climate and comms

Starting in the mid 1990’s Africa underwent a ‘mobile revolution’ whereby from a standing start of below 1% telephone penetration (tele-density) -   the Continent now boasts over 800 million mobile phones.     By skipping the so-called ‘landline’ technologies the mobile operators leapfrogged a technology generation.   These mobile networks, it can be argued, have been a major contributor to the economic upswing the Continent has experienced since the start of the new millennium.     The mobile revolution is now over as growth has moderated and penetration levels started to peak.     However, a new revolution beckons - the Internet revolution.   Africa falls behind the Rest of the World when it comes to broadband with less than 15% penetration, mainly in the cities.    During the last 5 years numerous submarine cables have been installed, connecting Africa to the Globe.   These fibre-opti...

FIDO or Fast Identity Online was launched last week by a couple of Internet big hitters most notably PayPal.   They clearly have a vested interest in ensuring that their transactions are secure.     FIDO aims to provide specifications or standards to the industry that embody  an approach to authentication which starts to move away from the ‘security by obscurity ‘  or user name/password paradigm prevalent today.   The main reason why the incidence of hacking is sky-rocketing.   [ Twitter Hacked ] FIDO aims to leverage hardware devices such as phones and tablets as well as fingerprint readers, webcams, TPM ( Trusted Platform Module)  chips and tokens into an open-standard whereby there will be inter-operability between different systems but which comply to the standard.   A client/server architecture in combination with some hardware fingerprint starts to approach a much more secure approach th...

Experts from Gartner have said that the recent 'froth' of M&A activity in the security space does not constitute a 'trend'.   While 'one swallow does not a summer make'  I would contend that this is in fact a trend and that it set to hold for at least another year.   Why? Well first of all the 'froth' was in fact more like a large set of Atlantic rollers breaking on the Cape coast!!!  Consider the number of deals that have taken place in the last 6 months ( see previous blog) crowned by the recent announcement by HP of its acquisition of Arcsight for $1.5bn. "   Hewlett-Packard  has agreed to buy high-end technology security company ArcSight for $1.5bn to profit from its customers’ increasing concerns about  protecting their data from hackers . The cash offer of $43.50 a share for Silicon Valley neighbour ArcSight was more than 50 per cent above where the company was trading before reports last month that it was courting buyers. It value...

So how do you value your privacy in the Facebook age ? Does it matter to you that the calls you make, the emails you send, your credit card transactions, the Internet sites you visit, the images of you travelling to work, your social networking posts are now stored at data centres in the Cloud and retrievable by myriad marketers, Government agencies and companies ? None of whom you ever entrusted with your information in the first place. Your digital footprint is a permanent record of your every move. Data is the pollution of the Information age. Everything we do generates data, and a secondary spin-off of Moores law is that every year it gets cheaper to store and process this data. So rather than sort through our e-mails and delete the ones we don’t need – we just keep them all – it is easier and cheaper to do so. The same thing happens with all of our data now. Most of ‘your’ data actually belongs to someone else. All of your G-mails, everything you ...