German nuclear plant + more things

2 minutes estimated reading time

German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says | Reuters – So Sarbannes Oxley meant that a lot of corporates disabled USB ports. Technology company Huawei used to have ‘dirty machines’ and clean machines. Neither of which were connected by a network. The same was true in many agencies where I worked. Yet a German nuclear plant allows easy access via USB. Secondly, why do the USB chargers on airplane cockpits have any intelligence at all that would store a virus and allow it propagate? I would be very paranoid about using any USB chargers in coffee shops or an aircraft seat moving forwards. This is the problem when everything from light bulbs and doorbells now contain a Linux server. More security related content here.

Ogilvy’s rebrand reveals an ad industry in confusion | Thomas Barta – an inhouse marketers perspective on things. If you substituted the word advertising for PR in this as a discipline it could be an analysis of all agencies.

iPhone maker Foxconn is churning out “Foxbots” to replace its human workers — Quartz – I am not convinced that they will be that successful. This is partly down to some of the manual dexterity required being similar to a watchmaker in some parts of the assembly. And that is down to Apple driving an industry race to squeeze phones into tighter factors for the guts. The process is repeatable, but hard to deliver. Back in the day Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers used to use pick-and-place machines for a lot of consumer electronics. It is why Japan went more towards micro-chips faster than players like Philips. Japan did a lot of component standardisation in terms of sizing and connectivity to the board. The boards were relatively simply designed and gave a bit of latitude to allow for a lack of precision from the machines. That meant slightly larger goods. More expensive devices like Sony’s Walkman  Pro, were handmade because they crammed so much technology inside them .

[Publish] Facebook Profiles can no longer be connected to Buffer Publish – Buffer FAQ – well that’s a bit of a bummer. But you can still publish content via more expensive systems like Percolate. Is this Facebook trying to discourage organic content from anyone but brands (that spend advertising money?)