to ignore, Forbes argues. Indelicately implemented, […]

Google Will Use Cash To Clean Up Open Source

October 12, 2013 Paul Roberts

The widespread use of vulnerable or buggy third party code is serious problem facing public and private sector organizations, alike. Just this week, for example, The Wall Street Journal reported that an independent audit of Healthcare.gov, the star-crossed Federal Government website that is the primary health exchange in more than 30 states, is choking on poorly integrated or extraneous code that “served no purpose they could identify.” But what happens when the third-party code in question is open source code? Things get more complex. For one thing: open source is the salt and pepper of the software world: a common ingredient in applications of all sorts. And, as security researchers have noted: many of the so-called “smart devices” that are populating the physical world run variants of Linux, the open source operating system. But because those source code repositories are managed cooperatively and collectively by volunteers, security often takes a […]