weeknotes

You can only have your files if you buy a coke! – Weeknote #170 – 3rd June 2022

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A short week this week due to the bank holidays. Most people were on leave this week, so it was quiet as well.

At the weekend we went to see the Emergency Services Day that was taking place on the Beach Lawns in Weston-super-Mare. I did confirm with one of the crew there, that the Weston Fire & Rescue Service are the only service in the country with a hovercraft. Merseyside use to have one, but no longer. I often use this story when introducing myself in presentations and mentioning that Weston-super-Mare has the second longest tidal range in the world, as a result there is a lot of mud at low tide and people get stuck. They have to be rescued by hovercraft. The Weston hovercraft is 14 years old and is due to be replaced.

I did have a meeting about the security challenges of the intelligent campus. I was reminded of a story I wrote about in 2017, Hijacked vending machines cause chaos.

A university had been receiving an increasing number of complaints from students across campus about slow or inaccessible network connectivity. It turned out that hijacked vending machines (and 5,000) other Internet of Things (IoT) devices attacked the university network and slowed it right down.

I still have this image of a member of staff trying to access their files and finding a hijacked vending machine responding, you can only have your files if you buy a coke!

vending machine
Image by jplenio from Pixabay

I did some planning for meetings happening next week.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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