Opinions

Centrify Asia-Pacific Regional Director Matt RamsayIT security is at greater risk from the bad habits of system administrators than from bad guys actually hacking into infrastructure warns Centrify Asia-Pacific Regional Director Matt Ramsay.

Mr. Ramsay calls for a fresh look at the core problems bedevilling our enterprise security. “Do we only need to guard against the bad guys trying to hack our infrastructure?” he asks. “Or do we need to defend ourselves from the bad habits of the good guys who manage that infrastructure?

“The bad guys are a given: Their hack attempts are driven by every motivation from greed to ego. But the bad habits of the good guys – your beloved systems administrators – are another matter.”

At this month’s Commsday Summit in Melbourne, Internode managing director Simon Hackett warned of “three elephants” that threaten to shake up effectiveness of the National Broadband Network (NBN).

“The first elephant in the room is the 121 points of interconnect,” he said. “From my point of view – unless you’re Telstra – 121 points of interconnect is a bad thing. All overhead costs rise from 14X to 121X – whatever X is. Also, when these PoIs are distributed from 14 to 121, it arguably reduces the reliability of the network to major failure on the point of the interconnect.”

The other two elephants in the room are:

  1. that Telstra retains ownership of the copper wires in the ground that it is being paid to turn off for the NBN and
  2. the Telstra Structural Separation Undertaking.

In the following 21-minute video of his Commsday presentation, Simon Hackett’s identifies some of the competition0related challenges that exist around the NBN. In Simon's view, these challenges focus in practice on actions that the ACCC should be taking in order to safeguard and augment the Long Term Interests of End Users.  The following video of Simon's presentation runs for about 21 minutes.

Simon Hackett(This post is based on a piece first published in Business Spectator).

In a recent online article (http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/dont-believe-the-myths-on-the-isp-filter/), Senator Conroy took on his critics regarding the current Australian Government mandatory Internet censorship policy.

I feel that its important to highlight some of his statements, and then provide some analysis of each of them.

I’ll quote from the opinion piece, and respond to each quotation, in turn: