SteveJ-restore-test

What  did US Intelligence tell the Australian Government about Real Network Security  when a chinese vendor was vetoed  as supplier of NBN (central?) switches? Now that we have O'bama admitting " we did Stuxnet, with a little help ", we know that they aren't just capable and active, but aware of higher level attacks and defences: you never admit to your highest-level capability. Yesterday I read two pieces that gave me pause: the first,  the US Navy replacing Windows with Linux for an armed drone was hopeful, the other should frighten anyone who understands Security: there's now a market in Zero-Day vulnerabilities . The things the new-world of the NBN has to protect us against just got a lot worse than you can imagine. Links in that article: Google's responsible disclosure  [and payments] “The Hackers Who Sell Spies The Tools To Crack Your PC (And Get Paid Six-Figure Fees) " “Shopping For Zero-Days: A Price List For Hackers’ Secret Software Exploits ...

Will Apple, in 2013, release its next Game Changer for Television following on from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad? If they do, will that break the Internet as we know it when 50-250MM people trying to stream a World Cup final? Nobody can supply Terrabit server links, let alone afford them. To reinvent watching TV, Apple has to reinvent its distribution over the Internet. The surprising thing is we were first on the cusp of wide-scale "Video-on-Demand" in 1993. Can, twenty years later, we get there this time? Walter Isaacson in his HBR piece, " The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs " says: In looking for industries or categories ripe for disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than they should be. In 2001 portable music players ... , leading to the iPod and the iTunes Store. Mobile phones were next. ... At the end of his career he was setting his sights on the television industry, which had made it almost impossible for people to click...

With the release by IBM of " Australia's Digital Future to 2050 " by Phil Ruthven of IBISworld  there is now some very good modelling to say "The Internet Changes Everything", with some Industry bulwarks of the past set to disappear or radically shrink and others, "New Century Industries" (my words), that don't yet exist at scale , will come to the fore of our economy. Previous pieces that link the NBN/Smart-Internet with "Negawatt" programs are now more relevant: Smart Internet+Smart-Grid: making money and reducing carbon footprint Smart-Grids and Carbon Trading: Enough for an economic Negawatt scheme? I'd appreciate someone with real Maths and Analytic Economics ability to tear apart my simple assumptions and ideas to create something achievable and provably economically advantageous to Australia. But until then, I have to let my simple arguments try to carry the day. I think "the Negawatt" is a Big Idea that's been 2...

There's stuff that I don't know about the technical implementation of the NBN using Gigabit PON (Passive Optical Network) - and I'm not sure where to find them: What sort of fibre are they using? Can it be upgraded to normal Ethernet? Does this fibre have a 20km range? Is that 28dB loss or more in 20km? How many dB loss do the splitters introduce? The wikipedia page suggests that the 2.448Gbps downstream link is normally split into 32 subscriber fibres - and that it does that in 28db. Is that a single splitter in-the-field? [low loss, high fan-out] Or a number of splitters that will be deployed between the head-end and subscriber. Will NBN Co be laying additional empty conduit/pipe in the pits it digs? Or if using aerial cables (power poles), making provision to easily run additional fibre. In 2000, Adrian Blake in Cooma paid AGL/Great Southern Energy to lay extra conduit in the trenches being dug to reticulate natural gas in the town. The "Dot Boom" became the ...

The NBN started as an estimated $5B Rudd/Conroy project tender to deploy Fibre-to-the-Node, to which the owner of the copper network to the Nodes , Telstra, declined to respond beyond a single page. The next iteration was the $43B Rudd/Conroy Fibre-to-the-Home (FttH) scheme a s a tertiary-level Stimulus Package , addressing longer-term impacts of the GFC. It hadn't been ALP policy before then. After Kevin '07 became Toast '10, Gillard/Conroy had the opportunity to walk away from the NBN, but the ALP became wedded to the NBN in the 2010 election. In the spirit of the knife-edge Parliament, the Abbott/Turnbull Opposition stance on the NBN is " not what they said ", with Turnbull initially charged by Abbott with "destroy the NBN" and now having morphed that into "we'll do it cheaper, with less waste". The NBN is the most notable current place where Politics meets Engineering. The tension in this project is between the lead-time for large infra...

Synopsis: The Killer App is the new Ecosystem:    small Apps, Platforms for Ordinary Folk and the Ubiquitous and Universal Network. Reviewing notes for these posts: Lesson from History. Facebook is only 7-years old. L2 VPN's + turn-key Telco packages: Vertical Integration? How I'd restructure the NBN finances. Led to a new insight: Killer Apps aren't necessary or likely in the Post-PC era. In 1995 it was: "The Network is the Computer" , in 2012 it's: "The Platform is the Application". Just the steady take-up from "Early Adopter" to "Early/Late Majority" accounts for a 15-20 fold growth in demand... Facebook & Google started small and Just Kept Growing. Ditto the iPhone. How big will they get?? Still more people on the planet who can connect to all of them, so "bigger". I'm starting to form a view that the "Killer Apps" of the PC era were an aberration. Once people have bought the enabling technology (p...

Turnbull has a central criticism of the NBN, and it is astute and credible: Is there any evidence it will provide Extra Value, or is that just an Article of Faith? I watched the Mark Zuckerberg piece on ABC one night prior to their $100B float today, which triggered the thought: The NBN Mk 1. won't be fully deployed for 7-10 years. What might be different then? Maybe looking 7-years back might give us some clues... Zuck started in 2005 and isn't 30 yet and changed the world. That's a Generation or two in Internet time, and only a fraction of the lead time for physical infrastructure and large scale change like upgrading servers and corporate technology. NBN opponents assume "there has to be a Killer App" for the NBN.Microsoft is still insisting "Everything is PC" whilst looking for The Next Big Thing , and languishing economically. Meanwhile Apple, Google, Facebook and a host of hot new startups that build on the available infrastructure. Sometimes  just...

Tony Simmons recently wrote a piec e suggesting that the Banks could be their own Telco using the NBN. Banks in Australia and New Zealand have run co-operative businesses for many years. A couple that spring to mind: the Australian Payments Clearing Association  and Bankcard, Australia's first Credit Card in the 1970's, was run by "Charge Card Services". There are many advantages, not just cost, but Security [protection against hacking/attacks], very strong Identification of source and destination, and strong independent logs and auditing of transactions. In fact, the L2 VLAN abilities of the NBN allow a whole range of very interesting non-switching-provider networks. Federal Government is an obvious one. There's already ICON around Canberra, but every Agency has different supplier agreements and the Telcos play "divide and conquer" with them. There only needs to be one "GovieNet". Such a single network would allow employees, contractors and f...

I think there are 3 actions the Gillard Government can undertake to improve the prospects of the NBN. 1. Reform NBN Co into a Co-operative owned by Telcos and ISP's. Takes away the problem of the wholesaler being a monopoly and setting prices too high. It's necessary to get the voting/Governance right so Optus/Telstra don't automatically control it, but still have some influence. Funding? I don't know enough about the topic to know how the Govt can raise bonds for a Co-OP. Perhaps they can be allowed to raise Govt Guaranteed Bonds like the old Telecomm/Telstra Bonds. 2. Let the market speak!! Allow subs to prepay for service to bring forward their installation. This allows retail customers to put their money where mouth is, and is an additional source of cheap funds. There'd need to be several levels of pre-payment from ~$250 to $10,000, each with a different incentive/discount schedule. If whole street or communities pre-paid to $2,500/household, that should ...

Malcolm Turnbull trotted this out and it really needs to be highlighted and responded to in and of itself: it's is so fundamentally flawed as to be inconceivable for an informed person, let alone the expert commentator he'd like to portray himself as From Malcolm Turnbull's "Comms Day" 2012 speech : Another takeaway is that ‘inside the house’ costs for FTTP can mount and become a serious economic factor. These costs tend to fall over time, and vary from place to place, but in the UK ‘inside the house’ expenses have been estimated to be 20 per cent of total FTTP costs.  The Telstra fibre rollout in South Brisbane likewise indicates this expense is likely to be material – Telstra this week confirmed industry reports that it is using up to a day of technician labour at each residential premise, adding up to $1000 to the cost of the cutover.  It is not clear NBN Co has budgeted for this expense anywhere. If it has, it would be instruct...

At 'Comms Day' 2012, Malcolm Turnbull asked : [ more audio ] "Why do we need to run fibre into every home?" We aren't building a network for 2010, but one able to easily handle the demands of 2020 and upgradeable as needed during its 25-30 year life. There are 3 reasons we "need to run fibre into every home", beside the obvious [3G/4G networks are perfect for mobile devices and exactly wrong for fixed services]: Storage (Disk & Flash) drives demand for bandwidth, especially upload capacity. A Cyberwar will be won or lost in 3 minutes. Defences must be automatic and "full-coverage". Australian Telcos don't just not co-operate, they actively self-harm to attack competitors. There is also a wild-card: Just what will Apple come up with in 2013 to follow on from the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010. Will it be "TV done right" as Walter Isaacson implies, or something closer to the "Knowledge Navigator"? Either way, we'...

AUSTRALIAN TELCO BUSINESS PRACTICES Australian Telcos aren't just uncooperative, their behaviours are pernicious, obstructive and often perversely self-injurious. This (and the GFC) is why Telstra's share price fell around three times pre-NBN, and has recovered over 10% in the short time since the NBN arrangement has been completed. There are 4 incontestable examples of this: Telstra/Optus cable rollout. ISDN only as a 'premium service'. ADSL 1 (ACCC intervention), ADSL 2 turn-on and ADSL 2 DSLAMs & ULL (non) churning. Mobile roaming. The massive and predictable waste of money caused by Telstra purposefully overbuilding the Optus network, even as they deployed, was sheer bloody-minded behaviour. When they'd beaten Optus to a standstill they proved that to "queer the pitch" (prevent others from 'scoring') was their only objective by never completing their own cable network. Telstra had the resources and capability to finish their roll-out to 85-...

STORAGE DRIVES DEMAND FOR INTERNET USE. Since IBM introduced the first disk (5MB, RAMAC) in 1956, demand for storage has grown relentlessly, as demonstrated by yearly total disk sales. Disk Vendors have collapsed to 2+1 as we enter the end-game. Storage drives demand for bandwidth, both for data exchange/transfer and backups. Bandwidth demand will track storage sold, lagged by 1-3 years. The proliferation of smartphones with video has driven the explosion of content on social media, and You-tube's "60 hours of video uploaded every minute" is only set to get higher. By 2020, the last 10-fold scale-up of disk drives will be complete with 3.5" drives maxxing at 20-40TB: 1-10,000 hrs video [or for 'action' HD, ~500 hours with MPEG-4 variable encoding/bitrates.] Flash is also in its last 10-fold scale-up and starting to suffer the same scaling problems that began in 2004/5 for DRAM. There are at least 3 candidate technologies to replace Flash and fuel further grow...

CYBER-WARFARE and the Australian NBN. We know from "Stuxnet" that Nation States are actively building and deploying Cyber warfare tools, applying them to National Security concerns and running them as Military, not technical, operations. This includes accurate reconnaissance and network topology and vulnerability mapping. The worst case is that attackers will gain access to the network control tools and infrastructure. Recent coverage suggests that Obama denied a US Military request to launch a cyber attack on Syria's infrastructure during the recent 'troubles'. From the "slammer" worm, we know that any Cyber warfare attack will be fully developed within 3 minutes, and any attack will be launched at the worst possible time for defenders, possibly accompanied by physical distractions. Recovery from "munitions grade" worm/malware compromise will be long and expensive. Experience is that malware infections is as damaging to businesses as a fire: W...

Whilst reading this piece today I 'had a thought'. " Militarisation of cyberspace: how the global power struggle moved online ",  Nick Hopkins, guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 April 2012 15.00 BST One argument in support of the NBN I've not heard is about Security , but not the "how to keep your bank account and credit card safe" kind - the usual direct theft or Identity Fraud talked about at Cyber-Security conferences. The National Security kind that interest the Intelligence agencies and Military, a.k.a. "Cyber-warfare". This is as far removed from normal Cyber-security as guarding bank vaults is from fighting a war. Attack, and hence Defence, is taken to a whole new level: because the resources employed and what is at stake is taken to a whole new level. The Y2K debacle/non-event conclusively demonstrated a number of things, one of which was Federal Government "front office" functions (normal day-to-day tasks) were completely dependent ...