A National Broadband Plan for Our Future: A Customer-Centric Framework

Congress has recently charged the Federal Communications Commission to establish a National Broadband Plan. This paper argues that a customer-centric plan, which puts the customer in control of decision-making, will yield the best broadband result for the U.S. The Federal government must establish a market infrastructure that encourages competition, requires transparency of both network providers and application providers, and includes vigorous antitrust enforcement. Competition from wireless broadband is present now and will become far more prevalent shortly, on the basis of current and announced investment plans. Regulators must also make available far more licensed spectrum to ensure this competition is realized. Calls for regulation in the form of mandated unbundling and more unlicensed spectrum are regulatory cul-de-sacs with proven track records of failure. Calls for regulatory control of network provider practices (other than transparency), such as network neutrality, are misguided. Such decisions are best left to customers, who can very well decide for themselves which of the broadband providers offer terms that best suit the customer.Technology and Industry

WiMax - a critical view of the technology and its economics

University of the Witwatersrand Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment School of Information and Electrical EngineeringMobile Broadband is now more of a necessity than a luxury, especially amongst the younger generation, irrespective of where they live. Mobile WiMax and LTE, the latest and fastest Mobile Broadband technologies, mark significant improvements over 3G networks because they use IP (Internet Protocol) end-to-end. To end-users, this means faster network speeds, better quality services, and increased coverage area. To the Network Operators, this means simplified network architectures, efficient use of resources, and improved security. In this report, the different issues and challenges related to deploying Mobile WiMax (802.16e or 802.16m) in rural South Africa, were identifed and explored. In this project, Atoll, SONAR, and Touch Point analysis tools were used to determine which Mobile Broadband technology is economically and technically suited for rural South Africa. It was found that LTE yields superior performance results than WiMax, which in turn yields superior performance results to all other existing 3G technologies. However it will take time for LTE to reach rural areas therefore WiMax can be considered as a solution to extend Broadband services to rural South Africa and thus assist in bridging the digital divide. Recommendations on how best to deploy Mobile WiMax are made based on observations made from the experimental work.MT201

The Proceedings of 14th Australian Digital Forensics Conference, 5-6 December 2016, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

Conference Foreword This is the fifth year that the Australian Digital Forensics Conference has been held under the banner of the Security Research Institute, which is in part due to the success of the security conference program at ECU. As with previous years, the conference continues to see a quality papers with a number from local and international authors. 11 papers were submitted and following a double blind peer review process, 8 were accepted for final presentation and publication. Conferences such as these are simply not possible without willing volunteers who follow through with the commitment they have initially made, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the conference committee for their tireless efforts in this regard. These efforts have included but not been limited to the reviewing and editing of the conference papers, and helping with the planning, organisation and execution of the conference. Particular thanks go to those international reviewers who took the time to review papers for the conference, irrespective of the fact that they are unable to attend this year. To our sponsors and supporters a vote of thanks for both the financial and moral support provided to the conference. Finally, to the student volunteers and staff of the ECU Security Research Institute, your efforts as always are appreciated and invaluable. Yours sincerely, Conference Chair Professor Craig Valli Director, Security Research Institut

DNS to the rescue: Discerning Content and Services in a Tangled Web

A careful perusal of the Internet evolution reveals two major trends - explosion of cloud-based services and video stream- ing applications. In both of the above cases, the owner (e.g., CNN, YouTube, or Zynga) of the content and the organiza- tion serving it (e.g., Akamai, Limelight, or Amazon EC2) are decoupled, thus making it harder to understand the asso- ciation between the content, owner, and the host where the content resides. This has created a tangled world wide web that is very hard to unwind, impairing ISPs' and network ad- ministrators' capabilities to control the traffic flowing on the network. In this paper, we present DN-Hunter, a system that lever- ages the information provided by DNS traffic to discern the tangle. Parsing through DNS queries, DN-Hunter tags traffic flows with the associated domain name. This association has several applications and reveals a large amount of useful in- formation: (i) Provides a fine-grained traffic visibility even when the traffic is encrypted (i.e., TLS/SSL flows), thus en- abling more effective policy controls, (ii) Identifies flows even before the flows begin, thus providing superior net- work management capabilities to administrators, (iii) Un- derstand and track (over time) different CDNs and cloud providers that host content for a particular resource, (iv) Discern all the services/content hosted by a given CDN or cloud provider in a particular geography and time, and (v) Provides insights into all applications/services running on any given layer-4 port number. We conduct extensive experimental analysis and show that the results from real traffic traces, ranging from FTTH to 4G ISPs, that support our hypothesis. Simply put, the informa- tion provided by DNS traffic is one of the key components required to unveil the tangled web, and bring the capabilities of controlling the traffic back to the network carrier

A Peer-to-Peer Network Framework Utilising the Public Mobile Telephone Network

P2P (Peer-to-Peer) technologies are well established and have now become accepted as a mainstream networking approach. However, the explosion of participating users has not been replicated within the mobile networking domain. Until recently the lack of suitable hardware and wireless network infrastructure to support P2P activities was perceived as contributing to the problem. This has changed with ready availability of handsets having ample processing resources utilising an almost ubiquitous mobile telephone network. Coupled with this has been a proliferation of software applications written for the more capable `smartphone' handsets. P2P systems have not naturally integrated and evolved into the mobile telephone ecosystem in a way that `client-server' operating techniques have. However as the number of clients for a particular mobile application increase, providing the `server side' data storage infrastructure becomes more onerous. P2P systems offer mobile telephone applications a way to circumvent this data storage issue by dispersing it across a network of the participating users handsets. The main goal of this work was to produce a P2P Application Framework that supports developers in creating mobile telephone applications that use distributed storage. Effort was assigned to determining appropriate design requirements for a mobile handset based P2P system. Some of these requirements are related to the limitations of the host hardware, such as power consumption. Others relate to the network upon which the handsets operate, such as connectivity. The thesis reviews current P2P technologies to assess which was viable to form the technology foundations for the framework. The aim was not to re-invent a P2P system design, rather to adopt an existing one for mobile operation. Built upon the foundations of a prototype application, the P2P framework resulting from modifications and enhancements grants access via a simple API (Applications Programmer Interface) to a subset of Nokia `smartphone' devices. Unhindered operation across all mobile telephone networks is possible through a proprietary application implementing NAT (Network Address Translation) traversal techniques. Recognising that handsets operate with limited resources, further optimisation of the P2P framework was also investigated. Energy consumption was a parameter chosen for further examination because of its impact on handset participation time. This work has proven that operating applications in conjunction with a P2P data storage framework, connected via the mobile telephone network, is technically feasible. It also shows that opportunity remains for further research to realise the full potential of this data storage technique

Selected Computing Research Papers Volume 7 June 2018

Contents Critical Evaluation of Arabic Sentimental Analysis and Their Accuracy on Microblogs (Maha Al-Sakran) Evaluating Current Research on Psychometric Factors Affecting Teachers in ICT Integration (Daniel Otieno Aoko) A Critical Analysis of Current Measures for Preventing Use of Fraudulent Resources in Cloud Computing (Grant Bulman) An Analytical Assessment of Modern Human Robot Interaction Systems (Dominic Button) Critical Evaluation of Current Power Management Methods Used in Mobile Devices (One Lekula) A Critical Evaluation of Current Face Recognition Systems Research Aimed at Improving Accuracy for Class Attendance (Gladys B. Mogotsi) Usability of E-commerce Website Based on Perceived Homepage Visual Aesthetics (Mercy Ochiel) An Overview Investigation of Reducing the Impact of DDOS Attacks on Cloud Computing within Organisations (Jabed Rahman) Critical Analysis of Online Verification Techniques in Internet Banking Transactions (Fredrick Tshane

The digital challenge for multinational mobile network operators. More marginalization or rejuvenation?

Multinational mobile network operators (MNOs) rapidly emerged in the early 1990s and for a decade and a half were the dominant actors in their industry. We analyze the development and competitiveness of a typical MNO, Telenor. With the introduction of 4G in 2010, we show that Telenor, like other MNOs largely failed to respond to the opportunity that connectivity provided to develop digital services. Instead, these were developed by technology platform companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Telenor became a marginalized supplier of standardized internet connectivity. We argue that the ‘decade of lost opportunity’ (2010-2020) for Telenor was a product of a lack of ‘recombinant firm-specific advantages’ (FSARs). With the launch of 5G, an emerging global digital infrastructure, this sidelining is set to intensify unless Telenor responds to this new opportunity by developing B2B digital services. We analyze the FSARs that are necessary for a successful transition of capturing the value that 5G provides and the degree to which they are present, or potentially present, in Telenor