Here’s everything you need to know today — in 5 minutes or less — about the world’s most important news in IoT.
What’s News:
Why Do IoT Projects Fail?
The use of IoT for business operations is developing rapidly and has already been proven to deliver huge new value. Yet IoT projects have several elements that all need to work well together, sometimes making them more complex to build than expected. For a variety of reasons, it is estimated that nearly 3/4 of all IoT projects started will not be considered successful by the organizations using them. This is a real cause for concern in the IoT community.IoT And Blockchain: Components Of A New Computing Stack
While business applications are moving to a centralized-computing paradigm with the cloud, IoT is moving in a different direction, one that focuses on decentralized edge computing. Decentralized IoT alone has issues related to security and data privacy when many devices interact with each other on a network, but those issues can be addressed by combining IoT with Blockchain.
CyberSecurity:
The Mirai IoT Botnet Holds Strong In 2020
More than three years after its first appearance, the Mirai botnet is still one of the biggest threats to IoT and continues to be successful for a well-known reason: Its targets are IoT devices with hardcoded credentials found in a simple web search. Such devices listen for inbound telnet access on certain ports and have backdoors through which Mirai can enter. Once a device is subsumed in the botnet, it immediately scans for other victims.A Flaw In Philips Smart Light Hue Bulbs Exposes Your WiFi Network To Hackers
The underlying high-severity vulnerability resides in the way Philips implemented the Zigbee communication protocol in its smart light bulb, leading to a heap-based buffer overflow issue. Through this exploitation, a threat actor can infiltrate a home or office's computer network over-the-air, spreading ransomware or spyware, by using nothing but a laptop and an antenna from over 100 meters.
Smart Home:
Can A Smart Home Really Help You Save Energy (And Money)?
Yes, smart homes can save you money — plenty of it, actually. But it will depend on what smart products you buy. The most energy-efficient devices are the ones that come with sensors or other kinds of energy limiters. A smart TV or Bluetooth speaker won’t necessarily save you money — although they probably will when compared to their older peers such as tube TVs or decades-old record players. The good news is that nowadays, most of these gadgets tend to be energy-efficient and smart at the same time, so you won’t have a problem combining energy-savings with comfort, be it purchasing a fridge or a lighting kit.Ring Brings Privacy Controls Front And Center But I Still Live Under Surveillance
After a rough few months of bad press and suggestions that it quietly shares data with third-parties, Ring has updated its app with the new Ring Control Center. The software update is a very positive step towards helping Ring owners better control their data. It also tells you if your local police department is a Ring partner.Keeping Your Smart Home Secure: 14 Tips To Help Protect IoT Devices
As smart home technology is becoming increasingly popular, the number of attacks on the Internet of Things devices is on the rise. A recent spate of incidents involving consumer IoT devices has seen malicious users gaining access to home networks through holes in device security. Many consumers may now be reluctant to use IoT devices, even though many of those breaches were due to poor user setup.
Smart City, Transportation, Infrastructure:
Smart Cities Drive Progress With Analytics At The Edge
For digital cities, there are compelling reasons for moving data analytics to the Edge, when the data is generated and captured, rather than sending everything to analytics engines in corporate and cloud data centers. In many cases, applications require that data analysis takes place in near real-time, as the data is generated. There simply isn’t time to send data to a distant data center for analysis. In other cases, it doesn’t make sense to pay the costs of transmitting data over a network and storing it in the cloud when it might be needed for immediate purposes.
Industry 4.0:
John Deere Digs Into The Challenges Of Smart Farming
When John Deere first began its initiative to provide farmers with better connectivity, it was primarily dealership-focused, in the sense that it really only concerned itself with making sure John Deere was alerted to any issues a customer might be having with its equipment via a telecommunications base station. However, as John Deere’s Director of Intelligent Solutions Nancy Post explained, the concept of a connected farm has become so much more. Now, as smart farming gains attention, more and more farms are making use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and the latest advances in cellular and wireless technology.Introducing StarlingX 3.0 For Edge Computing And IoT
StarlingX is an open-source edge computing and IoT cloud platform optimized for low latency and high-performance applications. It provides a scalable and highly reliable edge infrastructure, tested and available as a complete stack. Applications include industrial IoT, telecom, video delivery, and other ultra-low latency use cases.Critical IoT Vs Massive IoT: How To Spot The Difference
Massive IoT, aka massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) in the 5G world, defines applications with lots of endpoints that continuously serve little bits of data, mostly infrequently and to even remote locations. It involves applications that are low cost and low energy but with small data volumes in massive numbers that are reported regularly to the cloud. By contrast, critical IoT involves fewer endpoints that handle massive levels of data. More technically, critical IoT applications are described as Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC). It represents the longer-term vision for high-bandwidth and low-latency applications and devices, going beyond just data collection and into more complex scenarios. Thus, it’s easy to see how 5G will factor into the equation and allow critical IoT to become more of a reality going forward.Â
💡 IoT Insights is an Atherton Research publication