Tempered Teams with Fabric World: Secure IDN Fabric for the Textile Industry

Tempered announced a new partnership with Fabric World -- collaborating with the craft and sewing giant to deploy its secure identity-defined networking fabric on its new line of smart sewing machines. Smart sewing machines recently emerged onto the Internet of Things landscape, with cloud-based solutions taking the market by storm in 2017. “We’re using our secure fabric to literally secure the fabric,” said product director Eric Furnan. “Textile workers and stitching grandmas don’t need IT training. They need easy-to-use, point-and-click security, with identity-based whitelisting and micro-segmentation.”

Textile factories and homemakers alike have been adopting the new smart sewing technology, with sales up over 70% from last year. The HIPstitch 100 embeds the secure IDN fabric technology, and doubles as a secure WiFi hotspot in the home. The HIPstitch 250 features even greater capabilities, targeted for the industrial sewing market.
  View the full Tempered Networks Fabric World case study      Participate in the Secure Fabric Discussion

Tempered Networks Support Team Pivots to Craft Brewing

Riding the success of the ultra-reliable 1.12.3 release, the support organization at Tempered Networks had plenty of spare time with no customer calls flooding in. Brewing craft beers evolved from a hobby to a successful revenue stream, explains one master brewer, simply known as L2: “Yeah, once they installed the 1.12.3 upgrade, we didn’t really have a lot to do. And fresh hops just came in season, so I was like ‘we can start a batch, we can do this’.”

The beers rapidly grew in popularity among Seattle’s young tech professionals, featuring hits such as TCP/IPA, Tun on Tap, Protocol Pale Ale, Traceroute Stout, Sys-Lager, and ESP ESB. Soon beer Fridays across the Queen Anne, Lake Union, and Fremont neighborhoods were transformed by the fresh, non-GMO, locally-sourced organic flavors. “And for those jumping on the gluten free bandwagon, we’re experimenting with a new CIDR Block Hard Cider,” beams L2.

Marketing picked up on the buzz and now offers complimentary swag bottles at tradeshows and engagement events. “We’re actually seeing more and more orders for cases of beer, when customers efficiently secure their networks with the Tempered solution, and save all that time without complex firewall, VPN, IDS, and router configs,” remarks Jeff L. in sales, “I think drinking beer, networking, and the cyber just naturally go hand-in-hand.”
  Browse the TNW Online Beer Gallery

Industry-first Smartwatch Security Device: the HIPswatch

Secure communications have finally arrived at your wrist with the HIPswatch. This smartwatch has its own identity and can securely access your Tempered-enabled corporate, industrial, or cloud-based networks. The touch interface can link with Conductor to manage policies or even receive security alerts right from your wrist, without having to look at your phone. HIPswatch lets users "swipe away your cyber threats,” says product manager Bobby Prexton, “swipe left on a smart alert to deny access, or right to whitelist. It really keeps you in touch with your network.” Users will appreciate the gentle vibration notifications that are less intrusive than texts or mobile alerts.
  Comment on how you would use the HIPswatch to manage your policies and alerts

Go Evangelist Strike Force tussles with Lua Evangelist Strike Force

A Friday demo promoting the Go programming language happened to follow a brief introduction to Lua, causing some internal friction between developers. The so-called Go Evangelist Strike Force (GESF) challenged the Lua Evangelist Strike Force (LESF) to settle the score with a foosball tournament later that day. Tempers flared as the GESF touted static typing, garbage collection, and concurrent programming, while the LESF argued for portability, smaller size, and no pointers. Rumor has it that by the third round of beers, the two groups had made peace and even drafted plans to start outing any Perl or PHP holdouts they could find in development. Fortunately closing time dispersed the drunken nerd mob before any property damage took place.

Test Moves Synology Upstairs, Downstairs, then Upstairs again

ESXi users were warned late Friday that Test would need to move the Synology storage cluster upstairs, downstairs, then upstairs again. Impacts may include, but not limited to the LDAP server going down, print servers going offline, the HA cluster broken, and a disruption to ESXi training. Apparently the disks needed to be checksummed, with full bad sector scans, and backed up to tape, optical media, and even de-duplicated to a similar sized SSD volume. “We do expect the scalability harness to go offline, followed by the integration harness, Firmware Upgrades harness, Text Matrix harness, Conductor HA harness, HA HA mode harness, Alpo harness, Kibbles harness, Milkbone harness, Horse harness, and Harnesses harness. We don’t even know what will happen to the Jumbo Cyber harness,” reported one test engineer. Test will declare a “VMware Situation Green” once the dust settles.
  View the full Synology storage cluster schedule here

Pricelow Leaves Tempered for “Eye of the Cyber” Tour

Cybersecurity expert Jeff Pricelow announced he would be leaving Tempered Networks to tour full-time with his new rock band, the Cybers. The “Eye of the Cyber” tour has booked appearances across the country and is named after the group’s hit single. The song gained popularity in hacker circles when headlining the soundtrack for the hacker movie Cracky, a rags-to-riches tech drama where a rogue hacker turns white hat to secure enterprise vulnerabilities. Pricelow is lead vocalist and plays lead guitar for the band. While working at Tempered he often moonlighted in local bars with the Cybers. He reportedly would play “Eye of the Cyber” to pump up regional sales representatives before a big meeting. His son -- Adam, a former summer intern -- also plays bass for the band.