[LINK] Pirate Party Telecommunications Policy

[David Boxall]

Hi all,

I've raised the issue of the Pirate Party's lack of a telecommunications 
policy. 
 
Some of the assertions I'm getting in response strike me as a little 
weird. Particularly as they come from someone who says he has relevant 
experience.


... homes that are still too remote for a copper cable are definitely 
going to be too remote for a fibre connection, as a copper cable can 
be strung up on poles but you have to trench fibre and in the arid 
area of Australia there are plants whose roots steal water from other 
plants roots by slicing into them and they do the same thing to any 
underground cables they come across so they have to have extra 
reinforcement.
Isn't the fibre component of HFC normally overhead? I know that's the 
case for TransACT.


Any services provided by Fibre, including audio and video is purely IP 
based and will only work over the internet connection 
I thought NBN FttP made provision for both video and audio, outside the 
Internet. Am I misreading 
? 
Links to substantial information on non-Internet audio and video over 
fibre would help no end.


Now that the analogue TV has been turned off part of that spectrum is 
now being used for Digital Radio and Digital TV but this had no effect 
on any types of internet or mobile coverage
Don't both Telstra and Optus use some of that old TV spectrum for mobile 
telephony?


Any help, references, etc. would be greatly appreciated. It's hard for 
one of limited knowledge to detect all the BS, let alone counter it. ;)


If you want to join in, I think they allow non-members to comment.

--
David Boxall|  Dogs look up to us
|  And cats look down on us
http://david.boxall.id.au   |  But pigs treat us as equals
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Re: [LINK] RFI: Telstra DNS outage

[Roger Clarke]

At 13:27 +1200 13/5/16, Juha Saarinen wrote:
>Have some official comment from Telstra now:
>http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-dns-outage-causes-customer-grief-419496

>Update A Telstra spokesman acknowledged last night's outage and attributed it 
>to a failure with a component that manages traffic to its two DNS servers.
>"We can confirm there was an issue with one of our DNS servers which impacted 
>some of our corporate customers only. It was resolved in 90 minutes," the 
>spokesperson said.
>"We isolated the component and traffic was directed to the servers."

Thanks Juha!

This suggests that the Telstra spokesman may have mis-read the DNS entries the 
same way I did (in order to conclude that there were "two [and only two] DNS 
servers").

And that the Telstra spokesman may have overlooked the use of Anycasting.

Or, alternatively, the Telstra spokesman knows what he's talking about, and 
there's a single-point-of-failure for the entire Telstra service, viz. "a 
[single] component that manages traffic to its two DNS servers".

That's consistent with 'a router' and hence with my initial presumption that 
the two DNS-servers are on the same sub-net.  (But there are many other 
possibilities, so it certainly doesn't prove my presumption to be correct).

I need to revise my critical comments to something like "it still seems like 
incompetence on the part of Telstra's technical staff and/or execs (e.g. if 
they ignored risk assessments and tech recommendations) and/or spokesman".

I remain aghast, and I think Telstra customers should be as well.


-- 
Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd  78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 6916http://about.me/roger.clarke
mailto:roger.cla...@xamax.com.auhttp://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of LawUniversity of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer ScienceAustralian National University
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Re: [LINK] RFI: Telstra DNS outage

[Roger Clarke]

>> On 13 May 2016, at 9:02 AM, Roger Clarke  wrote:
>> Is the largest provider in the country utterly incompetent?
>> Or is there something important about Internet architecture that I fail to 
>> understand?

At 9:08 +1000 13/5/16, Avi Miller wrote:
>It's most likely that Telstra are AnyCasting their DNS servers:
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast
>Essentially this means that they have a single IP address that is routed to 
>the nearest actual DNS server to the requester. And that there can be lots and 
>lots of backends for this.

Thanks for this!

However, following through to RFC3258
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3258

it seems that redundancy, and hence accessibility when the primary DNS-server 
is unreachable, was *not* a motivation for the application of Anycasting to the 
DNS:
"The primary motivation for the development and deployment of these practices 
is to increase the distribution of Domain Name System (DNS) servers to 
previously under-served areas of the network topology and to reduce the latency 
for DNS query responses in those areas"

And, as I understand it, the first backbone router, where BGP comes into play, 
should intercept the packet addressed to the Telstra name-server, and 
substitute an IP-address based on its internal table.

If Anycasting is in use, and the Telstra name-servers were unreachable, then 
presumably either the BGP tables were polluted, or *all* of the net-near 
name-servers were out of action.  (Or even *all* of the name-servers were out 
of action, if the process is clever enough to detect that the net-near ones 
aren't responding and then sends packets to net-distant servers).

Either way, it still seems like incompetence on Telstra's part.

(And the speed with which it was fixed suggests that there could have been a 
pre-programmed solution to whatever the underlying cause was, had they bothered 
to implement it).


-- 
Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd  78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 6916http://about.me/roger.clarke
mailto:roger.cla...@xamax.com.auhttp://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of LawUniversity of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer ScienceAustralian National University
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Re: [LINK] Surveillance system

[JanW]

At 11:01 AM 13/05/2016, Stephen Loosley wrote:

>Swinburne Uni adds analytics to CCTV
>
>Looking to expand to facial recognition, heat maps. 

And come up with a brand new name:  Prison.




I write books. http://janwhitaker.com/?page_id=8

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jw...@janwhitaker.com
Twitter: JL_Whitaker
Blog: www.janwhitaker.com 

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you 
fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space. 
~Margaret Atwood, writer 

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Re: [LINK] Surveillance system

[Andy Farkas]

On 13/05/2016 11:01, Stephen Loosley wrote:

“In retail, shops use heat maps to work out which of their shops are more 
popular and how long people stand in front of the shelves.


I fear for my daughter's future

-andyf

PS. She's 2

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[LINK] Surveillance system

[Stephen Loosley]

Swinburne Uni adds analytics to CCTV

Looking to expand to facial recognition, heat maps.

By Andrew Sadauskas  May 13 2016  10:00AM
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/swinburne-uni-adds-analytics-to-cctv-419483


Swinburne University is leveraging its fleet of 930 IP-based CCTV security 
cameras to tap into analytics on everything from number place recognition to 
abnormal behaviour.

It plans to further bolster its capabilities in the future by adding heat maps 
and facial recognition platforms.

Swinburne IT security specialist Chris Goetze told iTnews collecting the 
analytics became possible after the university upgraded from analogue to 
digital surveillance cameras several years ago.

That move had been inspired by a particularly nasty storm across Melbourne’s 
eastern suburbs.

“Back in 2007, there was a big storm that went through Melbourne that caused a 
fair bit of property damage to our campuses. As a result of that, senior 
management realised they needed a way of seeing what was going on all of the 
campuses in real time,” Goetze said.

“It coincided with us doing a major network upgrade – probably our first one – 
so 10/100 PoE to every point and every comms room we had. And the decision was 
made to try to leverage off that investment in that network for CCTV."

Swinburne’s previous analogue CCTV system required physical video recorders 
within a couple of hundred metres of each camera.

The move to IP-based digital CCTV, using Axis cameras and Milestone Corporate 
XProtect software, removed this physical limitation, allowing the university to 
centralise its storage of security footage at a data centre on its main campus 
in Hawthorn, where the analytics platforms are now hosted.

“You’re limited in distance between your camera and your recorders, and that 
impacts the placement of your recorders – there’s a couple of hundred metres 
between your camera should be and where your recorder can be,” Goetze said.

“We have campuses in Croydon, Lilydale, Wantirna and the Melbourne CBD, yet 
they all connect on our network to our servers in Hawthorn. Because we have our 
own fibre connection [between campuses], we don’t have any latency issues. "

The university has now been able to leverage its IP infrastructure to introduce 
a number of analytics platforms, including iCetana for detecting unusual 
behaviour and Snap Surveillance to learn about the physical relationship 
between cameras, which integrate into the core Milestone platform using APIs. 
Licence plate recognition comes as part of the Milestone package.

Other pieces of the analytics puzzle – such as people counting – are done using 
applications deployed to the end devices.

“Because the cameras are a miniature Linux computer effectively, you can deploy 
apps directly on to the cameras, so we’ve deployed an app from a company called 
Cognimatics,” Goetze said.

“That runs directly on the camera head and sends the data to a SQL database, 
and you can deal with the data however you want after that.”

The combination of IP cameras and analytics, specifically abormal behaviour 
detection, helps the uni's physical security teams pick up things that happen 
around the university without having to monitor 600 cameras on screen, Goetze 
said.

“iCetana .. automatically detects abnormal behaviour or heavily changed 
conditions. It does that without a rule base, so we know it will pick up 
fights, someone falling over, or a car driving the wrong way,” Goetze said.

The camera-matching Snap Surveillance gives security staff a visual 
representation of the camera they’re interested in, along with other cameras 
nearby.

“So if you want to follow ‘person of interest A’ across the campus, this tool 
comes into its own then because you find your suspect on the camera, and it 
shows you nearby cameras they might walk towards," Goetze said.

“When you see them on the next camera you click on it to bring it into the 
central view, and it, in turn, shows you other cameras that are nearby.

"It makes it much easier for control room operators to track someone without 
having to remember ‘oh it’s camera 68 I need to jump to now, which is in this 
building’. It just does it for them.”

Not just security

The use of analytics goes beyond security, with people counting used to assist 
with the planning of library services.

“We use it throughout the seven levels of the library to work out which areas 
are overloaded, which areas they need to expand, which services are used more 
than others. Are the periodicals more interesting than the computer lab?” 
Goetze said.

“We’ve taken it a step further and put people counting in a number of study 
areas, and then present that information to students in a phone app, so they 
can see which study areas have spare seating without having to walk halfway 
across the campus only to find there’s no seats spare.”

Swinburne is now looking to bring facial recognition analytics into the fold.

“Facial matching comes on and off 

Re: [LINK] RFI: Telstra DNS outage

[Jim Birch]

Avi Miller wrote:

It's most likely that Telstra are AnyCasting their DNS servers


...so the problem would likely relate their routers' Anycast configuration,
rather than an actual dns server problem, I guess.

Jim
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Re: [LINK] RFI: Telstra DNS outage

[Hamish Moffatt]

On 13/05/16 09:02, Roger Clarke wrote:

itNews reports:

Telstra suffered a nationwide network outage last night, as two of its internet 
domain name servers ceased to respond to queries from thousands of customer 
systems.

Am I missing something here?

I've chastised small-time ISPs in the past for having both or all of their 
DNS-servers on the same sub-net and therefore (under IPv4 at least) subject to the 
same threats.  They thereby represent a single-point-of-failure, rather than the 
redundancy that is the whole point of having >1 DNS-server.

But Telstra currently shows this:

telstra.net.NS  dns1.telstra.net.
telstra.net.NS  sec1.apnic.net.
telstra.net.NS  sec3.apnic.net.
telstra.net.NS  dns0.telstra.net.

dns1.telstra.net.   A   203.50.5.200
dns0.telstra.net.   A   203.50.5.199

Is the largest provider in the country utterly incompetent?

Or is there something important about Internet architecture that I fail to 
understand?



Besides dns0/1.telstra.net there's two other servers there you've 
overlooked.


In addition to what the others have said, those are the IPs for 
telstra.net's name servers (used for everybody worldwide to find 
Telstra), not the name servers used by Telstra customers to find things 
on the Internet. On my cable connection in Melbourne the provided name 
servers are 61.9.133.193 and 61.9.134.49 
(dns-cust.lon.bigpond.net.au/dns-cust.win.bigpond.net.au).




Hamish
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Re: [LINK] RFI: Telstra DNS outage

[Avi Miller]

Hi,

> On 13 May 2016, at 9:02 AM, Roger Clarke  wrote:
> 
> Is the largest provider in the country utterly incompetent?
> Or is there something important about Internet architecture that I fail to 
> understand?

It's most likely that Telstra are AnyCasting their DNS servers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast

Essentially this means that they have a single IP address that is routed to the 
nearest actual DNS server to the requester. And that there can be lots and lots 
of backends for this.

Cheers,
Avi
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[LINK] RFI: Telstra DNS outage

[Roger Clarke]

itNews reports:
>Telstra suffered a nationwide network outage last night, as two of its 
>internet domain name servers ceased to respond to queries from thousands of 
>customer systems.

Am I missing something here?

I've chastised small-time ISPs in the past for having both or all of their 
DNS-servers on the same sub-net and therefore (under IPv4 at least) subject to 
the same threats.  They thereby represent a single-point-of-failure, rather 
than the redundancy that is the whole point of having >1 DNS-server.

But Telstra currently shows this:

telstra.net.NS  dns1.telstra.net.
telstra.net.NS  sec1.apnic.net.
telstra.net.NS  sec3.apnic.net.
telstra.net.NS  dns0.telstra.net.

dns1.telstra.net.   A   203.50.5.200
dns0.telstra.net.   A   203.50.5.199

Is the largest provider in the country utterly incompetent?

Or is there something important about Internet architecture that I fail to 
understand?

__

Telstra DNS outage causes customer grief
By Juha Saarinen on May 13, 2016 6:51AM
Two-hour interruption to services.
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-dns-outage-causes-customer-grief-419496

Telstra suffered a nationwide network outage last night, as two of its internet 
domain name servers ceased to respond to queries from thousands of customer 
systems.

Two Telstra name servers used by customers for domain resolution, ns0 and 
ns1.telstra.net, went offline just after eight o'clock last night, users 
reported.

Domain name system servers are used to look up and point client systems to the 
correct IP address for human readable URLs such as www.telstra.net.

Without working DNS resolution, web browsers and other applications are unable 
to locate the IP address of the server they need to communicate with.

The name servers appear to have come back up around 11pm yesterday.

Telstra's service status web page made no mention of the DNS server problem.

While many Telstra customers took to Twitter and Facebook to complain about the 
outage, the telco did not confirm the service interruption until this morning, 
when it said the issue had been dealt with.

@crakd67 Sorry for the delay in replying - the DNS issue has since been 
resolved - Steph
- Telstra (@Telstra) May 12, 2016

iTnews has contacted Telstra for comment on the outage.

The telco earlier this month pledged to pour an extra $50 million into its 
mobile network after a series of damaging outages in the early months of this 
year.


-- 
Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd  78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 6916http://about.me/roger.clarke
mailto:roger.cla...@xamax.com.auhttp://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of LawUniversity of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer ScienceAustralian National University
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