CLOUD COMPUTING IN AFRICA.

....Seacom known for its undersea optical fiber cables is expected to make their first move into offering cloud services with the launch of their Pamoja Cloud Services

Pamoja is a cloud services marketplace that the company says will revolutionize the way the SME sector conducts business. Seacom becomes the second infrastructure company to move into this space after Safaricom who launched their service about a year ago. Read Safaricom launches cloud services
According to the company website, Pamoja's business model is "built on the growing demand for IT-as-a-Service from small and medium enterprises (SME), coupled with the need for service providers to increase the value of their existing offerings and grow broadband revenue." Pamoja is building a SME Cloud services marketplace, which it will then offer to its channel partners and service providers to on-sell under their own brand (white-labelled) to their customer base.
Pamoja is expected to "remove the capital expense barrier to entry for International content owners who want to expand their service footprint to the African continent; no upfront capital investment is required," the statement said.
Pamoja is investing, initially, in Cloud computing infrastructure in South Africa and Kenya. This will allow Pamoja to service the Southern African markets with a strong focus on South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia. From the Kenyan based platform services will be delivered to Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan.
 To the technical teams in pamoja Cloud Services,applesam ventures ans samtech investments salute your panache of your work.Keep up the nifty work folks.

Source:Applesam ventures
Credit-sam

MOBILE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS IN AFRICA

.....Although still in its infancy, Africa is experiencing exciting technological advances thanks to a boom in mobile phone use of the past decade and the growing availability of the Smart Phone, with its advanced features and opportunities.

In many parts of Africa, the use of mobile phones is higher than computers, allowing for growth in the nations educational avenues. It has been well documented that over the past few years Africa has struggled with low levels of educational opportunities and access, a shortage of teaching staff, low level literacy and numeracy.

The answer for many lies in the opportunities that new Smart Phone technology can offer in the field of education. Computing in the average African schools consists of a small computer lab, but thanks to rapid growth in mobile phone technology, the possibility of distance learning is closer than ever before.

The smart phone could provide the answer to educating those in remote areas. Research carried out by applesam ventures indicated that 96% of the distance education students had access to mobile phones, while only 1% had access to the internet at home.

In the Western world our mobile phones have become handheld computers. But in Africa, where many of the population have poor electric supplies and affordability issues, the mobile phone companies and developers have ensured that mobile phones are the primary source of communication. It has the ability to do things such as mobile banking(m-pesa). There are 84m internet-enabled mobiles in Africa and it is predicted that 69% of mobiles in Africa will have internet access by the year 2014.

Social networking such as Facebook in Africa is on the up and in turn, debate and interactive learning is transforming the education system. People, young and old, on the continent can access knowledge on their mobile phone devices.

Mobile learning on Smart Phones differs from e-learning on computers in that activities are not set in one place and can be conducted at any time and at any place.

Examples of this mobile education are in farming and their livelihoods. A number of smartphones have been leased to farmers so that they can receive information, such as market prices, weather reports and advice and pass this information on to others.

There are barriers to mobile learning in Africa, such as illiteracy levels, access issues (remote areas and price factors) and a gender gap (more men have mobile phones than women). However, thanks to the availability of solar power and mobiles running on much less power than computers, education through mobile phones is becoming a great possibility to help those formerly excluded from educational opportunities.

Smart phone technology offers advanced systems such as interactive voice response (IVR) and barriers are breaking down, with mobile phone usage becoming more affordable.

Africa Initiatives is a Microsoft project focusing on Africa with the release of ‘Huawei 4Afrika’ Windows 8 smartphone and the creation of the ‘Afrika Academy’ to teach Africans important business and entrepreneurial skills.

If Smart Phone technology is developed in a robust, low cost manner, more and more Africans will continue to take advantage of this information technology and new and exciting learning styles available to them.

Source:applesam ventures

SEACOM PROMISES FOR FURTHER UPGRADE

...The privately owned communications service provider SEACOM has selected Ciena Corporation’s (NASDAQ: CIEN) 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and OneControl Unified Management System for the upgrade of its submarine network across the Southern and Eastern African coastlines. This falls in line with SEACOM’ s focus on driving the development of the African internet and opening the broadband tap for African consumers.
Ciena’s technology will allow SEACOM to meet the growing capacity demands of its customers and enable affordable Internet access to East Africa with a network that offers a better cost point and a smoother evolution path for the future.
The upgrade includes key countries in SEACOM’s 17,000km undersea network, including India, Egypt, Dijbouti, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa. The solution will allow SEACOM to deliver its capacity in very short timeframes and provide for future demands. The deployment will initially use Ciena’s 40G coherent transport technology, with ultra-long distance 100G wavelengths planned for future upgrades.
“Connectivity services in Africa are booming due to the growing needs of business IT users, the rise of ”cloud” based services, and growing requirements for the processing and storing of personal data,” says Claes Segelberg, chief technology officer at SEACOM. “Ciena’s technology will enable us to cost-effectively scale our capacity to address this growing demand for connectivity throughout the continent. The company’s future-proof network design has mitigated the risks associated with the upgrade project, ensuring a seamless transition for SEACOM’s carrier customers and end users.”

 Ed McCormack, vice president and general manager, submarine systems at Ciena said: “In the last couple of years, bandwidth penetration in several African countries has increased tenfold with the support of SEACOM’s submarine network. Ciena’s coherent technology will enable SEACOM to evolve and grow its network cost-effectively. It will lay the foundations for a unified terrestrial and submarine network and evolution path to a GeoMesh network architecture. This project demonstrates a key aim of Ciena’s OPⁿ network architecture vision: to bend the cost curve of networking in the face of new service requirements.”
For folks wondering about Ciena;


Ciena is the network specialist.It collaborates with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they perform and compete. Ciena leverages its deep expertise in packet and optical networking and distributed software automation to deliver solutions in alignment with OPⁿ, its approach for building open next-generation networks. It enables a high-scale, programmable infrastructure that can be controlled and adapted by network-level applications, and provide open interfaces to coordinate computing, storage and network resources in a unified, virtualized environment.

About SEACOM
SEACOM, the only privately funded and truly neutral carrier in its market, is a bandwidth solution enabler with an extensive network of submarine and terrestrial high speed fibre serving the east and west coasts of Africa with onward reach to and from Europe, India and Asia.
In service since July 2009, SEACOM has increased the availability of International bandwidth in Africa ten-fold and more in many of Africa’s most underserved nations – providing high quality, cost effective, end-to-end wholesale connectivity.
SEACOM sees Africa as a rich source of content and ICT activity and continues its commitment to closing Africa’s digital divide by building a truly African Internet.

After experiencing some few short comings a couple of weeks earlier  due to fiber cut vandalism in the upper part of our African continent,one of the 5 sub marine FO providers have promised to upgrade their network system robustly.I and applesam ventures wish SEA COM all the very best in their en devours.

Source:www.samwelkariuki.com
Credit:Samwel kariuki

VPN SERVICES AROUND THE GLOBE

....About an year ago applesam ventures took a look at a selection of the web’s VPN providers to see which ones really take privacy seriously. During the months that followed we received dozens of emails begging us to carry out an update and today here it is. The first installment in our list of VPN providers that due to their setup cannot link user activity to external IP addresses and activities.
Prompted by a high-profile case of an individual using an ‘anonymous’ VPN that turned out to offer less than expected protection, applesam ventures decided to ask a selection of VPN companies some tough questions.
With our findings we compiled a report of providers that due to their setup were unable to link their outbound IP addresses with user accounts. Ever since we have received countless emails demanding an update.
It’s taken a long time but today we bring the first installment in a series of posts highlighting VPN providers that take privacy seriously. Our first article focuses on anonymity and a later installment will highlight file-sharing aspects and possible limitations.
We tried to ask direct questions that left providers with little room for maneuver. Providers who didn’t answer our questions directly, didn’t answer at all, or completely failed by logging everything, were simply left out. Sadly this meant that quite a few were disregarded.
This year we also asked more questions, which are as follows:
1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP-address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?
2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?
3. In the event you receive a DMCA takedown notice, how are these handled?
4. Which payment systems do you operate and how are these linked to individual user accounts?
The list of providers is a tiny sample of the thousands out there today and is not comprehensive by any means. Providers not covered this time around will be added during the coming weeks. All responses listed below are in the words of the providers themselves and the order of the list does not carry any meaning.

BTGuard

1. We do not keep any logs whatsoever.
2. The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event we would even communicate with a third-party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.
3. We do not have any open incoming ports, so it’s not possible for us to “takedown” any broadcasting content.
4. At the moment we only accept Paypal and Bitcoin. We have plans to accept alternative credit card processing in the near future.In kenya,hopefully soon,we would line our payment acceptance via mpesa(safaricom),airtel money(airtel) and ikopesa(orange).

Private Internet Access

1. We absolutely do not maintain any VPN logs of any kind. We utilize shared IP addresses rather than dynamic or static IPs, so it is not possible to match a user to an external IP. These are some of the many solutions we have implemented to enable the strongest levels of anonymity amongst VPN services.
2. We are in compliance with DMCA as all companies, world-wide, must be. We have proprietary technology and an experienced legal team which allows us to comply without any risk to our users.

Proxy.sh

1. No information whatsoever is being recorded or held in our facilities. Our services are run from RAM and all our system services come with state-of-the-art configuration that ensures nothing is left after usage. The only information we have about our customers is an e-mail address and the name of the payment method.

Torguard

1. TorGuard doesn’t store IP’s or time stamps on our VPN/proxy servers, not even for a second. It’s impossible to match what is not there. Since some people tend to misbehave when using a VPN , this raises the obvious question: how do we maintain a fast, abuse-free network? If even our network engineer can’t back track the abuser by IP, then how do we stop it?
Through packet level filtering at the firewall it’s possible to apply rules to an entire shared server, blocking the abuse immediately. For example, let’s say someone decides to use TorGuard to unlawfully promote their Ugg boots business (spam). In order for us to block this one individual, we simply implement new firewall rules, effectively blocking the abused protocol for everyone on that VPN server. Since there are no user logs to go by, we handle abuse per server, not per user.
2. TorGuard recently went through some corporate restructuring and has now moved its parent company to Nevis, West Indies. Our company abides by all International laws and data regulations imposed within our legal jurisdiction. We don’t share any information with anyone regarding our network or its users and won’t even consider communicating with a 3rd party unless they’ve first obtained adequate representation within our legal jurisdiction. Only in the event of an official court ordered ruling would we be forced to hand over blank hard drives. There’s nothing to hand over but an operating system.
3. TorGuard complies immediately (24 hours or less) with all DMCA takedown notices. Since it’s impossible for us to locate which user on the server is actually responsible for the violation, we block the infringing protocol in its entirety, whatever it may be – Kazaa, HTTP, Jabber, Citrix, Bittorrent, FTP, Gnucleus, eDonkey2000, etc. This ensures the content in violation is immediately removed from that server and no longer active on our network.
4. We accept all forms of credit card, Visa, Amex, Mastercard, Discover, PayPal , Google Checkout and Bitcoins. We also accept anonymous payments through our pre-paid PIN system. These pre-paid service PIN numbers can be purchased from one of our participating online resellers and redeemed during checkout on our website.
Our client billing area and VPN/Proxy user auth servers are two completely separate systems. This is to ensure the privacy and securities of our customer’s accounts are upheld at all times. While the customer’s chosen payment method will be linked to the client billing area login, this information is kept completely separate from their VPN/Proxy network. In this way, it’s virtually impossible to “connect the dots” of a paying customer with that of someone who is using the servers. This can become a pain for clients as they are required to remember two sets of logins/passwords, but trust us – it’s in the best interest of security.

TorrentPrivacy

1. We don’t store any logs, it’s impossible to track users’ activity through our VPN.
2. Our company is based on Seychelles. We do not disclose any information to 3rd parties and this can be done only in case of a certain lawsuit filed against our company.
3. If we receive a notice about DMCA infringement, our team of lawyers solves it immediately without any blocking of servers or protocols. We don’t store any content on our servers, users are anonymous, so, there are no problems with it. We promise our customers that they will not have problems with the DMCA.
4. PayPal and CommerceGate.

Anonine

1. We store a users E-mail and username, that´s it. This means that we do not store, or have access to, any traffic logs of any kind. By traffic logs we mean, any kind of data that has the potential to, directly or indirectly, match a users original ip or identity with one of our IPs.
2. It is important to remember that we do not store any traffic logs, and therefore it would be physically impossible for us to hand something like that over to a 3rd party. This, next to the encryption, is the core of the entire anonymity aspect of the service.
3. Our no logging policy has never really caused us any trouble since we never have received any official requests to hand over any traffic logs.
4. We accept credit card payments through Paypal and Payson.Our services will soon be unveiled in kenya and modes of payment will be communicated further.

IVPN

1. No. As a privacy service and EFF member, IVPN’s main priority is the anonymity of its users. We use non-persistent logs (stored in memory) on our gateway servers. The logs are only stored for 10 minutes. That time window gives us the ability to troubleshoot any connection problems that may appear, but after 10 minutes no trace of activity is stored.

2. We ensure that our network providers understand the nature of our business and that we do not host any content. As a condition of the safe harbor provisions they are required to inform us of each infringement which includes the date, title of the content and the IP address of the gateway through which it was downloaded. We simply respond to each notice confirming that we do not host the content in question.

AirVPN
1. We don’t keep any log that can allow a 3rd party to do that.

PrivatVPN

1. We don’t keep ANY logs that allow us or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user our service. The only thing we log are e-mails and user names but it’s not possible to bind a activity on the Internet to a user. This applies to all our servers except U.S. servers.

PRQ

1. No logs are held or kept.
2. We operate in Swedish jurisdiction. We do not give out any information, since we do not have any information to give out.
3. We do not care or get scared about the DMCA.
4. We accept Wiretransfer, Bitcoin and Bankgiro. We only require a working e-mail address to be a customer.

Faceless.me

1. We keep connection logs in our system, but they contain only depersonalized data, that allows us to optimize traffic routes and make connection more fast. These logs are stored for 7 days, but they are not interesting for anyone. In the event we are sued we can deliver only this information.
2. We don’t have any mechanics to block users, we also have no information about which user the complaint is against but we are developing a system to alert our users in case there is a complaint about their activities.
4. We use Plimus Payment System for all user accounts. iPhone / iPad / iPod users can purchase a subscription from an application that can be installed from Apple AppStore. Payment is made through the AppStore billing system. Users of devices based on Android can purchase a subscription from an application that can be installed from Google Play. Payment is made through Google Checkout.

IPVanish

1. IPVanish users are given dynamic and shared IP addresses. Essentially, that mixes customer A’s traffic with customer B’s and C’s and so on, making it impossible to single out anyone for anything.
The only information that we do collect from a VPN session is: Timestamp (date and server time) of the connection to IPVanish, duration of the connection, IP address used for the connection and bytes transferred. This helps us troubleshoot any connectivity issues a customer may have. And of the small amount of support info we do keep, we purge it regularly.

BlackVPN

1. On our Privacy servers we don’t log anything that can identify a single user, but on our US, Canada, UK, Germany & Singapore servers where we don’t allow file-sharing. We do log the internal RFC1918 IP that is assigned to the user at a specific time. We never log the real external IP address of the user.
We also hold a username and email address of our subscribers, the times of connection and disconnection to our services along with bandwidth consumption.
2. We now operate under the jurisdiction of Hong Kong because we worry what the lawmakers in USA and Europe may introduce to make things difficult for proxies and VPNs. We will fiercely protect the privacy and rights of our users and we will not disclose any information on our users to anyone, unless forced to by law enforcement personnel that have produced a court order.
3. On our Privacy servers DMCA does not apply (eg USA DMCA to our Swiss server). If we receive a DMCA on our other servers (US, UK, Canada, Germany & Singapore) we generally give the user one warning that they are violating our TOS and their account may be terminated.

Ipredator

1. We keep connection logs for debugging purposes, which happens encrypted and off-site. Connection logs contain information for debugging PPTP client issues. We try to store the least amount legally possible anywhere. IP-addresses are encrypted and can only be decrypted by non-support staff to ensure a proper process. For example, to work around issues where the police ruffles up the support staff a bit to get data for an abuse report. In the database we only store the details users give us on sign-up and a limited backlog of payments.
2. Usually we only receive email, therefore we drop anything that has DMCA in the subject. If they want something they need to send us a letter or a fax or send the police. Most of the time we get complaints for running the TPB proxy or the TOR servers.
3. PaySafe, BitCoins, PayPal, PaySon, AlertPay

BolehVPN

1. No we do not keep logs. However as per our policy, if we do notice any unusual activity on our servers (high bandwidth loading, high number of connections or cpu usage) we may turn on logs temporarily to identify abuse of our services (such as DoS or spamming through our servers).
Once the user is identified, we will terminate the offending user, issue him an e-mail for the reason of termination and wipe the logs from our system.
Turning on logs for troubleshooting is a very last resort and is necessary to ensure the integrity of our services. It has happened very rarely (only a handful of times in our 6 years of operation) and such information was not disclosed to third parties but merely used to terminate the offending user. In any case logs were usually enabled for not more than few hours and only for the particular server that was experiencing abuse.
2. Servers hosted in US or categorized as “surfing/streaming’ have P2P disabled on them. As for other servers, they are not subject to DMCA and we have a good working relationship with our server providers.
In the event DMCA notices or similar are given to us, we normally respond that we don’t have such content hosted on our networks and if the provider is adamant, we will terminate our relationship with the server provider and find a new one. We will not reveal the user that generated that DMCA notice (nor can we with no logs taken). Over the years, we have identified server providers that we can work with and understand the nature of our business.
4.. However to sign up to our service, all is needed is a working e-mail and you are free to use placeholder names etc etc. Only in the event of dispute or chargeback cases (especially with credit cards), additional info is requested which is to be expected when using a credit card (unless a prepaid visa is used).

Following these remarks,applesam ventures urges Kenyan ICT firms to embrace virtualization for easier ways to keep and store data as it is soon going to be the most effective way of trafficking the most essential data that we all need.

Source:www.samwelkariuki.blogspot.com
Credit:Applesam ventures

CLOUD COMPUTING FOR OUR SMEs.

...In small businesses, the cloud environment brings the most valuable benefits. The physical infrastructure deployment and maintenance, the need for specialized IT staff and the expensive software updates are just some of the aspects small businesses would not worry about if they would switch to cloud-based applications. But let’s see what kinds of productivity tools are out there in the cloud for SMBs:Cloud computing solutions should be the natural option for small businesses.
In a recent survey released by Spiceworks, 62% of the SMBs interviewed reported that they are using some type of cloud application. Most of them are using cloud services as tools for file-sharing, but haven’t moved into online productivity applications. According to the survey cloud-based productivity suites have the lowest adoption rate. Nearly two out of three businesses have no plans to use cloud-based productivity suites. Only 14% of those surveyed are currently using cloud-based productivity suites e.g safaricom ltd, and another 22% are thinking about adopting these services sometime in the future.

• There are many options online nowadays: The Best Cloud Storage Solutions. The best cloud-based file storing and sharing tools are Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive and Box.

• Team collaboration tools are able to track tasks assigned to different people,  and support projects milestones. Some of the most used team collaboration tools are Evernote, Teamly, and Basecamp.

• Email is one of the first tools that went to the cloud. Cloud email services are easy to setup and use. Plus they give access to critical information anywhere, anytime. The most used webmail services are Gmail and Outlook.

• Document collaboration tools allow employees to work together simultaneously on a particular document, spreadsheet or presentation. Google Drive, Office 365, and Zoho.

Cloud computing offers small businesses the great opportunities to reduce their costs, increase agility, and focus on their operations. Productivity applications such as email, documents, communication and collaboration are business-critical. Moving them to the cloud environment requires serious consideration of provider capabilities. A cloud computing vendor within or out of kenya must provide reliable and secure services to its clientels.

Its been an indolent sunday and i thought of letting folks in kenya know a little bit of what is the next big thing in their tech-world.
Lovely sunday.......

CYBER ATTACK STATISTICS IN KENYA

....Although the number of Cyber Attacks in February in kenya has not reached the level of January, the level of attention in this part of the year remains high.

The Daily Trend of Attacks chart clearly shows a peak around the 23th of February, the International Privacy Day, when the Anonymous unleashed their OpBigBrother, concentrating the fire against industries related to Video Surveillance and several Law Enforcement Institutions. Other “trafficked” day of the month were the 3rd and the 15th.

The Motivations Behind Attacks chart confirms the prevalence of hacktivism with 56% of occurrences, exactly the same percentage observed in January. Cyber Crime is stable at number two, even if its percentage dropped from 40% to 31%. It is interesting to notice, month after month, the growing number of Cyber Espionage campaigns discovered.

SQLi leads the Distribution Of Attack Techniques chart with 34.3% of occurrences, a value similar to the one encountered in January (32.6%) when this category of attacks ranked at number two. One month ago, the first place was for DDoS, which apparently is loosing appeal in February, dropping from the first to the fifth place with a small 8%, far from the 39% of the previous month and also overtaken, by Targeted Attacks (11.7%). The next months will tell us if this is the beginning of a new trend or simply an isolated sporadic event.

Last but not least,industry targets lead the Distribution Of Targets charts. This is a consequence of the spree of attacks against video surveillance industries happened on February the 23rd. Governmental targets confirm their second place with a value (23.7%) close to the one registered during the previous month. Targets belonging to organizations rank at the third place, in front of financial targets.

As usual, no need to remind that the sample must be taken very carefully since it refers only to discovered attacks included in the 1-15 and 16-28 February 2013 Cyber Attacks Timelines (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence it does not pretend to be exhaustive but only aims to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape”.

As they say in latin,''BAHEMUS ATTACKUM'' meaning ''we have a new attack''.Folks,kenyans,this menace is deadly than TB,swine flu and AIDS combined together.Believe me!!!!!!!!!...www.samwelkariuki.blogspot.com

Source:sam

             www.samwelkariuki.com

 

....Well, well well! It seems like our own favourite ethical african hacker, samwel kariuki, is about to meet the clan with whom he shares his talents! If you still haven't figured out who S.K is, please do your homework before falling in love with him! (yes, I said it!)

Security researchers and ethical hackers are massing up in nairobi at an undisclosed conference this time of the year. The crowd is going to be equipped and ready to hunt down every vulnerability possible in Chrome, Internet, Explorer and Java (good riddance since Java has attacked over and over again since 2013 began). And in doing so, we will be able to bag generous 'cash prizes'.
On the other hand, Google is arranging its own competition with the name of Pwnium 3 but abroad in the US. Pwnium 3 focuses on finding vulnerabilities in Chrome OS and is offering a more-than-generous $3.14159 million is reward. This particular competition will be based on Samsung S5 550 Chromebook running the latest version of Chrome OS. You will need to successfully exploit the browser or system of the device logged in as a guest or a user or "compromise with device persistence - guest to guest with interim reboot, delivered via a webpage." My readers should take in notice to upgrade and update their systems with the latest versions of softwares to stay safe from cybercrimes and attacks.Ethical hacking has been on the rise since bounty hunters tend to look for every possible way to attack a system to earn their much deserved 'prize money'. Therefore, many International companies are encouraging hackers to join them in their pursuit for safe and secure softwares, programs, systems and the like.Samwel Kariuki has made it his mission to spread awareness regarding Ethical Hacking and its advantages. Believe me people, its always better to do the right thing and get paid than do the wrong one and get caught.

Let the hunting begin!.....

Cheers!