Senegal First African Country to Implement Recommendations of ‘Personal Data Protection Guidelines for Africa’

Last week, we have had a busy two days (11-12 October 2018) in Dakar participating in a mutlistakeholder workshop on Privacy and Personal Data Protection in Senegal co-organized by the Personal Data Protection Commission (CDP), the Ministry in charge of Digital Economy (MCTPEN), the Internet Society Senegal Chapter, and supported by the African Regional Bureau of the Internet Society. This workshop was recommended in the Personal Data Protection Guidelines for Africa launched in May 2018 during #AISDakar by the African Union and the Internet Society.

Senegal stands out as the first African Union member to act on that recommendation and run such a workshop, bringing together policy makers, law enforcement, data protection authorities, lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, and actors of the private sector, civil society, and technologists to debate the issues and build a shared vocabulary and shared understanding.

The discussion was wide-ranging, informed, and mature

Wide-ranging, because the organizers did a great job of attracting a diverse and engaged set of stakeholders and giving them the time and space to contribute.

Informed, because the participants were asking all the right questions (about privacy, innovation, cybercrime, threats to information, reputation and Continue reading

Making better use of your Linux logs

Linux systems maintain quite a collection of log files, many of which you are probably rarely tempted to view. Some of these log files are quite valuable though and options for exploring them might be more interesting and varied than you imagine. Let's look at some system logs and get a handle on some of the ways in which log data might be easier to probe.Log file rotation First, there's the issue of log rotation. Some Linux log files are “rotated”. In other words, the system stores more than one "generation" of these files, mostly to keep them from using too much disk space. The older logs are then compressed, but left available for a while. Eventually, the oldest in a series of rotated log files will be automatically deleted in the log rotation process, but you’ll still have access to a number of the older logs so that you can examine log entries that were added in the last few days or weeks when and if you need to look a little further back into some issue you're tracking.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: When Will We Be Able to Purchase 802.11ax Access Points and Client Devices?

Today we focus on when new 802.11ax access points and client devices will become available. The Wi-Fi industry has made these questions uniquely difficult to answer, but this blog explains what we expect to happen. If you have the patience, save these predictions for rereading toward the end of 2019!The three important milestones along the path to commercial equipment are the IEEE 802.11ax standard, the Wi-Fi Alliance 11ax certification, and integrated circuit chips. These are a sequence in time, but with a lot of overlap.The First Milestone: IEEEThe IEEE writes standards: very detailed definitions of the packet formats, fields, and functions that make the protocols work. IEEE 802.11ax is written as an amendment to the current 802.11 standards and eventually will be folded into the mainstream 802.11 document. Even as an amendment, however, it is 600 pages long. Getting every detail of such a standard correct requires scrutiny from many experts, and the IEEE process involves reviewing drafts and submitting comments and corrections, which then update new drafts, and are reviewed again.To read this article in full, please click here

G20 Women’s Summit: Digital Inclusion for Women

What if future generations in 2030 learned about gender inequality in their history class and not in their lived realities? What can rural women achieve when included in digital society? What can we do now to ensure a future without a gender digital gap?

Many women and girls are being left behind in digital development. Women are 12% less likely to use the Internet globally than men, while in low and middle-income countries, the gap between women’s use and that of men is 26%. This is not only a question of connectivity, but about using the Internet in a meaningful way.

These were some of the critical issues the W20 Summit tackled in Buenos Aires last week.

W20 Argentina, a step forward in the right direction

Women20 (W20) is one of the key G20 engagement groups which supports the promotion of gender inclusive economic growth.

Its recent summit was an opportunity for leaders to make progress on several fronts ranging from digital inclusion to labor inclusion, financial inclusion, and rural development.

In the final Comuniqué, 146 delegates from all sectors of the economy committed to “[Improving] access, affordability, safety, and security of digital services, broadband, and connectivity plans, and the Continue reading

The Role of Enterprise Container Platforms

As container technology adoption continues to advance and mature, companies now recognize the importance of an enterprise container platform. More than just a runtime for applications, a container platform provides a complete management solution for securing and operationalizing applications in containers at scale over the entire software lifecycle.

While containers may have revolutionized the way developers package applications, container platforms are changing the way enterprises manage and secure both mission-critical legacy applications and microservices both on prem and across multiple clouds. Enterprises are beginning to see that container runtime and orchestration technologies alone don’t address these critical questions:

  • Where did this application come from?
  • Was the application built with company and/or industry best practices in mind?
  • Has this application undergone a security review?
  • Is my cluster performing as expected?
  • If my application is failing or underperforming, where should I look?
  • Will this environment run the same on the new hardware/cloud that we’re using?
  • Can I use my existing infrastructure and/or tools with this container environment?

Leading Industry Analysts Highlight Container Platforms for Enterprise Adoption

For some time, there was a lot of confusion in the market between orchestration solutions and container platforms. But in 2018, we are seeing more alignment across major Continue reading

Serverless Rust with Cloudflare Workers

Serverless Rust with Cloudflare Workers

The Workers team just announced support for WebAssembly (WASM) within Workers. If you saw my post on Internet Native Apps, you'll know that I believe WebAssembly will play a big part in the apps of the future.

It's exciting times for Rust developers. Cloudflare's Serverless Platform, Cloudflare Workers, allows you to compile your code to WASM, upload to 150+ data centers and invoke those functions just as easily as if they were JavaScript functions. Today I'm going to convert my lipsum generator to use Rust and explore the developer experience (hint: it's already pretty nice).

The Workers teams notes in the documentation:

...WASM is not always the right tool for the job. For lightweight tasks like redirecting a request to a different URL or checking an authorization token, sticking to pure JavaScript is probably both faster and easier than WASM. WASM programs operate in their own separate memory space, which means that it's necessary to copy data in and out of that space in order to operate on it. Code that mostly interacts with external objects without doing any serious "number crunching" likely does not benefit from WASM.

OK, I'm unlikely to gain significant performance improvements on this particular Continue reading

Cognitive Campus – Next Frontier

Arista’s focus on disruption, with datacenters and routing, transforming siloed places in the network to seamless Places In the Cloud (PICs) has been well appreciated by our customers. Our cloud networking decade has been achieved by upholding these cloud principles and I believe these trends will influence cognitive campus PICs. Legacy campus networks suffer from a similar complexity of too many layers, boxes, cables, operating systems, proprietary features and network management choices. A change is very much needed and welcome in the 2020 era.

Gartner: Digital business projects in a quagmire? Hack your culture!

ORLANDO – If you are a CIO or business leader an are having trouble moving forward on a new or existing digital business project, you should hack your current IT culture to get things moving.Digital business is accelerating, disrupting the way businesses and governments are doing business, said Mike Harris, executive vice president and global head of research for Gartner at the kickoff of Symposium/IT Expo the consulting firm’s annual strategyfest that this year drew over 9,000 CIOs and IT professionals for a look at the technologies and trends.To read this article in full, please click here