Maybe you remember the trending word Pop cord which meant a kind of trendy pop enthusiast. Originally used to describe someone who focused more on surface and trends than on substance. The pop string was a person who followed the latest trends in pop music but perhaps didn't necessarily care about the deeper aspects of culture or music.

Today, trends are different and if popsnør were to appear on the vocabulary section of the university entrance exam, I am convinced that few would guess correctly. I believe that few people have a clue about the word and that it could be mistaken for the name of a candy named by an owner with poor knowledge, or why not by an AI-assisted marketing department with a tight deadline.

Speaking of which AI, I recently analyzed the latest trends in IoT and my top three list consists of sustainability, security and of course AI meets IoT. AI loves data, IoT generates a lot of said stuff so they thrive as playmates is obvious. But let's leave the IoT industry for a moment, let's also leave sustainability for a moment and focus on my two top trends, security and AI, and look back at 2024 and when things can go incredibly wrong in these areas.

Old networks create new threats

Speaking of security. On October 13, there was an attempted break-in at a water reservoir in Bollnäs. Shortly thereafter, a VMAs about unusable water. We may see more of this type of attack, and having your systems in order cannot be emphasized enough. It is painful that Helsingevatten's CEO Ylva Jedebäck Lindberg believes that after the disconnection of the 2G and 3G networks, the surveillance cameras do not work as they should. They had not had time to fix it. Personally, I strongly doubt whether the GSM network would have been enough for a surveillance camera, so it must have been the shutdown of the 3G network that caused the outage, and its best before date is extremely soon. The fact that the networks are being shut down is not new news, and what's more, people knew about it. I really feel sorry for them, and I hope it is a wake-up call for others.

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Do you work in any business that is covered by NIS2The Directive also requires both cybersecurity and physical protection for critical infrastructures, including water reservoirs and water supply systems. Since the water sector is classified as an “essential sector” under the Directive, this means that water facilities must have their security in order to protect against potential physical and cyber-based threats. The NIS2 Directive officially entered into force for EU member states on 18 October 2024, when all Member States were expected to have implemented the Directive in national law. If a security measure is known but not addressed in time, this can be interpreted as non-compliance under NIS2. So I have a message for all of you: GSM and 3G networks are not something you should build any part of your business on. Change systems immediately. Helsingevatten managed to get by with a few days until the NIS2 implementation, but now it is time to comply with NIS2 for all of you who are covered.

GPT bloopers as AI takes over

On to top trend number one, AI, a topic that is a bit more pop-culture than security. There are any number of comical stories to tell around AI. AI, by the way, is usually someone GPT model who made comical mistakes and not just AI in general. One of my first “aha moments” was when I tested ChatGPT and its knowledge of LPWAN and asked it to “give me the last answer again” in a chat and then got a blog post about online poker, something that is not something I have tested, will not test and certainly did not chat about. It gave me the last answer from another chat instead. I will not diss ChatGPT and its brothers and sisters, useful tool in many respects but not when it comes to letting it take over the writing and in its infancy the integrity and security was a bit questionable as you notice. I also note that several colleagues in the industry work with said tools, but sometimes with far too low a level of control of AI-generated textsAn example is to write jumping stilts and photo gloves in the product text about a router instead of network port speed and upload speed.

Fast and wrong is a concept older than pop strings, but even rushing slowly can have consequences, if I look at the challenges of the technology shift from GSM/3G to modern systems. What happened to lagom er best?