Last Friday, March 22, special counsel Robert Mueller ended his investigation on possible Russian influence in the 2016 United States presidential elections. Before he was appointed special counsel in May 2017, Mueller served 12 years as director of the FBI, from September 2001 to September 2013. Here we take a look at the telecommunications equipment that was used by Robert Mueller during his time as director of the FBI. The office of former FBI director Robert Mueller, June 4, 2010. (photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images) The FBI Director's office The office of the Director of the FBI is on the seventh floor of the brutalistic J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington D.C. Pictures of this room are very rare, but in 2010, The Washington Post published some showing Robert S. Mueller in his office, which appeared to be rather small and with remarkably old-fashioned furniture. Next to the director's office is a small executive conference room, also with 19th century furniture and a sign that looks as if it's from a Western movie saying "Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation". On the wall there's large world map, where for a domestic security service like the FBI one would rather expect a map of the United States: The conference room next to the director's office, June 4, 2010. (photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images - click to enlarge) Telephone systems In the photos we can see that in the office of FBI director Mueller there were four phones, which belong to three different telephone systems: IST phone The first phone from the left is a big white Integrated Services Telephone (IST), which was designed by Electrospace Systems Inc. (ESI) and manufactured by Raytheon. This is a so called "red phone", which means that it's connected to the Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN). This is the main secure telephone network for military command and control communications and connects all mayor US command centers and many other military facilities. Although this IST phone looks very futuristic, it has already been replaced by the newer IST-2, which was introduced in 2003. The new IST-2 was also on the president's desk in the Oval Office, before it was replaced by a Cisco IP phone for the new Executive Voice over Secure IP-network, which provides a highly secured link between the President and his senior cabinet members. It's interesting to see that there's no such new IP telephone in the office of the director of the FBI, which means that he has no direct line to the president - according to the fact that FBI falls under the Department of Justice and the director of the FBI reports to the Attorney General. STE phone Next to the IST there's a big black telephone called Secure Terminal Equipment (STE). It's made by the American defense contractor L-3 Communications (since 2016: L3 Technologies) and is capable of encrypting phone calls up to the level of Top Secret/SCI. STE phones can be used to make secure calls to anyone with a similar or compatible device and there are an estimated 400.000 STE users. STE is the successor of the almost legendary STU-III secure phone system from the late 1980s. These STE phones can be used for secure communications with everyone working for the US government, the military, its contractors, and also foreign partners who can not be reached through a more select secure telephone network, like the aforementioned DRSN. Nortel M5216 Finally, there were two Nortel M5216 Meridian telephones in former director Mueller's office: one with two additional 22 button key expansion modules on the desk, and one without these modules on the standing desk alongside the wall. These phones were used for any non-secure calls inside and outside the FBI headquarters. These telephone sets were manufactured by the former Canadian company Northern Telecom or Nortel and look rather outdated as they are probably from the mid-1990s. The Nortel Meridian telephone system itself is even older: it was first released in 1975. The system provides advanced voice and data features for applications ranging from 60 to 16.000 lines and also has Centrex capability. It became the first fully digital PBX on the global market and it was one of the most widely used business telephone systems, with an estimated number of 43 million installed users worldwide. Computer networks Besides the four telephone sets, there's also a computer in the office of former FBI director Mueller, which can be seen right behind his chair. A KVM-switch allows him to use a single set of Keyboard, Video and Mouse to access multiple FBI networks on different classification levels, like: - LEO: Law Enforcement Online (Unclassified) - FBINet: Federal Bureau of Investigation Network (Secret) - SCION: Sensitive Compartmented Information Operational Network (Top Secret/SCI) Former FBI director Mueller in his office, June 4, 2010. (photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images - click to enlarge) Links and sources - The Washington Post: Federal government cancels costly, decade-long search for a new FBI headquarters (2017) See also: - The phones of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper - NSA director Alexander's phones - US State Department red phones - Commander Petraeus' phones from https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-phones-of-former-fbi-director.html
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We made a tutorial some time back looking at how IIoT is different from IoT using some examples. Slides and video embedded below Related Links:
from http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2019/03/what-is-industrial-iot-iiot-and-how-is.html Adrian Scrase, CTO of ETSI & Head of MCC, 3GPP presented an update at BAPCO / CCE 2019 on Public Safety LTE and 5G. His presentation is embedded below. There has been quite a progress in this area since I wrote my last post on Release-14 here. This is the list of features that are planned for Release-16. There is also an update on Satellite communications but I will look at it separately in another post. Here are the slides:
Keynote Address: Critical communications standards supporting a multi-vendor and interoperable environment from 3G4G
The presentation can be directly downloaded from 3GPP website here. Related posts: from http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2019/03/update-from-3gpp-on-lte-5g-mission.html I have discussed about the UK's Emergency Services Network (ESN) multiple times but I manged to hear about the progress first hand this week. Bryan Clark, ESN Programme Director, Home Office gave a keynote address at BAPCO on Day 2 and the title of his presentation was "2019: The year vision becomes reality" British APCO or BAPCO Annual Conference and Exhibition 2019 was going to be a big launchpad for the ESN network. The ESN LinkedIn post said "Representatives from ESN and EE will be on hand to discuss coverage and ESN Assure. See an installation of the ESN Gateway solution within a police car, plus a live demonstration showing how ESN coverage can be extended from a vehicle into a building. We’ll also have a ‘Motorola Zone’ where you can watch demos of Kodiak and the ESN self-service portal – and a large touchscreen demo of the Samsung ESN Galaxy" Bryan started by cracking a joke about people referring to 'ESN' as 'ES When' programme because it has been delayed multiple times. He said straight in the beginning that he going to talk about what the ESN programme is doing now and what comes next. He started with this short video, embedded below but detailed info available on this LinkedIn post x So here is a short summary of the talk:
In case you missed BAPCO, Ken Rehbehn, a very well known Industry Analyst who works as a Principal Analyst at Critical Communications Insights and is also Montgomery County Firefighter/EMT, shared his observations and reflections from conference. Very grateful for his interview which is embedded below Related posts:
*Full Disclosure: I work for Parallel Wireless as a Senior Director in Strategic Marketing. This blog is maintained in my personal capacity and expresses my own views, not the views of my employer or anyone else. Anyone who knows me well would know this. from http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2019/03/update-on-uks-emergency-services.html After Avengers clip about Nick Fury paging Captain Marvel, I was asked by a few people about what, why and how of Pagers. Similar questions were asked when Tron: Legacy was released. It took me a while but finally managed to make a non-technical introduction on Pagers for people with very basic understanding of technology. Slides Video If you used pagers in past, tell me about the good, the bad and the ugly of pagers. from http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2019/03/a-primer-on-pagers.html As a public relations professional, we have no shortage of opportunities to get our clients in front of the media – whether it’s when the client has a new product release or a company announcement, or because breaking news creates an opportunity to position one of their executives as an expert on the situation. As your team brainstorms pitching campaigns, you can pitch three different categories of media outlets to put your client in front of the right audience: trade publications, tier-one media, and tier-two media. Trade PublicationsTrade publications cover specific industries or sectors, such as construction, facility management, manufacturing, security, food and beverage, hospitality, technology and more. They publish business-to-business (B2B) content, such as company and/or industry news, thought leadership articles and industry trends, and may be print, digital or both. Getting your client published in trade publications is a great way for leaders in the same field to see who your client is and what they bring to the industry. For example, bylines are great to pitch to the trades, as they show your client is a thought leader in the industry. Tier-One MediaAs a PR professional, one of your biggest goals is to get your client placed in the most well-known media publications and newspapers, such as TechCrunch, Fortune, the New York Times, Business Insider and The Wall Street Journal. These types of news sources are known as tier-one media. Landing your client in a tier-one publication is gold; it gets the company high-level exposure and builds credibility. There are a few key media relation strategies to keep in mind when reaching out to these notable media outlets and journalists. PR daily noted five ways to help land top-tier media coverage; read these tips and use them wisely. Metropolitan NewspapersMetropolitan news outlets are more localized publications that cover news pertinent to a specific area. For example, the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Herald or the Los Angeles Times qualify as metropolitan news outlets. When pitching these type of outlets, remember you must position your client using a local perspective. Most local newspapers and publications will only cover news that is relevant to that city/region. For example, say a local government official announces there needs to be a change in K-12 education methods to help raise students’ grades. If your client is in education technology, you can position them as an expert who can comment on how ed-tech engages students in the classroom and can help raise their grades. As you get ready to plan your next pitching campaign, don’t forget there is a time and a place to utilize all three types of media outlets. The post A Guide to the Three Main Types of Media Outlets appeared first on Tech Image. from https://www.techimage.com/blog/3-main-types-media-outlets/ Last October Deutsche Telekom, Niantic and MobiledgeX announced a partnership to create advanced augmented reality experiences over mobile network technologies. I was lucky to find some time to go and play it at Deutsche Telekom booth. The amount of processing needed for this to work at best also meant that the new Samsung Galaxy S10+ were needed but I felt that it also occasionally struggled with the amount of data being transferred. — nobu@MWC19 (@nobuMWC191) February 26, 2019 The pre-MWC press release said: Deutsche Telekom, Niantic Inc., MobiledgeX and Samsung Showcase World’s First Mobile Edge Mixed Reality Multi-Gamer Experience At the Deutsche Telekom booth at MWC 2019 (hall 3, booth 3M31) the results of the previously announced collaboration between Deutsche Telekom, Niantic, Inc., and MobiledgeX are on display and you’re invited to play. Niantic’s “Codename: Neon”, the world’s first edge-enhanced Mixed Reality Multiplayer Experience, delivered by ultra-low latency, Deutsche Telekom edge-enabled network, and Samsung Galaxy S10+ with edge computing enablement, will be playable by the public for the first time. “The ultra-low latency that Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enables, allows us to create more immersive, exciting, and entertaining gameplay experiences. At Niantic, we’ve long celebrated adventures on foot with others, and with the advent of 5G networks and devices, people around the world will be able to experience those adventures faster and better,” said Omar Téllez, Vice-President of Strategic Partnerships at Niantic. The collaboration is enabled using MobiledgeX’s recently announced MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 product. Key features include device and platform-independent SDKs, a Distributed Matching Engine (DME) and a fully multi-tenant control plane that supports zero-touch provisioning of edge cloud resources as close as possible to the users. Immediate examples of what this enables include performance boosts for Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality (MR) experiences as well as video and image processing that meets local privacy regulations. Samsung has been working together with Deutsche Telekom, MobiledgeX, and Niantic on a natively edge-capable connectivity and authentication in Samsung Galaxy S10+ to interface with MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 and dynamically access the edge infrastructure it needs so that augmented reality and mixed reality applications can take advantage of edge unmodified. Samsung will continue such collaborations with industry-leading partners not only to embrace a native device functionality of edge discovery and usage for the mobile devices and consumers, but also to seek a way together to create new business models and revenue opportunities leading into 5G era. Deutsche Telekom’s ultra-low latency network was able to deliver on the bandwidth demands of “Codename: Neon” because it deployed MobiledgeX’s edge software services, built on dynamically managed decentralized cloudlets. “From our initial partnership agreement in October, we are thrilled to showcase the speed at which we can move from idea to experience, with full end-to-end network integration, delivered on Samsung industry leading edge native devices,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, Senior Vice President Strategy and Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom. From the gaming industry to industrial IoT, and computer vision applications, consumer or enterprise, the experience is a great example of interactive AR experiences coming from companies like Niantic in the near future. As AR/VR/MR immersive experiences continue to shape our expectations, devices, networks and clouds need to seamlessly and dynamically collaborate. Niantic CEO John Hanke delivered a keynote at Mobile World Congress 2019 (embedded below). According to Fortune article, "Why the Developer of the New 'Harry Potter' Mobile Game and 'Pokemon Go' Loves 5G": Hanke showed a video of a prototype game Niantic has developed codenamed Neon that allows multiple people in the same place at the same time to play an augmented reality game. Players can shoot at each other, duck and dodge, and pick up virtual reality items, with each player’s phone showing them the game’s graphics superimposed on the real world. But the game depends on highly responsive wireless connections for all the phones, connections unavailable on today’s 4G LTE networks. “We’re really pushing the boundaries of what we can do on today’s networks,” Hanke said. “We need 5G to deliver the kinds of experiences that we are imagining.” Here is the video, it's very interesting and definitely worth a watch. For those who may not know, Niantic spun out of Google in October 2015 soon after Google's announcement of its restructuring as Alphabet Inc. During the spinout, Niantic announced that Google, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company would invest up to $30 million in Series-A funding. So what do you think, can AR / MR be the killer App 5G needs? from http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2019/03/can-augmented-mixed-reality-be-killer.html I made this video before MWC with the intention to educate the attendees about the various architecture options and 5G terminologies being discussed. As always, happy to get feedback on what can be done better. Slides followed by video below. Complete list of our training resources are available on 3G4G page here. from http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2019/03/updated-5g-terminology-presentation-feb.html It’s 8 a.m., you’re riding the “L” into work while scrolling through the Wall Street Journal app, and you come across an article addressing an issue that is squarely in your client’s wheelhouse. As a PR pro, it doesn’t get any better! This is a golden opportunity to leverage a current issue or trend to position your client in Tier 1 media. Enter the reactive pitch. Your first instinct might be to fire off an email to that WSJ reporter, but I would urge you to reconsider. After all, every PR person in the world with a somewhat relevant angle to that story is – at that minute – hammering the reporter’s inbox. So what do you do? It’s time to get old-school up in this piece: You pick up the phone. Of course, before you do that, some research is in order. It’s possible that the WSJ reporter will follow up on the story with another angle your client can speak to, but for that to work out, your angle would need to be super relevant, super timely, and potentially groundbreaking. Instead, try to get a unique piece of coverage that can stand on its own. Start with a quick search on tools like Cision or Tech News – or at the very least, Google News – and see who else covers your client’s space at Tier 1 outlets. Select the best contact at each and give them a call. All you need to say is: “You might have seen this morning’s WSJ story on X – if you’re working on a similar story and need sources, my client, X, is ready to speak on the record at your convenience.” That’s all there is to it! If it’s a breaking news story with trend-setting potential in your client’s industry, this strategy will work. But be forewarned – you need to move fast. It’s a race against time, because with every second that passes, the odds of other PR folks catching on and contacting the same reporter increases – which means your odds of placing the story decreases. If your first choice passes, go to the next reporter down the line until you get a hit. But what if you’re too late? This will quickly become apparent during the research process if you see that most Tier 1 outlets have already picked up the story. All you can do here is be creative and offer up that new, trend-setting angle your client can offer. Finally – follow up. A lot can happen during a reporter’s day, so they might not hear your initial voicemail. So follow up with an email after your call, and give it a day before calling again. Don’t be discouraged – most successful placements are the product of well-timed follow-up and leveraging positive media relationships. Reactive pitches are a win-win. Even if a completed placement doesn’t pan out, it’s a great opportunity to build your Tier 1 media network. That means that next time news breaks, reporters will be calling *you* to speak with your client. Good luck! The post How to Pitch Reactively appeared first on Tech Image. from https://www.techimage.com/blog/pitch-reactively/ MWC is huge and there is absolutely no way that I even managed to cover 1% of the floor, even though I spend half a day, every day looking at the demos and talking to companies. I came across just a couple of companies looking at post 5G research. One was Mehdi Bennis, from University of Oulu and a good friend of this blog and the other one was Interdigital, which has featured heavily on 3G4G blogs too. From the standards point of view, I am only aware of ITU 'Network 2030' (FG NET-2030) that is looking at how future network architectures, requirements, use cases, and capabilities of the networks will change by 2030 and beyond. I blogged about it here. It's too early to call anything as 6G because we don't even realise the ways in which 5G will change the world and the limitations that will feed into the requirements of IMT-2030 (just guessing the probable name). So here is the first video from Mehdi Bennis.
I also caught up with Interdigital and I got a very detailed video on their vision of what comes beyond 5G Would love to know what else did I miss on 6G and Beyond-5G at MWC 2019. from http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2019/03/beyond-5g-and-6g-at-mwc19.html |