NetHui 2015 – Friday afternoon

Safety and security in SMEs

  • Biggest challenge for one SME IT person very bad password practises
  • PABX issues, default passwords on voicemail resulting in calls getting forwarded overseas, racking up a big bill
    • Disable countries you don’t need
    • Credit Limits on your account
    • Good firewall practice
    • Good pin/password practice
  • SMEs wanted problem to go away since they had a business to run.
  • No standards for IT in small business, everywhere is setup different
  • 9 times out of 10 IT stifles business and makes things worse.
  • Small businesses recognise value, don’t want to spend on stuff that doesn’t return value
  • So many attack directions very hard to secure.
  • If you let other people using your business devices its a huge risk. Do you let your kids play with your work phone/laptop?
  • Biometrics don’t seem to be there yet
  • Maybe cloud-based software is a solution.

Disaster recovery

  • Pictures of before/after of satellite downlink and comms centre in Vanuatu after Cyclone
  • Cellular network survived, Datacentre survived, Fibre network survived
  • One month after disaster 80% of comms were restored
  • NZ team just sent over material via Govt CIO
  • Various other groups on the ground
  • Lots of other people doing stuff. Some were uncoordinated with main efforts
  • NZ people (Dean, Andy) Spent 90% of time on logistics and 10% of time on IT stuff
  • Vanuatu people very busy. eg offshore people had own mailing list to discuss things and then filter them through to people on the ground
  • Lots of offers from people.
  • Plan not in place in Vanuata, they now have one though
  • What people wanted was Generators and Satellite phones. Both of them are hard to ship via air due to Petrol/Lithium.
  • Very hard for non-regular (not the top 5 NGOs) to get access to shipping in military planes etc
  • Echo from people who had similar problems in Christchurch working with the regular agencies
  • Guy from vodafone said their company (globally) has a cellphone site that can be split between normal plane luggage
  • Twitter accounts for Wellington suburbs had a meeting with council
  • Some community outreach from the councils to coordinate with others. community resilience. Paying for street BBQs etc. “Neighbours day”
  • Vital infrastructure needs to have capacity in disaster.
  • Orgs need to have plans in place beforehand
  • Good co-operation between telcos in Christchurch Earthquake
  • Mobile app for 111 currently being looked at
  • Some parts of the privacy act can be loosened when disasters are declared to enable information sharing with agencies
  • Options for UPS on UFB “modems”

Panel: Digital inclusion – Internet for everybody

  • Panelists: Vanisa Dhiru (2020 Communications Trust), Bob Hinden (Internet Society), Professor Charles Crother (Auckland University of Technology), Robyn Kamira (Mitimiti on the Grid Project).
  • Charles
    • Cure-all quick technical fix
    • attitude to non-users
    • Recognise the dark-side of the Internet
    • What sorts of uses do we want to see?
    • Facilitating active vs passive users
    • Various stats on users. At around 80%. Elderly catching up with other groups
  • Vanisa
    • Digital inclusion projects, best know is “computers in homes”, In 1500 homes per year
    • Does digital disadvantaged just mean poor or other groups?
  • Tim
    • Network for Learning ( N4L)
    • Connecting up schools to managed network, many over RBI
    • School gets: router with firewall, some services on top of that
    • Means teachers don’t have to worry about the technical issues
    • map.n4l.co.nz is website with map of connected schools
    • Target 90% by end of the year. Getting down to smaller and more remote schools
    • Not just about having fibre connections and handing out tablets to every student
    • Raspberry Pi at each site they can to remote in to test network
  • Robyn
    • Issues 10 years ago about theft of data and concepts
    • Today we still see instances where models will have [Maori Chin Tattoo] and similar
    • Wellbeeding – health, education
    • Cultural preservation: creation too, not a museum piece
    • Economic development: how to we participate in dev of NZ
    • Mitimiti on the Grid. Very small school in Hokianga Harbour
  • I was tweeting a bit too much rather than typing here.
  • What is “inclusion”
  • Where the leadership be coming from
    • “everyone” . We live in a country small enough for everyone to do that.

 

General NetHui Feedback, some minor nagatives..

  • Need filtering of questions. Too many in all sessions turned into long statements. Val Aurora outlines a good method to prevent this.
  • I went to the “Quiet Room” once and there were people holding a noisy conversation
  • Heard there was a bit of an agressive questionare during the e-Mental health session
Share