Nonprofit ISP in Mexico Wins Court Battle Against Huge Federal Fee

A nonprofit telecommunications provider offering voice and data services to remote areas in southern Mexico has avoided a crippling federal fee after challenging it in court.

A Mexican court recently ordered the Federal Institute of Telecommunications to reconsider the spectrum fee for Indigenous Community Telecommunications (ICT), which serves about 3,500 customers. The fee, about 1 million pesos or US$50,000, is equal to about half of ITC’s annual operating budget, said Peter Bloom, founder and a board member of ITC.

But the ruling, by the Collegiate Circuit Court on Administrative Matters, Specialized in Economic Competition, Broadcasting and Telecommunications, doesn’t end the legal battle between the nonprofit ISP and the federal regulator.

ITC doesn’t feel like the regulator honored the ruling, Bloom said, even though it exempted the ISP from fees in 2017 and beyond as long as it maintains its nonprofit status.

The court instructed the regulator to “take into account fundamental human and constitutional rights when deciding how or if to charge for spectrum use,” he added. “In our case, our mission is social, but we were being taxed as a commercial cellular provider in an amount that would make it impossible for us to continue operating.”

The Continue reading

The Voice of SD-WAN

SD-WAN is about migrating your legacy hardware away from silos like MPLS and policy-based routing and instead integrating everything under one dashboard and one central location to make changes and see the impacts that those changes have. But there’s one thing that SD-WAN can’t really do yet. And that’s prepare us the for the end of TDM voice.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Voice is a way of life for some people. Cisco spent years upon years selling CallManager into every office they could. From small two-line shops to global organizations with multiple PRIs and TEHO configured everywhere. It was a Cisco staple for years. Which also had Avaya following along quickly to get into the act too.

Today’s voice world is a little less clear. Millenials hate talking on the phone. Video is an oddity when it comes to communications. Asynchronous chat programs like WhatsApp or Slack rule the day today. People would rather communicate via text than voice. We all have mobile devices and the phone may be one of the least used apps on it.

Where does that leave traditional voice services? Not in a good place for sure. We still need phone lines for service-focused businesses Continue reading

Technology Short Take 100

Wow! This marks 100 posts in the Technology Short Take series! For almost eight years (Technology Short Take #1 was published in August 2010), I’ve been collecting and sharing links and articles from around the web related to major data center technologies. Time really flies when you’re having fun! Anyway, here is Technology Short Take 100…I hope you enjoy!

Also, a quick note that I removed the “Servers/Hardware” and “Storage” sections this time around, as I didn’t have any useful content to share. I’ll continue to evaluate whether I will/should include those sections moving forward (your feedback is welcome; hit me up on Twitter).

Networking

Security

  • Container wizard Jessie Frazelle shares a proposal for hard multi-tenancy in Kubernetes. Along the way, she also provides some additional (useful) information about existing isolation mechanisms.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

Q&A: Cisco’s Theresa Bui on the company’s Kinetic IoT platform

It's been almost a year since Cisco announced Kinetic, a cloud-managed IoT platform aimed at capturing a large and profitable share of the rapidly growing business and industrial IoT market. The executive in charge of Kinetic, Theresa Bui, spoke to us about the platform and how it's architected, in the wake of a flagship customer announcement - the Port of Rotterdam - and a limited partnership with IBM.What’s a customer getting for their money when they buy Cisco Kinetic?As a whole, the platform enables three core, functional capabilities. It allows you to easily and automatically extract data, and how we do that is we ship a library of automated connectors that help you extract data from various data pipes, put it into a model – whether it’s CoAP or MQTT or whatever the flavor that works for you.To read this article in full, please click here

GDPR: Going Beyond Borders

Today, the EU General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR – comes into effect amid a great deal of anticipation and build-up. For the past few years, companies and policy makers around the world have been preparing for this legislation to come into force. It introduces higher and stricter privacy requirements and heavy fines for noncompliance. The interesting, yet challenging, part of the GDPR is that it applies to all organizations processing the personal data of subjects within the European Union, regardless of their location.

In this sense, the GDPR is an ambitious effort that seeks to fill a gap in the field of Internet privacy. Implementation by organizations around the world has not been easy as the statute is complex and, in many ways, difficult to enforce. This has been particularly so for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and startups as the costs of ensuring compliance are considerable.

At the Internet Society, we are pleased to see privacy becoming a priority, not just a “nice to have.” As an organization with a global community, operating all over the world, we are among those who have been preparing for the GDPR. Doing privacy well is not easy, but it’s Continue reading

Unsupervised anomaly detection via variational auto-encoder for seasonal KPIs in web applications

Unsupervised anomaly detection via variational auto-encoder for seasonal KPIs in web applications Xu et al., WWW’18

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site, or from the WWW 2018 proceedings page).

Today’s paper examines the problem of anomaly detection for web application KPIs (e.g. page views, number of orders), studied in the context of a ‘top global Internet company’ which we can reasonably assume to be Alibaba.

Among all KPIs, the most (important?) ones are business-related KPIs, which are heavily influenced by user behaviour and schedule, thus roughly have seasonal patterns occurring at regular intervals (e.g., daily and/or weekly). However, anomaly detection for these seasonal KPIs with various patterns and data quality has been a great challenge, especially without labels.

Donut is an unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm based on Variational Auto-Encoding (VAE). It uses three techniques (modified ELBO, missing data injection, and MCMC imputation), which together add up to state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance. One of the interesting findings in the research is that it is important to train on both normal data and abnormal data Continue reading

PenTest Edition: Cracking WEP, WPS, WPA, and WPA2 Wi-Fi Networks with the “Fern Wi-Fi Cracker” Tool

The Cybersecurity Man

Here’s a fun assessment you can perform on your home network. I’m running Kali Linux 2018.1 in a virtual machine using VMware Workstation Player. My wireless network adapter is an Alfa AWUS036NHA with a 9dBi omni-directional antenna. Penetration testers may use the Fern Wi-Fi cracker as a security auditing tool to test the security of an organization’s wireless network.

Disclaimer:

The information provided on the cybersecurityman is for educational purposes only. I am in no way responsible for any misuse of the information provided. All the information here is meant to provide the reader with the knowledge to defend against hackers and prevent the attacks discussed here. At no time should any reader attempt to use this information for illegal purposes.

The “Fern Wi-Fi Cracker” tool, from hereon abbreviated as “FWC,” is a security auditing and attack software program provided in the Kali Linux distribution. FWC has the ability to…

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A Peek Inside That Intel Xeon-FPGA Hybrid Chip

Last week at the Fujitsu Forum in Tokyo, Lisa Spelman, who is general manager of Xeon products and Data Center Marketing at Intel, did a soft announcement of the hybrid Xeon CPU-Arria 10 FPGA hybrid chip that the company has been talking about for years and that is now available to selected customers. …

A Peek Inside That Intel Xeon-FPGA Hybrid Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Podcast: Talking Data Privacy and GDPR with Todd M. Tolbert

“Let’s raise the bar on data privacy and make the Internet safer.”  With the imminent arrival of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this was one of the points raised by Todd M. Tolbert, our Chief Administrative Officer, in an episode of the Non-Profit Tech Podcast published yesterday. Hosted by fusionSpan’s Justin Burniske, the 35-minute episode covered a wide range of topics, including:

  • the difference between data privacy and data protection
  • Todd’s thinking about the value the GDPR brings in terms of thinking about data
  • mistakes organizations make with regard to handling their data
  • resources for organizations to do more
  • how you can’t be liable for data that you don’t have in the first place
  • asking the question… do you really need to keep those 700 email addresses that no longer work?

And, of course, Todd being who he is, there were some Texan things mixed in to the conversation as well. I very much enjoyed the episode and found it a useful contribution to the ongoing privacy discussions that tomorrow’s GDPR deadline has generated.

Some of the resources Todd shared included:

IDG Contributor Network: Soil to sale, ranch to register: IoT connects producers, distributors, retailers and consumers

IoT, because of its flexibility and, let us admit, complexity, gives CIOs and business leaders in similar roles pause. And this anxiety about the pain of implementing comprehensive digital transformation is causing some foot dragging. Delaying however could put your business at risk, potentially causing your business to fall behind and ultimately fail.  Implementing IoT solutions offer the opportunity to sustain your business leadership, the ability to scale and create new types of sales/revenues, as well as cost savings.  No matter what the industry, there are partners aplenty eager to help enterprises transform their operations via the extraordinary power of fully deployed IoT systems.To read this article in full, please click here

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