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Netball South Africa (NSA) president Cecilia Molokwane seemed unfazed on Monday about the legal threat sent to her federation by trade union Solidarity over the sports race regulations.

Molokwane said the governing netball federation would not respond to trade union Solidaritys legal letter until their council met to discuss the issue.

On 6 November, Solidaritys Hennie Bierman addressed a letter to Molokwane saying NSAs race regulations were "irrational".

This came after the Mpumalanga Sunbirds were disqualified for failing to adhere to the regulations during their clash with the Kingdom Queens, in the Telkom Netball Leagues Division 2 final last month.

READ | 'No quotas in netball,' says Molokwane

"[We are] of the view that the rules are irrational, damaging to the sport of Netball, and most importantly, to the players, coaching and management staff," Bierman wrote.

"The TNL tournament rules are on its own ambiguous in that no rational benchmark is set to determine the target system."

Molokwane, however, said they had procedures to follow before they could engage Solidarity on their threat.

"You can take us to court and do whatever but at the end of the day we will still have to go to the very same council and say, Solidarity is taking us to court, what do we do?" she said.

"We cannot spend money on legal matters. We will only answer that letter only when weve gone to council.

"We are not going to jump because of them. We have procedures to follow. We have a constitution to follow and it should be a council resolution like many other legal things we have to deal with.

"We are not going to do anything and we havent even responded. We will take the letter to council and go through our procedures, as we did with the AfriForum issue."

Molokwane said she was concerned that people outside netball were trying to influence the sport in a negative way and that it was up to their own council to decide whether their system was fit or not for the sport.

"My concern is that there are people outside of netball thinking they can come into netball and threaten us, giving us legal letters and whatever," said Molokwane.

"The council of Netball South Africa will decide whether the rules suit them or not. At the end of the day, they are the people that play netball.

"They are the people with the players and they will decide what is best for the players in the country."

READ | Proteas air Black Lives Matter grievances

Molokwane added that NSA, which was under a barrage of criticism during the height of the Black Lives Matter conversation in South African sport, her federation was working hard to ensure redress.

However, she suspected foul elements were trying to destabilise the organisation ahead of the 2023 Netball World Cup in Cape Town.

"We are still trying to fix the wrongs and injustices of the past and we cant do that in a day," Molokwane said.

"People are expecting so many miracles from us, the executive, and I dont know why. Theres only seven of us but we are working and we do netball because of the passion and love we have for it.

"People are trying to destabilise us. Is it not a plan to make sure we dont host the World Cup?"

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NSA president Cecilia Molokwane unfazed by Solidaritys legal threat over race regulations - News24

Imagine youre a young cyber officer in the Russian military looking to break into the defended network of a NATO government. You identify a target, a person whose credentials you could steal to gain access to the network and then perhaps move from node to node, looking for sensitive information to exfiltrate. You send your target a phishing email. The target clicks the link. Youre in! But later on, you learn that the information you stole was meaningless and you may have exposed your own techniques or tools. Your adversary wanted you to succeed in the hack to get information on you.

This is the value of honeypots, a deceptive cybersecurity practice that NATO used as part of its most recent exercise, NATO Cyber Coalition, which took place in Estonia and other locations from Nov. 16 to 20.

The exercise, coordinated through Estonias Cyber Security Training Centre, brought in more than 1,000 participants. Previous exercises have strived to mimic real-world challenges, such as Russian hybrid warfare techniques.

This year, We put [out] machines that are sacrificial, that are what we call honeypots or honeynets, said Alberto Domingo, a technical director for Cyberspace at the NATO Supreme Allied Transform Command on a call with reporters and other observers on Friday. The idea is that the adversary will find it easier to attack these machines without knowing and they will do that and we will be preserving the information for NATO and interacting with this adversary.

This experiment took the concept a further than standard use of deception techniques, he said by working with the adversary without his knowing...in order to derive: what is their behavior?

The objective is to collect intelligence on the adversary without their being aware of it. Its answering the questions of who is the adversary? What type of adversary are we talking about? What do they want and what are they going to do next? said Domingo.

The use of honeypots by governments is a relatively recent phenomenon.

In April 2017 Deborah Frincke, then NSAs director of research, discussed how her agency had also begun to experiment with deceptive tactics as a means of gathering intelligence on adversaries.

During a breakfast put together by the National Defense Industry Association, Frincke said that a lot of commercially available cybersecurity software gave adversaries too much room to explore its vulnerabilities. It was too easy, she said, just to buy a copy of the software and hunt for an attack that didnt set off obvious alarms.

There are ways we can get defenses right and ways we can get defenses wrong. So if you always put out a system that always tells an adversary always when theyve beaten it, thats probably not the most productive way to proceed. If they sometimes will get feedback thats incorrect, deceptive, that might be a better thing, said Frincke. She said the NSA was looking at Where might we go in terms of understanding defenses. We might think about defensive deception, for instance.

Frinke said honeypots can give you a window into the adversarys mindset. They can help answer such questions as what will the adversary tend to do? How long will they keep at a task before they move? Can we use that to determine between a [human] adversary and an automated system?Can we make them go away, worn out, or become indecisive? Thats getting at what is the cognitive load of the system were throwing at them. Can we give them a little more information that might actually be counterproductive to them, especially if its sometimes wrong? So you can start playing those games of what the adversary is actually doingand think about it from a psychosocial standpoint, how much does that buy you?

Just a month after Frincke gave that talk, Russian GRU actors attempted to breach the presidential campaign of French politician Emmanuel Macron. But unlike the DNC in 2016, the French had advance warning that they were targets. Macrons team set up their own honeypot defense.

We created false accounts, with false content, as traps. We did this massively, to create the obligation for them to verify, to determine whether it was a real account, the campaigns digital director Mounir Mahjoubi told the New York Times. I dont think we prevented them. We just slowed them down, Mahjoubi said. Even if it made them lose one minute, were happy,

Ian West, the chief of NATOs Cybersecurity Centre, wouldn't say whether NATO currently employs honeypots in real-world settings. We cant go into what we do or dont do in terms of our tactics, West said. We use every defensive means thats available to us in order to defend our networks.

But according to Frincke, the NSA conducted a series of internal exercises, which led to some surprising findings. Does attacker awareness of defensive deception change its effectiveness? By and large, she said, it doesnt.

Read more:
NATO Experiments With Deceptive Tactics to Lure Russian Hackers - Defense One

Currently, a divergence is observed between the aggregate of gross state domestic products (GSDPs) and the gross domestic product (GDP) of India. Though a thorough exercise is required to find out the reason, this difference has public policy implications for the country.

The divergence between the recorded output of Indias constituent states put together and the national output, which is taken to signify the size of the economy, gives rise to doubt if the GDP numbers put out by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) accurately capture the countrys economic growth. This divergence, if found true, could complicate assessments of the outcomes of various policy measures.

In 2019-20, as per available official data, Indias 20 states and Union territories (UTs) combined recorded growth of 6.9%, compared to national-level GDP growth of 4.2%. There have been reasonable differences between the two numbers in the past, and after the introduction the 2012 series of the National Accounts Statistics (NAS), this difference averaged 0.3 percentage points over fiscal years 2012-13 through 2018-19. The added-up GSDP growth of states/UTs has been consistently higher than that of national GDP during the last five years. But the growth difference of 2.7 percentage points in 2019-20 is not only abnormally high, it also suggests that the deceleration of growth at the sub-national level was not as sharp as the national number may suggest.

In India, states release only annual data of their GSDP and not quarterly data. Also, they do not provide GSDP figures with a break-down of consumption and investment. However, in their annual GSDP sectoral estimates, not only do they follow the same methodology of data compilation used by the National Statistical Agency (NSA), but the data is also discussed and vetted by the NSA. The comparable estimates of GSDP for 2015-16 to 2017-18 that the NSA prepared for the Finance Commission indicate that states estimates were quite consistent with these; specifically for 21 states, the ratio of one to the other varied between 0.99 and 1.01. Even the average annual growth at current prices of the NSAs comparable GSDP for 2015-16 to 2017-18 at 12% was a just a shade lower than 12.4% for the aggregated GSDP as compiled by the states themselves. This suggests that state estimates did not suffer from any methodological or estimation flaws. Further, the aggregated GSDP of states/UTs was also aligned with national GDP in 2011-12, the first year of the new NAS series, with the ratio of aggregated GSDP of sub-national constituents being 1.012. Aggregated GSDP growth after that was expected to show a similar growth trajectory. The gap of 2019-20, however, raises a question: Is there an emerging disconnect?

Before we look at the implications and ways of resolving it, it is important to look at two issues. The ministry of company affairs MCA-21 data for corporate output across all sectors and the data on railways, financial institutions, public administration and defence is allocated by the NSA to various states. Their respective directorates of economics and statistics incorporate that data in their overall compilation of GSDP. Each states share differs, and tends to exceed 60% of total GSDP for most. Hence, differences in GSDP growth can be inferred to arise from only that part of GSDP which is solely in the states domain. Often, discrepancies in GDP estimates (including sharp revisions) get attributed to the informal sector. The overall share in GDP of households and non-profit institutions serving households, which is the informal sector, has been around 45%, and this is almost equally distributed across agriculture, industry and services. Though there are differences in growth across those three broad sectors, industrial growth is significantly more robust from a data perspective.

Some questions arise in this regard. Has the issue of a sharp, persistent and secular deceleration of GDP growth been overplayed? The average annual growth of GSDP of Indias 20 major states/UTs during 2012-13 to 2018-19 was 7.15%. This measure of growth in 2019-20 at 6.89% was only a shade lower than 6.97% achieved in 2018-19, and showed a marginal deceleration from the trend medium-term growth. Seven of these states (six of them major), namely Tamil Nadu, Haryana, West Bengal, Sikkim, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh recorded higher growth in 2019-20 than the previous year. Could it be that Indian states are making a more accurate assessment of the growth situation on the ground? After all, considerable changes have taken place in the composition of the economy over the last five years, especially in the informal sector.

The methodology of the survey used by states to gather data has the approval of the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO). The NSSO, however, lacks the expert capacity to supervise these surveys, and this makes data robustness hard to ensure. Should this bottleneck not be eased for us to obtain clarity?

If the states GSDP reflects the situation correctly, has Indias unorganized sector bounced back faster after demonetization (in 2016) and introduction of the goods and services tax (in 2017) than anecdotal data suggests? And if this is so, will it not be prudent to ensure that the sector gets access to capital as part of the countrys stimulus strategy? And finally, will the 15th Finance Commission use GSDP or CSO data in deciding on its devolution of resources to states?

R. Gopalan and Manak C. Singhi are respectively, former secretary in the department of economic affairs, ministry of finance, and former senior adviser at ministry of finance, Government of India.

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An odd divergence between India and its constituents - Mint

The Federal Government has asked states across the nation should take advantage of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement in a bid to attract investments to the states for economic productivity.

This was disclosed by Francis Anatogu, Secretary, National Action Committee (NAC) on AfCFTA, while on a courtesy visit to Mr. Asishana Okauru, the Director-General, Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) on Friday in Abuja.

Anatogu said the FG wants states and private stakeholders to maximize the trade deal to ensure Nigeria takes full opportunity of the African Market.

He added that the FGs Committee on AfCFTA implementation wants the Governors to implement regional and local policies to integrate the AfCFTA in their states through sponsorship and participation in AfCFTA sensitization programmes.

It is no longer news that we have been clamoring for the diversification of our economy over the years.

As a committee, we are now working toward how we as a nation can properly utilize business doors being offered by AfCFTA. The NGF represents the states as good channel to reach out to the state government and that is why we have reached out to it.

We want them to take advantage of AfCFTA because as a nation, we need to produce what we sell; we need to invest and attract investors. To attract investors, we need good policies, infrastructure, and good conditions for ease of doing business.

He added that free trade is important to diversify Nigerias economy and all necessary leaders need to be on board. He urged that Governors must provide partnership for coordination at local levels.

Trade and all the things around it are very important for the development of our country, so we have to get our principals involved in this project.

To make any meaningful impact from this project, the sub-national leaders must be involved and the forum we will provide that platform for easy coordination.

They all know that we have signed this agreement but how to get them involvedis very importantfor the benefit of all, he said.

What you should know

Nairametrics reported last week that the FG announced that it ratified Nigerias membership to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), ahead of the December 5, 2020 deadline. The agreement goes into effect from the 1st of January 2021.

Yewande Sadiku, CEO of Nigerian Investment Promotion Council (NIPC),said in September that Nigeria was more ready for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), due to her domestic market manufacturing value addition capacity, which is 7 times the average of the top 20 economies in Africa and others.

Mr. Francis Anatogu, stated earlier that the agreement would reduce the erosion of the naira, which has suffered nearly 90% devaluation since 2016, through exports of Nigerian-made goods and services, and give the naira exposure to other currencies.

See the article here:
Terrorism: Nigeria and USA committed to defeating ISIS, Boko Haram and others - NSA - Nairametrics

The 5G transformation has reached a critical phase. 5G is the fifth generation wireless technology and also known as the fastest, most reliable and lowest latency technology ever. Yet, there are multiple scenarios determining how 5G rollouts will take place, including use of a Stand Alone (SA) or Non-Stand Alone (NSA) architecture.

Compared to 4G (LTE) networks, 5G brings:

5G has three main use case categories defined by 3GPP and GSMA:

In addition to this, the network slicing feature brings crating virtual networks in a service based & software defined architecture that allows more secure, differentiated and protected networks based on specific needs.

The following ITU (International Telecommunications Union) chart shows applications used in 5G use cases to enable us to visualize real deployments in a 5G environment:

Mobile networks consist of 2 major modules: Radio network and core network parts.

Two major 5G deployment alternatives are defined by 3GPP (Global Initiative creating standards for mobile networks): NSA (Non-Stand Alone) and SA (Stand Alone).

For both NSA and SA, new radio network technology (NR) is being used. New radio will satisfy high bandwidth needs such as VR, 8-12K video, etc., which is called eMBB (Enhanced Mobile Broadband).

For mobile operators who seek mainly high-speed connectivity to their customers, 5G NSA deployment could be enough at the start. However, 5G capable handsets and devices will be required.

The major first step taken by iBASIS to prepare for 5G video bandwidth explosion is deploying 100Gbps interfaces for 5G NSA.

The real 5G deployment is Stand Alone (SA) because it brings all possible use cases to the 5G mobile network, such as high throughput, low latency communications, massive IoT, network slicing, etc.

Thats why iBASIS is introducing its 5G signaling exchange testing platform for 5G SA enabling multiple scenario and use case testing.

Excerpt from:
What is 5G, SA, NSA? | iBASIS