IoT news of the week for IoT for June 12, 2020

Qualcomm inks a deal with JLC Infrastructure and Ignite for smarter cities:   Qualcomm is now focusing on smart cities and selling its technology to municipal buyers with a new partnership with JLC Infrastructure and Ignite. Qualcomm has a history of trying to bring its chips into new markets by signing deals with partners already in the sector and trying to build reference designs. This indicates that Qualcomm may finally see a market in smart cities. Along with the partnership news, JLC also said it will allocate $75 million to build out projects developed with Qualcomm and Ignite. So JLC is definitely making a significant bet on smarter cities. ( Qualcomm )  — Stacey Higginbotham
How to get the OT team to care about IT security?  There are a lot of crappy webinars out there right now, many of which are just thinly disguised sales pitches, but there are also a lot of really useful ones. CyberX recently hosted one that had some good insights, on how to help get information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams on the same page by using cybersecurity. Yes, CyberX, which provides OT security, had an agenda, but its panelists, which included Paul Brager, director of OT security programs at Baker Hughes, and Niyo Little Thunder Pearson, cybersecurity team lead with energy utility company ONE Gas, also shared some pearls of wisdom. For teams trying to get their OT folks on board, the most useful tidbit was probably the fact that applying some kind of security system can help improve the bottom line by pointing out places where the system may not be configured correctly or is simply inefficient. Also, be prepared to hear OT say no at first. Not only will the IT team have to devote hours to understanding the OT environment, it must get the OT folks to understand how the security landscape has grown more sophisticated. Check out the replay or just the notes. ( CyberX )  — Stacey Higginbotham
Big tech hits the pause button on facial recognition:  Earlier in the week, IBM took a stand for racial injustice with a strongly worded letter to Congress laying out its values and condemning the use of facial recognition. Big Blue said it was no longer offering such software or services for sale to law enforcement, and some of its largest peers quickly followed suit. Amazon announced a minimum one-year pause on selling its Rekognition service to police, and the very next day, Microsoft made a similar statement, saying that until federal laws are passed to regulate the use of facial recognition tech by law enforcement, it will not sell its service either. There are certainly caveats associated with some of these pledges, but it’s a win for personal privacy, at least for the moment. ( Reuters )  — Kevin C. Tofel
IFTTT cuts the cord on Wink:  As if between its inability to deliver a mature product and the PR disaster it created around its move to a subscription-only plan Wink wasn’t facing enough...