Up Times • April 2022

Business Continuity Mixtape – Bryley-curated stories from around the internet:

Duxbury, Massachusetts resident Barry Collins has died. Mr Collins is widely regarded as the inventor of the barcode – though his system, Kartrak (for logging freight train cars in motion) – didn’t fully work and was replaced. The Kartrak system is the ancestor of manufacturing and retail barcode scanning systems and QR codes. He was an MIT graduate and invented the system while working for Sylvania in the ’60s … tedium.co

Any lock can be broken. Weaker forms of MFA (multi-factor authentication) have lately been the target of criminals through prompt-bombing in which they try to wear people down by making MFA-verification requests a couple times a day or in the middle of the night or bombarding them relentlessly with verification requests. Sometimes people just click the link to make the requests stop. Your business’ data should be secured with stronger MFA implementations. Your employees should be warned and trained about the criminal tactic and given an appropriate response plan … wired.com

We all know that everyone makes mistakes. And these can include clicking a phishing link or getting tricked in an MFA prompt-bombing attack. It doesn’t help team-building to have employees who are afraid to admit their errors and point their fingers at others. How do you foster a company or department in which someone who makes a mistake can own up without fear of being berated or fired? CSO Magazine Hall of Famer Andy Ellis suggests managers, “practice saying that ‘human error is a symptom of a system in need of redesign,’ which I learned from [MIT professor] Nancy Leveson …” darkmatter.com

$100 million dollars has been allocated as part of the federal Infrastructure Bill to help Massachusetts expand broadband access. Fiber-optic networking now encircles Boston and brings with it the promise of big bandwidth. But it’s not always straightforward for people working from home how to capitalize on the network coming to their door. Nicole Nguyen shows the bottlenecks that can keep us from having our best internet speeds – and offers solutions … wsj.com

^{Note: The Mixtape section is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.}