Security, Ethernet interviews, Overnight Successes and help a cause.
Security Hole in Iconics’ Genesis 32 and Genesis 64?
Joel Langill reports on the Tofino blog that he and Eric Byres have tested security vulnerabilities pointed to by Italian researcher Luigi Auriemma in Iconics Genesis32 and Genesis 34 products. They have written a white paper you can download from the Tofino site.
http://www.tofinosecurity.com/blog/iconics-genesis-scada-security
http://www.tofinosecurity.com/downloads/440
Ethernet interviews
I received a couple of interesting end user interview videos on Ethernet from Rockwell. One is on security. Non-commercial. I liked them.
http://www.automationworld.com/video-8517
http://www.automationworld.com/video-8523
Overnight Success
Did you ever fall into the trap of thinking you’re not a success because all the rich people made it overnight? The president of the company where I landed my first (and last) pure marketing position kept telling me (after about 3 months on the job), “Jobs and Wozniak were millionaires overnight. Why aren’t we selling millions of these boards?”
Well, they weren’t millionaires overnight. Check out these stories of reality.
Help the cause
Want to help the industry, increase your visibility, learn something and work with great people? The leadership of WBF has issued a call for volunteers. Please help. And don’t forget the WBF annual meeting that will feature some great papers, May 23-25 in Newark, DE.
As many of you may be aware, WBF was set up in 1994 to support the then emerging ISA-88 standard from a user and supplier applications perspective – the do’s & don’ts and the people “in the know”. ISA88 is still ISA’s most successful ever standard and WBF has now become a key part of the establishment with annual conferences being held since that first one in 1994 and most of the industry’s leading figures involved in one way or another. WBF has impacted the industry in other important ways too. The idea for ISA95 was started at a WBF North American “Meeting of the Minds” conference and it has now also become one of ISA’s most important standards. The WBF was instrumental in publishing the B2MML and BatchML schemas and also started the work on Make2Pack – which has now become ISA-88 Part 5. Now WBF has started to become involved with the ISA106 standard for procedural automation in the continuous process industries. In addition WBF has recently published a book series based on groupings of papers over the years – initial sales are very encouraging.
WBF went through some VERY hard times during the economic downturn – to the point of almost going under (it was that close). The board had to take the tough decision to cancel our 2009 North American conference and regroup. Due to some changes in strategy over the past year or so, WBF is now back to a viable state. We will be running our 2011 conference at the end of May at the University of Delaware (see www.wbf.org) and we are hoping to get back to running our European conferences again. However, if we all see value in WBF, it needs support. Many of the people in senior roles have been involved since that first meeting and some of the committees have one or two members. We realize that everyone is busy but WBF needs more support in several areas and would welcome new membership at all levels, no matter what your skill level. We are sending this to the ISA88, 95, 101 & 106 committees as I believe that these are the ones most closely related to WBF’s goals.
If you want to help, send me a note and I’ll forward it to WBF.
