UN steps in to end marketing war over what 5G means

With mobile operators’ marketing departments already throwing around claims about their 5G services, the United Nations is weighing in with its definition of what qualifies a network as next-generation. Verizon Wireless will begin delivering “5G” service to select users in 11 U.S. cities in mid-2017, even though some places don’t yet have access to 4G.…

Linux Foundation smushes two smaller projects together to form Open Networking Automation Platform

The Linux Foundation announced yesterday that it had combined open source ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project into ONAP, the Open Networking Automation Platform, with the aim of helping users automate network service delivery, design, and service through a unified standard. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said that ONAP should be a…

Trump expected to cut federal IT spending

President Donald Trump said this week that the federal budget is a “mess” and is promising to make it leaner. This means that federal IT spending — now at $81.6 billion — is likely to see cuts, analysts said. The Trump administration is still filling top technology policy positions, including replacing former federal CIO Tony…

Stop using SHA1: It’s now completely unsafe

Security researchers have achieved the first real-world collision attack against the SHA-1 hash function, producing two different PDF files with the same SHA-1 signature. This shows that the algorithm’s use for security-sensitive functions should be discontinued as soon as possible. SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) dates back to 1995 and has been known to be…