Security for IoT Can’t Be an Afterthought

Earlier this week, in my presentation at CapArea.net on “Communicating with the Internet of Things” one of the points I emphasized repeatedly is the necessity to think about security early and often. Any time you are responsible for creating a device that can communicate with the internet, whether that be a home automation gateway, Wi-Fi-controlled light bulb, or and industrial control system designed for remote monitoring, you need to be sure you understand how that system can be attacked. As security MVP Troy Hunt likes to put it, you need to “hack yourself first.”

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photo credit: nwogen on freeimages.com

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Slides for “Communicating with the Internet of Things”

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that if you want to keep up with my hardware projects, I post video demos to my Devhammer Vimeo channel. You can also see info on some of my past projects on the Garage page on my blog.

Thanks to all the folks who came out to hear my talk last night at CapArea.NET on “Communicating with the Internet of Things”. I’m embedding my slides from the talk below, including some additional resource links:

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Internet Explorer and Web Components

I’ll say this up-front, so I don’t waste anyone’s time. I’m not an expert on Web Components, and this post isn’t intended to teach anything about them.

With that said, over the last few days I’ve been catching up on some podcasts, and the topic of Web Components has come up several times. The technology (or, I should say, technologies, since there are at least 4 different specifications encompassed by the term) sounds very interesting and useful, but the lament I heard over and over was that there’s no support for these technologies in Internet Explorer, and no indication of when they will be supported.

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.NET Gadgeteer Deployment 101

One of the things I love most about developing for the .NET platform is the wide variety of devices and form factors that I can write for using a single language, namely C#. With Microsoft’s recent announcements about the reach of Universal Apps, that’s more true than ever. But it’s not just true for Windows devices, you can also develop for devices and IoT using C#. And you don’t need to wait for the Windows 10 port for Raspberry Pi 2, either.

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Windows Media Center, XBOX 360, Visual Studio, and You

With the understanding that the overlap in a Venn diagram describing folks who use Windows Media Center, XBOX 360 as a Media Center Extender, and Visual Studio on their WMC machine is probably vanishingly small, I thought it might still be useful to post the problems I experienced with this combo, and the solution.

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