One of my biggest bugbears in IT is the implementation of standards between companies, be this in job titles, procedures, iconography, conventions and so on. Now, it’s understandable that not everyone will agree on definitions, and different people have different understandings of ideas and concepts. A good example of these differences comes from defining terms used within ITIL for service management (helpdesk): What constitutes a service request? What constitutes an incident? What constitutes a problem? When does a change request need to be generated?
The tug of war over which companies should be allowed to have their technology built into the heart of the world’s 5G network cores is spilling over to the wider tech industry, with firms such as Broadcom and even Google at risk of suffering business harm. 5G is going to become incredibly crucial to the very fabric of our modern society, so there’s a lot at stake. I’m sure you know the background, but just to recap. Under Chinese law, the Chinese Government can compel Chinese companies to provide access to their technologies and data. Huawei maintains that it would ignore any such instruction, but is that realistic? Can anyone really envision a Chinese firm not bowing to a diktat from their communist leaders in Beijing? This is at the heart of concerns in many Western countries.
From as far back as April 2016, the federal government has been talking about the trouble that encryption causes for law enforcement. In June 2017, the then Attorney-General George Brandis started talking about governments globally working to find ways to “break into” encrypted communications by working “with” the companies that provide end-to-end encrypted communications tools such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Viber, but not by introducing flaws or backdoors into the apps. Over the last 18 months or so, various comments were made by government representatives around breaking encryption — and fast forward to August 2018, we now have a proposed bill to be introduced into parliament — The Assistance and Access Bill 2018.