What I'm Reading (or Watching) 4/5/2020 - Another Industrial Protocol, A New Book, A Rick and Morty Based Music Video, It's a Sunday Funday

Books - 

Daemon -

Daemons: computer programs that silently run in the background, waiting for a specific event or time to execute. They power almost every service. They make our networked world possible. But they also make it vulnerable...

When the obituary of legendary computer game architect Matthew Sobol appears online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events that begins to unravel our interconnected world. This daemon reads news headlines, recruits human followers, and orders assassinations. With Sobol’s secrets buried with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed, it’s up to Detective Peter Sebeck to stop a self-replicating virtual killer before it achieves its ultimate purpose—one that goes far beyond anything Sebeck could have imagined...

I have had this book in my recommendations list on Amazon for years.  I have  read the "look inside" excerpts and it has always struck me  dumb, but it's the DefCon Book Club selection for April and May so I guess I am going to read it.

Network Forensics Tracking Hackers Through Cyberspace

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

Blogs / News -

Medium - The Complexity of the “Cyber Security” Role — When 52 Becomes One -

We have a problem when it comes to Cyber Security. The main problem is that many will define a “Cyber Security” Professional and think that it is one job function and where we can ask the person about a wide range of things from risk to IoT security. But it’s not true. It is just a name that we have attached to a growing area, and it gives very little hint as to where the expertise of a person might lie. And it doesn’t really define their level of expertise in the area.

One of the problems is that there are so many subject areas involved, and they can range from highly technical subjects such as Penetration Testing, Cryptography and Malware Analysis (the red circles in the diagram) to Human Factors, Risk and Organisation Factors (the blue circles):

...

For Cyber Security they define seven categories; 33 speciality areas; and 52 work roles [here], and then map these to 1,007 tasks, 374 skills, 630 knowledge areas and 176 abilities:

Coindesk - A New York Power Plant Is Mining $50K Worth of Bitcoin a Day -

Greenidge Generation, a natural gas power plant near the town of Dresden in the Finger Lakes region, announced it had successfully installed a mining farm in its facility. Comprised of nearly 7,000 mining rigs and powered by electricity generated on-site, the facility can mine an average of 5.5 bitcoins (BTC) every day, roughly $50,000, according to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index. 

Yahoo - Amazon is turning away employees with temperatures over than 100.4 degrees and slashing up to half their pay -

Amazon warehouses across the country continue to operate despite increasing reports of confirmed coronavirus cases among employees. Some Amazon warehouses have begun conducting daily temperature checks in hopes of curbing the spread of infection in their facilities — but many employees turned away will have their wages slashed by half. 

The Belmont Club - Suddenly, Neither Liberty nor Civilization Is Assured -

The two biggest uncertainties about the post-COVID-19 world are whether any privacy will survive and whether China or the United States will dominate. With regards to the first, the Guardian rhetorically asks whether you would  trade the total loss of your privacy for safety from the coronavirus, even if it meant entering a "cybergulag." That's what Russia is planning to do and China already did.  As the City Journal put it, perhaps the only way out of the lockdowns  is to voluntarily submit to 24x7 electronic tracking.

...

Foreign affairs will be dominated by the rivalry between China and the United States as each country vies for which can most successfully recover and regroup from the disaster. Beijing is already claiming the title. "Beijing is bolstering its soft power and taking the lead in a global response to the coronavirus public health crisis. The moves come as China’s daily number of new infections decline while those in the U.S. rise."

LA Times - How a discovery that brought us Viagra could help those battling the coronavirus   

Nitric oxide may not be done yet. The colorless, odorless gas, inhaled through a mask or even from a small “flute,” is now being tested as an experimental treatment for COVID-19. It may also prove helpful in protecting healthcare workers on the front line of the pandemic from getting sick.

At hospitals in Boston, Alabama, Louisiana, Sweden and Austria, researchers have launched a clinical trial to test inhaled nitric oxide in patients with mild to moderate cases of COVID-19. The trial will test whether the gas can drive down the number of patients who end up needing breathing assistance from a mechanical ventilator, a piece of equipment that’s in critically short supply. 

Reuters - As Trump administration debated travel restrictions, thousands streamed in from China -

In defending his strategy against the deadly coronavirus, President Donald Trump repeatedly has said he slowed its spread into the United States by acting decisively to bar travelers from China on Jan. 31.

 “I was criticized by the Democrats when I closed the Country down to China many weeks ahead of what almost everyone recommended. Saved many lives,” he tweeted, for instance, on March 2.

But Reuters has found that the administration took a month from the time it learned of the outbreak in late December to impose the initial travel restrictions amid furious infighting. 

Recode - Amazon white-collar employees are fuming over management targeting a fired warehouse worker -

Some Amazon corporate employees are angry and disgusted over how their company is handling escalating labor disputes at its warehouses, where facility workers say the company is not doing enough to protect them from exposure to the Covid-19 coronavirus.

On internal company email lists and chat groups on Thursday and Friday that Recode viewed, Amazon white-collar workers expressed dismay over a report from Vice News that the company’s top lawyer had referred to a recently fired warehouse worker as “not smart, or articulate” and implied that executives should use that to help squelch worker unionization efforts.

Other -

Wikipedia - Fieldbus

Fieldbus is an industrial network system for real-time distributed control. It is a way to connect instruments in a manufacturing plant. Fieldbus works on a network structure which typically allows daisy-chain, star, ring, branch, and tree network topologies. Previously, computers were connected using RS-232 (serial connections) by which only two devices could communicate. This would be the equivalent of the currently used 4–20 mA communication scheme which requires that each device have its own communication point at the controller level, while the fieldbus is the equivalent of the current LAN-type connections, which require only one communication point at the controller level and allow multiple (hundreds) of analog and digital points to be connected at the same time. This reduces both the length of the cable required and the number of cables required. Furthermore, since devices that communicate through fieldbus require a microprocessor, multiple points are typically provided by the same device. Some fieldbus devices now support control schemes such as PID control on the device side instead of forcing the controller to do the processing. 

I am going to keep posting these little summaries until I have covered the following protocols:

Modbus (covered)
DNP3 (covered)
HART (covered)
Fieldbus
EthernetIP / Common Industrial Protocol
IEC 61850
Siemens S7Comms
BACNet
Profibus
Profinet