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Disrupt Your Own Market

If you are ever having trouble sleeping, pick up an article on Digital Disruption. Instead of counting sheep you can count the jargon crammed into every sentence. Sentences with four or more nonsense words get a score of 2. Sentences earn an extra point when every single word is easily understood, but combine into gibberish. The points mean nothing and you don’t have to keep score; you will be asleep by the third sentence.

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Replacing an LTE Antenna

Our customer installed a Poynting LPDA-92 antenna in the same location and orientation as her previous antenna, but she wasn’t getting better reception. We turned to Poynting in South Africa for an answer. Their engineer’s response is worth sharing. The original is filled with technical language and delightful but confusing British phrasing. We’ve translated it into American and condensed it.

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Ignore Email from the CEO

Maybe you shouldn’t ignore it, but at least wait a few minutes before responding to any urgent request. Nothing makes employees snap into action like a message from the CEO, which is why CEO Fraud has become such a problem.

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Specifying the Right Antenna

Whether you are trying to connect to WiFi or cellular the right antenna is a primary factor determining success. Bundled antennas often deliver minimum performance required for ideal installations, but many factors can interfere with, or attenuate signal transmission.

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Controlling Our Data

In an April 6, 2018 article on National Public Radio’s website, the writer, Vanessa Romo never references the soon to be implemented GDPR in Europe. She believes Facebook COO Sanberg’s promise that if they find more examples of data collected by Facebook getting into the wrong hands, they will notify the public. She accepts Sandberg’s apology that Facebook “didn’t do enough” to protect their user’s privacy. The writer seems comfortable with Facebook holding “a massive trove of user data.” With all due respect, Ms. Romo is asking all the wrong questions.

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Your Greatest Security Risk

Social Engineering Exploits Human Trust and Courtesy to Gain Unauthorized Access

When we talk about security everyone thinks about firewalls and brute force attacks, but most IT administrators have things pretty well locked down on the server side. Some of the recent headline attacks were because of people, not systems. Investigators traced the now famous Hilary Clinton email leak to a hack of John Podesta’s Gmail account, a result of him clicking on a fake Google security alert in a spear-phishing attack. Back-end security will not help when an employee at a work computer clicks a fraudulent link in Facebook, bringing ransomware in the virtual front door. The easiest way into your private information is probably through your employees.

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A Glossary of IIoT Terms

This post is Part 2, please see: Industrial Internet of Things for Part 1.

The infusion of Internet protocol professionals into Industrial Machine communications has presented a new alphabet soup of acronyms and terms. Even some seasoned IT professionals are left scratching their heads when presented with the closed systems that have existed for years in industrial machine to machine communications.

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Industrial Internet of Things

Part 1: OT versus IT

At a Peplink Summit, Josh Varghese of Traceroute gave a presentation on IIoT, the Industrial Internet of Things. His talk included a basic description of Industrial IoT, a simple but essential clarification of Operational Technology—the core of IIoT, and an important glossary of terms. For the sake of this blog, I will split Mr. Varghese’s detailed talk into two parts. This first part will focus on the difference between IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology.)

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