Don’t go onto the IoT right now, there’s some demons out there.
They use their programming skills to penetrate a company. They inject their code everywhere, giving them the power to paralyse it. That’s when the demands for money begin.
No, no, I’m not talking about a software licensing writ. Underhand it may be, but it’s perfectly legal to bamboozle customers into buying things which will cost 10 times more than they ever imagined. It seems to be accepted that anyone who buys software and doesn’t scan every page of the small print deserves all the litigation that’s coming to them, says Nick Booth, freelance IT and communications writer.
No, the menace I refer to is Ransomware. Which, since it doesn’t involve corporate lawyers, is a socially unacceptable method of fleecing.
Security is dominating today’s news as a Ransomware attack has hit 99 countries and the UK’s National Health Service has been crippled. The after-shock of this awful event has been almost as bad, as a tsunami of self-publicists has been energised.
A wave of IT security marketing managers, consultants and political point scorers is surging over us all, drowning our sensibilities with their suffocating sanctimony. They are scandalised that the NHS didn’t spend billions on whatever it is they wanted to sell.
As usual, many of us are struggling to know who to blame. It’s difficult, for example, to rush to judge UK NHS administrators when you know how complicated their entire infrastructure is. If we want to make sure this sort of thing never happens again, the answer would be to secure the foundations.
That’s not going to happen in systems that are already well entrenched, eclectic and irreplaceable. But it could happen in the ‘new builds’ and greenfield sites of the next generation of enterprise IoT.
This is where the Multefire Alliance (MA) could be a life-saver in generations to come.
Those familiar with the MA will know it as a group of network equipment makers, software vendors and chip manufacturers who are conspiring in their labs to cross the good bits of LTE with Wi-Fi. That always conjures up images of mad scientists, cackling away as they create a monster. The fact that this new creation is going to be made out of unlicensed frequency bands should horrify the media folk in the global village. It can’t be long before they assemble a torch-bearing mob and storm the laboratory demanding answers.
Head scientist, Assimakis Kokkos, the chairman of the technology specification for the Multefire Alliance, will have to explain exactly what’s going on in his laboratory. People are already nervous about Ransomware and DDoS. They will want to know: Is Kokkos creating another monster?
His initial answer won’t persuade the frightened villagers to put down their pitchforks. “We wanted to create something simple and effective that combines the robustness of LTE with the simplicity of installation that Wi-Fi offers,” Kokkos said.
The news that Multefire will work with both LTE and Wi-Fi won’t be much compensation to the frightened villagers. The fact that it’s both compatible with the 3GPP standard used by LTE and can easily be integrated with Wi-Fi won’t impress them either.
This sounds like great news for corporations and large enterprises, who can now create networks that reach from their basement floors to the great outdoors, supporting a unified Internet of Things that spans every possible environment. That’s great for big companies, people will say, but what’s in it for us?
The benefits of Multefire can be expressed in layman’s terms though. Multefire’s throughput can be massively faster, because it can aggregate multiple channels to give you a throughput of 100 Mbps as standard, or even 500 Mbps. Multefire, being a seamless and all-encompassing networking system, can sustain a connection to your iPhone or your laptop as you move around. Multefire is much better at apportioning the use of the network more fairly.
But most importantly of all, Multefire is near impossible to hack as it doesn’t make you use the Internet Protocol stack. But it can tunnel its way through Wi-Fi networks, without fear of attack.
In other words, all threats can be nullified with this new hybrid system. So, you can fight fire with Multefire.
The author of this blog is Nick Booth, freelance IT and communications writer
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