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This is a sponsored blog post from TE Connectivity.

It is easy to develop an online relationship in this day and age. Maybe you frequent your favorite band’s fan page and discover a group of like-minded people eager to befriend you, or you have found an online book club that Brad Pitt just happens to also be a member of.

Your conversations are innocent at first, discussing the book or maybe a particular character and then, suddenly, boom: You are both declaring your undying love for one another and lamenting the fact that you can’t meet anytime soon because of Brad Pitt’s very busy movie-making schedule.

Though the example may seem extreme, how do you really know who it is you are dealing with at the other end of that network connection? Maybe it isn’t Brad Pitt at all….

As more and more people fall victim to conducting online relationships with fictitious characters—dubbed catfishing—computer scientists from the University of Edinburgh, Lancaster University, Queen Mary University of London and King’s College London have jointly designed a computer model to detect fake online personas or profiles, focusing specifically on gender and age.

Using information gathered from 5,500 public profiles from an adult website (prime hunting ground for catfishers), the computer models were trained to accurately determine the age and gender of the users based on their network activity and the writing style of their comments.

The findings: Researchers determined that 40 percent of the adult site users lied about their ages and one quarter of users lied about their genders.

What motivates a person to lie about their online persona? According to researchers, there is no absolute agreed-upon reason about what motivates the lying.

The motivation behind catfishing can be malicious and meant for achieving financial gain ("I love you, now send me some money!") or for personal gain for those people who maybe suffer from low self-esteem but want to connect with someone else ("I really do want to meet you, but I am so busy making this movie!").There is also a population of catfishers who simply enjoy lying or that use the lies to escape their own reality.

Researchers hope to make the technology available across all social networks in the future in an effort to flag dishonest users.

What do you do in the meantime? Go ahead, talk to Brad Pitt. But if Brad Pitt starts asking you to send him money, maybe you want to reconsider that particular correspondence.

Have you ever been catfished?

Raytheon Co. says it completed a modernization program for air traffic control in the New York area six months ahead of schedule. The company replaced software and hardware and more than 100 automation systems with the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System.

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Cyber-threats and attacks can take many shapes, but they all have the same objective: to cause harm for gain. The need to protect computer devices and IoT networks from destruction and damage is not new; it began in the late 1980s with a worm created by Robert Morris.

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Heiko Luckhaupt, Industry Sector Marketing Manager at RS Components discusses the gap between the IoT and the industrial world and a new open Arduino-compatible development platform for students and other learners to help bridge the divide.

To help students, makers and young developers in the transition from simple IoT projects and prototypes to entry-level industrial applications, the SIMATIC IOT2020 from Siemens is a highly valuable tool for university laboratories and academic environments active in the field of electronics and automation. IOT2020 is an Arduino-compatible industrial IoT gateway and builds a bridge between the two worlds by combining the flexibility of open-source ecosystems and high-level programming languages with the standards and established communication protocols. The system provides a simple way for engineers to get started with the industrial IoT, while meeting the challenges of an increasingly connected world. The highly affordable device comes with industrial certificates such as UL and CE. While being suitable for a large range of industrial customers, it is also perfect for educational purposes and provides students with the ideal platform to get a rapid experience of practical development. It also enables start-up companies and makers to develop, transform and build ideas into professional industrial projects and applications.

The IOT2020 is an open and flexible IoT gateway that is designed for continuous industrial operation. It can be used to retrieve, process, analyse and send data to almost any kind of device due to its various interfaces including Ethernet, USB and micro SD. The gateway is compatible with open-source software such as the Arduino IDE and Linux, as well as third-party hardware such as PLCs and sensors from various different brands via Modbus or PROFINET. The product is also compatible with Arduino shields and various programming languages, including high-level languages such as Java, C++ and JSON via a range of IDEs that include Eclipse and compilers for Yocto Linux. It is also expandable via an on-board PCIe port. Compatibility with the Arduino IDE and Arduino shields will enable students and makers to scale up their existing desktop-built projects and start getting familiar with industrial standards and communications protocols.

Overall, the new system brings together industrial standards with the flexibility of open hardware and software and will be a valuable tool for students and makers facing the challenge of developing industrial applications in an increasingly hyper-connected world.

Editor's Note: This is a sponsored blog post from RS Components Industrial.