Berto Jongman: Platform Capitalism, Empire and Authoritarianism: Is There a Way Out?

Corruption, Ethics, Politics, Security
Berto Jongman

The world will face more widespread and intensified surveillance, but this time it could be framed as something for our own good, for the good of humanity.

Just as contemporary activist movements rely on platforms, so too does authoritarian populism. Platforms have played such a significant role in the success of this current wave of global authoritarianism that one might even call it platform authoritarianism. Where Trump had Twitter, President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil had WhatsApp; more specifically, Bolsonaro rose to power through a regressive movement that lived not just in the streets but was organized and composed on countless WhatsApp groups — a contemporary, more networked version of the classic revolutionary cell structure, perhaps. The attempted genocide of the Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar was also partly organized and encouraged on Facebook. And, more mundanely, platforms are used routinely by specialist data analysis groups — whether they are private companies such as the infamous Cambridge Analytica, or state-sponsored, like the “Bear” groups linked to Russian security intelligence — to attack, undermine and even hijack democratic systems, from national elections to referenda, using enormous quantities of intimate user data for targeted political advertising, misinformation and voter suppression.

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Penguin: Open Source Networking, Telecommunications Waking Up…

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Innovation, Knowledge, Money, Security, SmartPlanet, Software

Open Source Networking and a Vision of Fully Automated Networks

Transforming telecom

As an example of transformative change that is now underway, Joshipura pointed to the telecom industry. “For the past 137 years, we saw proprietary solutions,” he said. “But in the past several years, disaggregation has arrived, where hardware is separated from software. If you are a hardware engineer you build things like software developers do, with APIs and reusable modules.  In the telecom industry, all of this is helping to scale networking deployments in brand new, automated ways.”

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Penguin: Open Source to Power Security Operations

Security
Who, Me?

Open source to power Telstra security operations centres

Telstra will offer enterprise-grade managed security services from SOCs in Melbourne and Sydney

The telco’s director of security solutions, Neil Campbell, said the new SOCs and Telstra’s new platform are part of “reimagining” how managed security services are delivered, particularly in the context of the vast quantities of data enterprises find themselves grappling with thanks to developments such as the Internet of Things.

Using open source offers “the ability to be master of your own destiny when it comes to features and timelines,” he added, allowing the telco to be flexible in order to meet its clients’ requirements as well as adapt to an evolving market.

Another reason for using open source is that “by contributing to the open source community we put the tools in the hands of users who might otherwise not be able to afford an enterprise-grade SIEM platform or for their own reasons would never outsource and are looking for some flexibility in-house,” Campbell said.

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Berto Jongman: Say NO to Mandated Cyber – Insecurity (“Keys Under Doormats”)

Access, Security
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications

We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.

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Jean Lievens: European Open Science Cloud

Access, Architecture, Cloud, Data, Design, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Science, Security, Software, Sources (Info/Intel), Spectrum
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Towards the European Open Science Cloud

CERN has recently published a paper which outlines the establishment of the European Open Science Cloud that will enable digital science by introducing IT as a Service to the public research sector in Europe.

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Jean Lievens: Can Analytics Save The Earth?

Access, Architecture, Data, Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Science, Security, Software
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

This Earth Day, Let's Start Using Analytics To Conserve Energy

The success of new energy projects relies on one crucial skill: the ability to derive insights from massive amounts of rapidly changing data. That’s why utilities and energy companies are adopting analytics to meet the rising demand for renewable energy from more sophisticated customers.

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