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NBN from Cheaper, Faster and More affordable to a complete failure and a waste of money

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Over 10 years ago, the then Labor government undertook a major project for Australians to be part of the digital economy and help connect every household and business to the Internet via fibre optic cable. They set up a massive public company (NBN) to run the project.

The Coalition then won government and said it was too costly and dumped the fibre going back in time to use the existing copper network. They spent almost 12 months doing a cost benefit analysis and gave it a new name called MTM. Sold as being a Cheaper, Faster and More affordable service it was sure to be a winner and offered minimum 100Mbps to be rolled out to all Australian by Jun 2016.

Technically rolling back to copper can never be as fast as fibre, but in politics you can always promise one thing but deliver far less. You just cover it up spin and lies and get a new NBN CEO to cover your tracks.

So here we are in 2017, the cost of the project has more than doubled, rollout is massively off-tracck and we have a sub-standard NBN that is performing worse than ADSL was in 2007.

The CEO of NBN Bill Morrow is trying hard to convince people that we really don’t need high speed internet in Australia, so people should not complain about the speed. He goes to great lengths to defend the poor performance of the network. He argues that people are not signing up to higher speeds, so they don’t need them. What he neglects to say is that people are not signing up to 100Mbps or even 50Mbps because most of them can’t even get 25Mbps which is the minimum speed needed to be called “Broadband”. But Bill Morrow wants you to sign up to 100Mbps even though you will only get no more than 10Mbps.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is responsible for the mess now says the NBN is a failure and a waste of money. By saying this, he is also stating that its a waste for Australians to participate in the Digital Economy.

What was promised as was Cheaper, Faster and More affordable is now a complete failure and a waste of money. If you are one of the lucky ones who has NBN, at say 50Mbps, you are doing well. If its not rolled out in your area, then the future does not look good.

Government spyware vendor Hacking Team hacked

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Hacking Team, a notorious Italian based company that develops and sells surveillance technology to governments worldwide, has been breached. The attackers have leaked over 400 gigabytes of emails, files and source code allegedly taken from Hacking Team. It contains sensitive information allegedly obtained from the company’s systems.

Hacking Team offers lawful interception services tools, which the company calls “offensive technology,” to law enforcement and intelligence agencies from all over the world including Australia.

Given the amount of data leaked it appears the attackers has access to their systems for quite some time. Some of the emails show that the United Nations has been investigating the reported sale of Hacking Team’s surveillance tools to Sudan. It also shows they have customers in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt and Mongolia. The company denies any involvement with Sudan and has long asserted that it does not sell to oppressive governments , however the leaked emails seem to suggest otherwise.

Spreadsheets contained in the data dump also show the AFP paid for unspecified, offensive-use products from Hacking Team twice: once in November 2009 (A$126,525) and again in February 2010 (A$234,980) at a total of A$361,505.

The breach came to light early on Monday 6th Jul when someone hijacked Hacking Team’s Twitter account and started publishing screenshots apparently representing emails sent and received by the company’s employees. The screenshots show emails regarding DNS issues suffered by Hacking Team in March 2014 due to its service provider, commentary on reports from Citizen Lab and other researchers, and communications related to human rights investigations.

Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), analyzed some of the leaked files and identified a document that apparently shows every one of Hacking Team’s customers and the revenue they have generated. The document reveals that Ethiopia paid $1 million for surveillance software, while the government of Chile signed the largest contract to date, worth $2.85 million.

The company’s Twitter account still appears to be controlled by the attackers at the time of publishing. Hacking Team’s Christian Pozzi said on Twitter that the breach has been reported to law enforcement authorities and that the people responsible for the attack will be arrested.

The Hacking Team representative says they are in the process of notifying all customers about the breach. Pozzi’s Twitter account was also hijacked minutes before this article was published.

This incident should serve as a warning to everyone that attention to detail in the IT security business are mandatory, not optional.

Do we have to worry about our privacy?

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Several weeks ago whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked secret documents about the NSA surveillance program PRISM.

This program enables and allows the US government to access anyones personal data from companies such as Google and Facebook.

It basically allows the National Security Agency to tap directly into the servers of the nine mentioned companies to extract audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs of foreign users.

While the US Government provides many valid reasons to justify surveillance of this type, do they respect the wishes of other countries to have their own such programs.

For instance, should we respect China spying on American and Australia citizens?

Or, should there be a different standards and rules for other countries?

Lets look at the National Broadband Network (NBN) in Australia. The federal government rejected a bid by Huawei to take part in the rollout of the National Broadband Network due to their links with this type of surveillance practice.

However when asked about the NSA surveillance program PRISM, Australia’s Foreign Minister Bob Carr appears to display no concern about it. “She’ll be right mate“, thumbs up, was the message he told to the people of Australia, and in my view he might as well be endorsing it.

History shows us that we haven’t always have had governments respecting the constitution, law and the rights of the people. With this kind of practice in the hands of the wrong government, our chances of restoring a democratic society have become very slim.

I have listened to many views on this topic and it is clear that many people are afraid of their Governments.  Who they are in bed with, and who their enemies are. However, I feel it is the Governments who should be afraid of their people, especially in China where revolution is still fresh in the memory of their people.

Your views?

Trust Nobody – Especially Adobe and McAfee

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Last week, many users would have noticed a warning message to upgrade Firefox to the latest version. They would have also been informed that Flash Player was out of date and were directed to a link to apply an update.

According to Firefox stats, more than 10 million people have clicked the link, which is probably doing more than Adobe’s own efforts to keep people up to date.

Flash is a major security threat on most computers. Adobe only decide to check for updates every month by default, as they consider this is enough for threats such as zero-day Flash exploits. If you don’t believe me just see Steve Jobs’ thoughts on Flash.

When directed to the download page for the Flash update, you would think that you were to address the Flash security alone. But Adobe’s tactics and practices are cunning and deceiving. Adobe first tries to shaft you by thrusting the Adobe Download Manager upon you, and then McAfee security scan. For most people, they would not have noticed the automatically ticked boxes that gives you more than what you have asked for.

I never really had a problem Adobe or McAfee but several months ago McAfee acquired Secure Computing and then shortly after that decided to discontinue the Snapgear product range . The Snapgear products were fantastic until McAfee changed and re-branded the software. People complained about the performance of the new software and their response was to ditch the product.

It seems that both Adobe and McAfee as a team have developed a new strategy called, “lets install unwanted software on the users PC without them knowing”. After all, they know all about what users want judging by the noise on their user forums. I thought these guys were big enough not to have to resort to this sort of thing but I am wrong 10% of the time. The only justification I can see is that they are truly concerned about user’s security and feel they to just shove AV software down your throats. These are the same guys who ditch a perfectly good security appliance such as the Snapgear UTM.

Maybe they are getting ready to move their offices to Nigeria to better sell their products.

I pity the IT workers that are going to have to deal with uninstalling this but I guess Adobe and McAfee would not give a shit. As somebody who fixes PCs for other people from time to time, I have on a number of occasions had to talk people over the phone on installing Flash because they literally couldn’t do it. Mozilla have succeeded in little more than annoying a lot of people.

Here is my tip. Read the permission screen VERY carefully, as you may have to UN-check default boxes to not download any unwanted software.

Be very mindful of the sneak-in-the-back-door tactics that Adobe and Mcfee will use after this press release.