Internet of Things Bah humbug
Now the Internet of Stuff that has real potential.
Over the summer term eight UK schools will get £800,000 worth of sensors, servers and cloud to inspire them into learning about and getting interested in the Internet of Things. The money comes from the Technology Strategy Board, a government quango which prefers to be known as "Innovate UK", and will be spent developing …
Comes to mind. With the ability to monitor classroom temperatures as opposed to halls and corridors, which outside doors and/or windows are left open or used most often affecting airflow and temperature, you can then manage heating or air conditioning more efficiently with zone control. Also air quality, I always remember how stuffy schools seemed to be in winter with every door and window closed.
Once kids can see how to make that work I am sure they would begin to see other possibilities. Really it is little different to production line control or telemetry, feedback for a system and how to use the data.
A quick scout through the list of chosen schools and i find that 3 of the chosen few on the list are using less than secure WordPress websites, the swiss cheese of hosting platforms, how long before they are not only inadvertently "selling" Louis Vitton products, "Raybans" and making my penis bigger but also providing miscreants with the fun of hacking other IoT systems.
The words security and schools websites are seldom together in the same sentence. recently received a spam email including link to no less than 5 academia websites using the erstwhile swiss cheese platform with pages created that they had no clue about, there was even a "webdesign" company on the list ffs. When are they going to stop and take a look at the basics before they charge head first into IoT implementation.
I emailed they affected organisations to inform them about their inadvertent retail/malware spreading acitivity and of the 7 emails i sent only one bothered to reply.
In fairness, most schools use external hosting, so if a website does fall then it's not going to effect the running of the school all that much (apart from embarrassment). Personally I've not found Wordpress to be too bad; provided you take a few precautions and keep it updated.
All the other CMSs are riddled with holes too; but Wordpress is so prolific that it's the one platform worth writing exploits for.