company:sprint

  • Kdenlive Devs Had a Sprint, Made This Awesome Vid
    https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/03/kdenlive-devs-held-a-sprint-made-this-awesome-vid

    The developers behind Kdenlive, the open-source video editor, recently held a 4-day sprint in Lyon, France, to work on new features and improve performance. This post, Kdenlive Devs Had a Sprint, Made This Awesome Vid, was written by Joey Sneddon and first appeared on OMG! Ubuntu!.

  • Improving your Definition of #done
    https://hackernoon.com/improving-your-definition-of-done-d467c06837bf?source=rss----3a8144eabfe

    By Simon Reindl, Professional #scrum Trainer, Scrum.orgThe purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially releasable Done product Increment, in order to realize business value. Many teams struggle in improving their Definition of Done. The technique described here allows for greater transparency on where the Definition of Done is, and what are the next steps.The intent is to provide a structure for the teams to reflect, and then build a plan on what to introduce to improve the quality of their product Increment. This could be run during a Sprint Retrospective, before starting a team, or at any time during a Sprint.Draw three nested triangles on a whiteboard or flip chart, as show in the image below. Label the centre rectangle “Now”, the middle rectangle “Next”, and the outer rectangle “Future”. (...)

    #scrum-agile #agile #definition-of-done

  • Un bolivien à la tête du nouveau fond d’investissement en technologies « SoftBank Latin America » (5 milliards de dollars)

    http://www.la-razon.com/economia/boliviano-marcelo-claure-fondo-america-latina-tecnologia_0_3106489407.html

    Sur #softbank :

    https://blog.mondediplo.net/2018-03-17-Les-fonds-souverains-a-l-assaut-du-futur
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/11/insatiable-global-funds-control-future-of-tech-industry

    Marcelo Claure est président exécutif de Sprint (4e opérateur de télécommunications aux États Unis) et propriétaire de Bolivar, un des deux clubs de foot de La Paz.

  • I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone
    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunter-300-dollars-located-phone-microbilt-zumigo-

    T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country. Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred dollars, he said he (...)

    #T-Mobile #Sprint #AT&T #Apple_Maps #Maps #smartphone #géolocalisation #harcèlement

    ##AT&T

  • The Google #design Sprint in Action
    https://hackernoon.com/the-google-design-sprint-in-action-c798b8b920ec?source=rss----3a8144eabf

    The Fanbase DesignFanbase, is a Decentralized App (dApp) running on the Lightstreams #blockchain protocol to bring rewards to music fans and content control to musicians, was validated this month with the renowned Google Ventures Design Sprint that allowed our team to create a design for the best user experience possible.The Design Sprint creates a shortcut to learning, a team does not have to launch and find they’ve forgotten important parts of a successful product. By using a Design Sprint to validate Fanbase, we asked ourselves important questions, worked across teams to make sure we weren’t building biases into our dApp, and eventually tested the final product. I took part along with Executive Board Member Andrew Zapella, John Bettiol, Technical Engineer Gabriel Garrido, designer Edi (...)

    #design-sprint #ico #technology

  • Fin de la neutralité du Net : YouTube, Netflix et Amazon Prime Video bridés
    https://abonnes.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2018/09/07/les-operateurs-americains-freinent-youtube-netflix-et-amazon-prime-v ?

    Aux Etats-Unis, la fin de la neutralité du Net, principe qui interdisait aux opérateurs de télécommunications de discriminer les flux Internet, et que le président Donald Trump a fait abroger en juin, se fait sentir.

    Ainsi, quatre de ces sociétés ont déjà commencé à brider le trafic des services les plus prisés par les internautes — Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, et surtout YouTube, la plate-forme de vidéos gratuites propriété de Google —, selon une recherche menée par l’université Northeastern et l’université du Massachusetts, et révélée par Bloomberg.

    Depuis longtemps, le rêve des opérateurs était de faire passer à la caisse ces grandes plates-formes très consommatrices de bande passante, ce qu’ils n’avaient pas réussi à faire jusqu’à présent. Ces mesures pourraient n’être qu’un premier pas avant une facturation en bonne et due forme.

    Pour mener leurs travaux, les chercheurs ont développé une application, baptisée « Wehe », capable de détecter quand et par qui les services mobiles sont ralentis. Elle a été téléchargée par 100 000 consommateurs ; 500 000 tests ont été menés sur 2 000 services dans 161 pays.
    La nécessité de « bien gérer le réseau »

    Dans le détail, AT&T et Verizon, les deux premiers opérateurs outre-Atlantique, ont discriminé le trafic des services vidéos à respectivement 8 398 et 11 100 reprises. Plus raisonnables, T-Mobile et Sprint s’en sont tenus à 3 900 et 339 ralentissements.

    En août, Verizon a même été surpris en train de brider les connexions des sapeurs-pompiers, qui se battaient contre le plus vaste incendie qu’ait connu la Californie.

    #Neutralité_internet

  • A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations
    https://www.zdnet.com/article/cell-phone-tracking-firm-exposed-millions-of-americans-real-time-locations

    The bug allowed one Carnegie Mellon researcher to track anyone’s cell phone in real time.

    A company that collects the real-time location data on millions of cell phone customers across North America had a bug in its website that allowed anyone to see where a person is located — without obtaining their consent. Earlier this week, we reported that four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you’ve probably never heard about before. The (...)

    #LocationSmart #T-Mobile #Verizon #Sprint #smartphone #géolocalisation #hacking #AT&T

    ##AT&T

  • Electronics-Recycling Innovator Going to Prison for Extending Compu...
    https://diasp.eu/p/7152379

    Electronics-Recycling Innovator Going to Prison for Extending Computers’ Lives

    [ https://returntonow.net/2018/05/10/ewaste-innovator-prison ]

    Eric Lundgren built the first “electronic hybrid recycling” facility in the United States, which turns discarded cellphones and other electronics into functional devices.

    Known for building an electric car out of “garbage” that outlasts a Tesla, his company processes more than 41 million pounds of e-waste a year.

    Lundgren has received international praise for slowing the stream of harmful chemicals and heavy metals into the environment, and counts IBM, Motorola and Sprint among clients grateful for his cheap refurbished products.

    Unfortunately, Microsoft is not such big a fan of Lundgren’s work.

    When he figured out how to recycle e-waste from China (...)

    • @aude_v MS joue la carte de l’#obsolescence_programmée_factice mais Eric Lundgren remet en circuit des disques de restauration système qui sinon grâce aux stratégies de MS étaient ignorés des utilisateurices. Ou comment un pollueur infect comme MS se retrouve à gagner en dépit de tout bon sens.

      Lundgren argues he hasn’t cost Microsoft any sales, as the company provides restore disks for free with software purchases, but many buyers lose or throw them away.

      Microsoft also provide free downloads to restore the software to licensed customers online, but many customers don’t know that’s an option, and end up throwing the computer away as a result.

      Lundgren made 28,000 of the discs and shipped them to a broker, who planned to sell them to computer refurbishing shops for about 25 cents each, so they could provide them to used-computer buyers.

      Microsoft’s lawyers valued the discs at $25 each and said they represent $700,000 in potential sales.

      Lundgren pleaded guilty but argued that the value of his discs to Microsoft was zero, as Microsoft, nor any computer manufacturers, sell them. He also explained that the discs could only be used to restore the software to computers already licensed for it. The licenses are good for the life of the computer.

      The real loss to Microsoft was in the potential sale of new computers and new software licenses.

  • The Geopolitical Economy of the Global Internet Infrastructure on JSTOR
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.7.2017.0228

    Article très intéressant qui repositionne les Etats dans la gestion de l’infrastructure globale de l’internet. En fait, une infrastructure globale pour le déploiement du capital (une autre approche de la géopolitique, issue de David Harvey).

    According to many observers, economic globalization and the liberalization of telecoms/internet policy have remade the world in the image of the United States. The dominant roles of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have also led to charges of US internet imperialism. This article, however, argues that while these internet giants dominate some of the most popular internet services, the ownership and control of core elements of the internet infrastructure—submarine cables, internet exchange points, autonomous system numbers, datacenters, and so on—are tilting increasingly toward the EU and BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries and the rest of the world, complicating views of hegemonic US control of the internet and what Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure.

    This article takes a different tack. It argues that while US-based internet giants do dominate some of the middle and top layers of the internet—for example, operating systems (iOS, Windows, Android), search engines (Google), social networks (Facebook), online retailing (Amazon), over-the-top TV (Netflix), browsers (Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Explorer), and domain names (ICANN)—they do not rule the hardware, or material infrastructure, upon which the internet and daily life, business, governments, society, and war increasingly depend. In fact, as the article shows, ownership and control of many core elements of the global internet infrastructure—for example, fiber optic submarine cables, content delivery networks (CDNs), autonomous system numbers (ASN), and internet exchange points (IXPs)—are tilting toward the rest of the world, especially Europe and the BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). This reflects the fact that the United States’ standing in the world is slipping while an ever more multipolar world is arising.

    International internet backbone providers, internet content companies, and CDNs interconnect with local ISPs and at one or more of the nearly 2000 IXPs around the world. The largest IXPs are in New York, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Seattle, Chicago, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. They are core elements of the internet that switch traffic between all the various networks that comprise the internet system, and help to establish accessible, affordable, fast, and secure internet service.

    In developed markets, internet companies such as Google, Baidu, Facebook, Netflix, Youku, and Yandex use IXPs to interconnect with local ISPs such as Deutsche Telecoms in Germany, BT or Virgin Media in Britain, or Comcast in the United States to gain last-mile access to their customers—and vice versa, back up the chain. Indeed, 99 percent of internet traffic handled by peering arrangements among such parties occurs without any money changing hands or a formal contract.50 Where IXPs do not exist or are rare, as in Africa, or run poorly, as in India, the cost of bandwidth is far more expensive. This is a key factor that helps to explain why internet service is so expensive in areas of the world that can least afford it. It is also why the OECD and EU encourage developing countries to make IXPs a cornerstone of economic development and telecoms policy work.

    The network of networks that make up the internet constitute a sprawling, general purpose platform upon which financial markets, business, and trade, as well as diplomacy, spying, national security, and war depend. The world’s largest electronic payments system operator, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications’ (SWIFT) secure messaging network carries over 25 million messages a day involving payments that are believed to be worth over $7 trillion USD.59 Likewise, the world’s biggest foreign currency settlement system, the CLS Bank, executes upward of a million trades a day worth between $1.5 and $2.5 trillion over the global cable systems—although that is down by half from its high point in 2008.60 As Stephen Malphrus, former chief of staff to the US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, observed, when “communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt, rather it snaps to a halt.”61

    Governments and militaries also account for a significant portion of internet traffic. Indeed, 90 to 95 percent of US government traffic, including sensitive diplomatic and military orders, travels over privately owned cables to reach officials in the field.62 “A major portion of DoD data traveling on undersea cables is unmanned aerial vehicle video,” notes a study done for the Department of Homeland Security by MIT scholar Michael Sechrist.63 Indeed, the Department of Defense’s entire Global Information Grid shares space in these cables with the general public internet.64

    The 3.6 billion people as of early 2016 who use the internet to communicate, share music, ideas and knowledge, browse, upload videos, tweet, blog, organize social events and political protests, watch pornography, read sacred texts, and sell stuff are having the greatest influence on the current phase of internet infrastructure development. Video currently makes up an estimated two-thirds of all internet traffic, and is expected to grow to 80 percent in the next five years,69 with US firms leading the way. Netflix single-handedly accounts for a third of all internet traffic. YouTube is the second largest source of internet traffic on fixed and mobile networks alike the world over. Altogether, the big five internet giants account for roughly half of all “prime-time” internet traffic, a phrasing that deliberately reflects the fact that internet usage swells and peaks at the same time as the classic prime-time television period, that is, 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.

    Importance des investissements des compagnies de l’internet dans les projets de câbles.

    Several things stand out from this analysis. First, in less than a decade, Google has carved out a very large place for itself through its ownership role in four of the six projects (the SJC, Faster, Unity, and Pacific Cable Light initiatives), while Facebook has stakes in two of them (APG and PLCN) and Microsoft in the PLCN project. This is a relatively new trend and one that should be watched in the years ahead.

    A preliminary view based on the publicly available information is that the US internet companies are important but subordinate players in consortia dominated by state-owned national carriers and a few relatively new competitors. Keen to wrest control of core elements of the internet infrastructure that they perceive to have been excessively dominated by United States interests in the past, Asian governments and private investors have joined forces to change things in their favor. In terms of the geopolitical economy of the internet, there is both a shift toward the Asia-Pacific region and an increased role for national governments.

    Return of the State as Regulator of Concentrated Markets

    In addition to the expanded role of the state as market builder, regulator, and information infrastructure policy maker, many regulators have also rediscovered the reality of significant market concentration in the telecom-internet and media industries. Indeed, the US government has rejected several high-profile telecoms mergers in recent years, such as AT&T’s proposal to take over T-Mobile in 2011, T-Mobile’s bid for Sprint in 2014, and Comcast’s attempt to acquire Time Warner Cable last year. Even the approval of Comcast’s blockbuster takeover of NBC Universal in 2011, and Charter Communications acquisition of Time Warner Cable last year, respectively, came with important strings attached and ongoing conduct regulation designed to constrain the companies’ ability to abuse their dominant market power.87 The FCC’s landmark 2016 ruling to reclassify broadband internet access as a common carrier further indicated that US regulators have been alert to the realities of market concentration and telecoms-internet access providers’ capacity to abuse that power, and the need to maintain a vigilant eye to ensure that their practices do not swamp people’s rights to freely express themselves, maintain control over the collection, retention, use, and disclosure of their personal information, and to access a diverse range of services over the internet.88 The 28 members of the European Union, along with Norway, India, and Chile, have adopted similar “common carriage/network neutrality/open network”89 rules to offset the reality that concentration in core elements of these industries is “astonishingly high”90 on the basis of commonly used indicators (e.g., concentration ratios and the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index).

    These developments indicate a new phase in internet governance and control. In the first phase, circa the 1990s, technical experts and organizations such as the Internet Engineers Task Force played a large role, while the state sat relatively passively on the sidelines. In the second phase, circa the early to mid-2000s, commercial forces surged to the fore, while internet governance revolved around the ICANN and the multi-stakeholder model. Finally, the revelations of mass internet surveillance by many states and ongoing disputes over the multi-stakeholder, “internet freedom” agenda on the one side, versus the national sovereignty, multilateral model where the ITU and UN system would play a larger role in internet governance all indicate that significant moves are afoot where the relationship between states and markets is now in a heightened state of flux.

    Such claims, however, are overdrawn. They rely too heavily on the same old “realist,” “struggle for control” model where conflict between nation-states has loomed large and business interests and communication technologies served mainly as “weapons of politics” and the handmaidens of national interests from the telegraph in the nineteenth century to the internet today. Yet, nation-states and private business interests, then and now, not only compete with one another but also cooperate extensively to cultivate a common global space of economic accumulation. Communication technologies and business interests, moreover, often act independent of the nation-state and via “private structures of cooperation,” that is, cartels and consortia, as the history and contemporary state of the undersea cable networks illustrate. In fact, the internet infrastructure of the twenty-first century, much like that of the industrial information infrastructure of the past 150 years, is still primarily financed, owned, and operated by many multinational consortia, although more than a few submarine communications cables are now owned by a relatively new roster of competitive players, such as Tata, Level 3, Global Cloud Xchange, and so forth. They have arisen mostly in the last 20 years and from new quarters, such as India in the case of Tata, for example.

    #Economie_numérique #Géopolitique #Câbles_sous_marins

  • Sprint: Net neutrality means we can’t stamp out download hogs

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/18/sprint_fcc_net_neutrality_throttling
    Sprint says America’s new net neutrality rules – which kicked in last week – have forced it to stop throttling download hogs’ mobile broadband connections.

    Sprint, the third-largest carrier in America, slashed download speeds for subscribers making “heavy” use of its network. That practice, we’re told, breaks US watchdog the FCC’s net neutrality rules.

    “For less than a year, Sprint used a network management practice that applied only at the level of individual congested cell sites, and only for as long as congestion existed. At such sites, we temporarily allocated resources away from the top 5 percent of heaviest users and to the 95 percent of users with normal usage, to try to allocate the effects of congestion more fairly. Once congestion at the site passed, the limitation automatically ended,” Sprint told The Reg today.

    #net_neutrality

  • Sprint, Windstream traffic routing errors hijacked other ISPs

    It is not always longer far away countries such as India or Pakistan which make these mistakes but also Mr. USA himself can made erroneous announcements (#BGP #route_hijacking).

    In simple words, it is like putting road signs on the Internet where Sprint and Windstream say to the world:
    “Hey guys, send all traffic for the following networks to us: Telesmart, Macedonia, Saoudinet, Saoudi Arabia, a network from Gaza, one from Iceland, and three from China”
    (all their traffic are belong to us ...)
    The effect is that the traffic does not reach its destination, or that it transits via another network as was the case for Telesmart.

    Quotes from http://www.renesys.com/2014/09/latest-isps-to-hijack :

    From 13:56 UTC on Tuesday (9-September) to 15:56 UTC on Wednesday (10-September), US wireless carrier #Sprint (AS1239) started hijacking a prefix (95.128.184.0/22) from Telesmart, an ISP in Macedonia. What was interesting was that once traffic arrived at Sprint, it continued onto Cogent and finally onto its intended destination at Telesmart in Skopje. Was this an accidental #man-in-the-middle (#MITM) or something else?

    [...]

    The same day #Windstream (AS7029) began announcing 212.118.142.0/24 (SaudiNet), which is normally announced by Saudi Arabian incumbent, Saudi Telecom. Unlike the previous Sprint example, traceroutes to this prefix along the Windstream route died within Windstream, effectively knocking this network off the Internet for anyone accepting the bogus route. Then on Wednesday, Windstream announced a handful of strange routes for about 10 hours including one from Gaza, one from Iceland, and three from China — all more-specifics of existing routes, ensuring their global propagation and acceptance.
    [...]
    There is a potentially innocent explanation to this example. Perhaps, these address ranges were ones that Windstream deemed to be sources of bad traffic and so was “blackholing” them internally, a relatively common practice. In this scenario, we could have simply witnessed Windstream inadvertently leaking internal routes to the global Internet for 10 hours.

    PS: Also interesting reference in a larger context, at this year’s #Defcon 22 conference, Luca Bruno and Mariano Graziano from eurecom.fr ("a leading teaching and research institution in the fields of information and communication technologies") gave a talk about the vulnerabilities of some ISPs’ public #looking_glass utilities that would allow an attacker to remotely modify #router configurations.

    white paper:
    https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-22/dc-22-presentations/Bruno-Graziano/DEFCON-22-Luca-Bruno-Mariano-Graziano-looking-glass-WP-UPDATED.pdf
    presentation:
    https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-22/dc-22-presentations/Bruno-Graziano/DEFCON-22-Luca-Bruno-Mariano-Graziano-looking-glass-Updated.pdf

    #ISP
    #security
    #blackhole

    #Wristcutters