Posts tagged System
Google Struggling to Create System to Comply with UK ePrivacy Directive
Dec 7th
Google has admitted that it is struggling to create a system of processes that will allow the firm to abide by new cookie laws owing to the sheer number of its products that are affected by the rules.
The cookie law is an amendment to the ePriva…
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Water Utility Control System Hacked Last Week
Nov 21st
Last week the news blogs were filled with information about a second attack on a computer-based supervisory control system (SCADA) at the Curran-Gardner Township Public Water District based near Springfield Ill. The first was the Stuxnet malware targeted at an Iranian nuclear facility that was extensively covered. We wrote about how the Symantec anti-virus researchers decompiled the malware and demonstrated it to us here earlier this summer, and how variants on Stuxnet called Duqu were also found last month floating around European networks.
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A second attack was reported by Computerworld last week based in a Houston utility.
The Illinois attack was revealed by SCADA cybersecurity expert Joe Weiss. Writing on his ControlGlobal blog he mentions the specifics. First off, the attacker’s IP address originated in Russia, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There were various “minor glitches” in remote access sessions to the SCADA system that were observed for several months prior to last week’s attack. “The attackers are thought to have obtained the usernames and passwords to the system by first breaking into a computer belonging to the utility’s SCADA software vendor, according to Weiss and subsequent reports.
The ultimate damage inflicted on the utility was a burned out water pump. If these reports were accurate, it would be the first time someone has targeted an industrial facility in the US in this manner. That is a big “if” indeed.
A friend of mine who works as an engineer for another water company told me that they “have very secure systems with firewalls between our SCADA and office net and finance systems. The guys that have access to our SCADA system are set up in 5 layers of rights. Those with access to actually change things have digital keys that reset password codes every few minutes. I suppose that the system in Springfield could be penetrated as they say and running the pump on and off could cause damage. It’ll be interesting to see if that was the case or if someone named Homer Simpson was just eating donuts in Springfield instead of responding to the pump alarms.”
Whether the Springfield utility followed best practices in how it connected its SCADA controllers remains to be seen. While these units use their own firmware and operating systems, typically they are connected via USB to Windows PCs that can be infected with malware. That is indeed how the original Stuxnet attacks started.
Weiss points out that there is a lot of misinformation at this point. There are various agencies that are set up to share reports about these kinds of events, and that few of them have posted anything authoritative yet. And in the Illinois case, there are a variety of state and federal agencies that have to coordinate their activities to handle this kind of attack, and they are still working out the details.
Photo c/o CleanWaterWaste.com.
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SEO Consult® Develop Internal Wiki System – DigitalJournal.com (press release)
Nov 13th
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SEO Consult® Develop Internal Wiki System
DigitalJournal.com (press release) SEO Consult®, a market leading search engine optimisation agency, have recently developed a new internal wiki system that has been designed to improve industry knowledge of staff members. Based in Cheshire, SEO Consult® currently employ over 85 SEO … |
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German Rail System to Get Mobile Payments This Year
Aug 26th
Come November, the world’s second largest mass transit company will let its riders pay for trips by waving their cell phones at the terminal. The Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s main railway operator, began implementing its Touch&Travel mobile payments system in 2008 and expects it to be ready within two months.
The system will rely on near field communications (NFC) chips contained in customers’ mobile phones to handle the payment transactions for each trip. Alternatively, riders can pay with their phones by scanning a QR code at the beginning and end point of their ride.
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Touch&Travel mobile apps are available for iPhone and Android-based smart phones. “In addition to using NFC or barcodes to provide location information, smartphone apps can use GPS or the user can type in a location ID number,” writes NFC World. Riders will be billed for their transit usage at the end of each month.
Contactless payments are just one of the many uses for NFC, which is one of the most talked-about technologies of the last year. Some other use cases include exchanging contact information, mobile gaming and unlocking doors, to name a few. Still, mobile payments are perhaps the most anticipated of its future uses, as everybody from banks and credit card companies to Google and smaller tech startups have been preparing solutions in this space.
New York City’s transit system started its own pilot program for mobile payments last year, which lets riders pay for trips with their iPhones. Since the iPhone does not yet support NFC natively, the devices need to be housed in a special casing in order to work with New York’s subway, rail, bus and taxi systems.
Will mobile payments make commuters lives easier or is this just a tech fad waiting to happen? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Credit Cards Are Killing Creativity: The Case for a New Online Payments System
Aug 25th
With the rise of startups like Square, and near-field communication technology going global, we’re seeing payment systems change drastically in the real world. These tools are making our lives easier and are enabling new transactions to occur that would not have been possible before.
Surprisingly, however, we are not seeing much change at all in payment systems online. PayPal is still huge. We still need a credit card for almost all transactions online. In my opinion, attention on payments needs to be directed back to the Internet – because there are a huge number of negative effects resulting from using credit cards online.
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Michael Moore-Jones is a 16-year-old New Zealander passionate about technology and business. He is the founder of They Don’t Teach You This In School, a website which helps young people benefit from the experiences of adults through short videos, and a co-founder of Duo.
10 Cents and $1
We are all very used to receiving free content on the Internet. But why is that? Do we no longer place value on quality? A high-quality news article on the New York Times, for example, is worth about 10 cents to me. I’m willing to pay that. I would bet that millions of other people worldwide would pay it too. However, because of the fact that existing payment systems online are controlled by the credit card companies, it isn’t profitable for anyone to charge less than a dollar for content, as there are minimum transaction fees.
This gap between 10 cents and $1 is where all the problems are occurring. Most credit card payment systems on the Internet charge a minimum of 30 cents per transaction. Content sellers would lose money if they sold content for anything less than this, and, depending on their costs of production, they’d still lose money at prices up to a dollar. This means that content producers are forced to give their content away for free, because people won’t pay a dollar for an article.
Enforced Generosity, Enforced Mediocrity
What are the implications if credit card companies continue to dominate, and everyone is forced to give content away for free online? For starters, less quality content. If people can’t make money from what they produce, they start to lose the motivation to produce.
There really is no incentive quite like money. Of course there will always be bloggers and news websites and musicians and movie producers – but unless there is a monetary incentive, a much lower quantity of content with much lower quality will be produced if people are not incentivized enough to put in the effort.
Content, in its broadest form, is information available to individuals. Information makes the world go around, and therefore content is crucial to societies. It is of utmost important that multiple news sources exist, so that democracy can function effectively.
We’ve seen the huge benefits from citizen journalism, for example. But perhaps those citizens decided to be journalists because of the novelty factor. Once that novelty wears off, will we still have as many citizen journalists unless they can profit from their content? I would argue that we are going to see the number of citizen content producers decrease over the coming years after the novelty of these technologies wears off. Therefore if we want to continue to see the benefits of citizen journalists, the ability for these people to be incentivized will have to be introduced to the Internet.
Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Must
There is no reason for all content producers to start charging for their content. Steven Brill, the founder of Journalism Online, recently said that “publishers don’t need to make a choice between advertising and circulation revenue. By charging only certain kinds of readers or for certain kinds of content, they can still maintain a big, non-paying audience capable of generating ad revenues.”
To create a positive and beneficial Internet, we have to give content producers the ability to choose how they monetize their content. The first step in that is reducing the importance of credit card companies in online payments.
To create a positive and beneficial Internet, we have to give content producers the ability to choose how they monetize their content. The first step in that is reducing the importance of credit card companies in online payments.
There is another benefit to having an alternative to credit card payments online: a Nielsen study recently showed that 71% of global consumers would pay for online content, provided that it is in some way better than what they would receive if they bought it in the physical world.
What this means is that content producers have incentive to produce better content. At the same time, consumers will receive higher quality content. It’s a win-win situation for all parties.
Micropayments Aren’t Enough – We Need Nanopayments
So, what should we do to provide an alternative to the current credit card payment system? Micropayments aren’t enough – we need to be talking nanopayments. There must be a ubiquitous digital payment system that gives content producers the ability to charge for their content, from amounts as small as one cent. Bitcoin is one of the key current players in this space, and the new social exchange MyCube is also working on solving this problem.
The Internet is fantastic at breaking down barriers. The problem we have here is that credit cards have been incorporated into the very fabric of payments through the Internet, and it is therefore slightly harder to break the barriers set up by credit card companies. It is very possible though – and there is no solid competition as of yet. So get to work.
[Disclosure: I was a member of the Digital Life Academy, of which MyCube is a sponsor].
Credit card photo by Andres Rueda
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StorageRoom Wants to Be Your Cloud-based Mobile Content Management System
Aug 11th
While handling backend data for mobile development is a challenge that many startups are addressing this year, content management systems are also a service that many developers would like to outsource to an easy-to-use third-party company. This is where cloud-based “backend as a service” startups branch, from either handling data, computing resources or managing content. If you need a backend service provided, there are a variety of startups lining up to take the job.
That is where a German startup called StorageRoom comes into play. The company has created a cloud-based CMS that devices can interact through with a RESTful JSON API. The idea is to cut programmers out of the content loop so they can do what they do best while editors handle content issues.
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StorageRoom is trying to position itself in the middle of the backend as a service startups like Parse and Kinvey and more traditional CMS like Joomla, Drupal or Typo3.
“All the mobile backend services we found so far are focused on providing a database with added business logic and social plugins,” said co-founder of StorageRoom Sascha Konietzke. “They have an API, and so do we, but what’s really different is that, for the other services, all content is user-generated and written/read through the API. In our service – besides some small exceptions – content is generated and managed by editors of the app owner in an editing interface that we provide (the other services don’t have that, as content is coming from end-users).”
As Konietzke points out, most CMS are developed for the Web and not mobile and hence do not have APIs or have APIs that manage mobile poorly. With StorageRoom, developers create their data structures, enter content, manage the data within the editing interface and then query the StorageRoom API.
Konietzke says that 150 developers are now using the StorageRoom, including one very large game developer that they are not ready to reveal yet. The company is self-funded and operating on the “lean startup” principle.
“We are now looking into this as we think we really found a problem that is worth solving and received very good feedback when talking to other developers and our existing customers,” Konietzke said.
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