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  • When disaster strikes many of us, no matter where we are, want to do something.  The net, with its ability to connect us all, is becoming the tool of choice for digital humanitarians and citizens to lend a hand.  Is it making a difference?  Looking at the After Nepal’s devastating 2015 earthquake, the Internet became a lifeline.  And while communication is now considered a crucial part of aid and social media is part of the toolset, privacy, power and access are just some of the complex challenges that digital humanitarians must navigate when using these platforms in their...
    Date published 10 March 2016
  • The other day, I planned to take my 15-year-old son to the movie theatre to see “Hateful Eight” in 70mm film format. The theatre would not allow him in. Under article 240a of the Dutch penal code, it is a felony to show a movie to a minor when that movie is rated 16 or above. Even though I think I am responsible for what my son gets to see, I understand that the rating agency put a 16-year stamp on this politically-incorrect-gun-slinging-gore-and-curse-intense-comedy feature. All this is to say that in the (liberal and democratic) Dutch society, blocking and filtering communication is a fact...
    Date published 04 March 2016
  • Rumbo al encuentro IETF 95, que se concretará del 3 al 8 de abril en Buenos Aires y será el primero en la historia en realizarse en Latinoamérica, apareció el IETF Journal en español. El boletín resume las alternativas del IETF 93, realizado en Praga y profundiza sobre los principales temas en los que está trabajando el IETF actualmente. El Journal publicado en español incluye un informe especial sobre la sesión de preguntas y respuestas en vivo con Edward Snowden que tuvo lugar a través de video antes de la reunión Nº 93. Otros artículos de la publicación tratan sobre: el trabajo para...
    Date published 03 March 2016
  • On 23 February 2016, the Internet Society and the African Union Commission released a survey that they conducted jointly. The survey assesses African Information and Communication Technology policy makers’ priorities in the area of ICT and Internet policies. The survey participants are ICT ministers and high level officials who attended the 1st ordinary meeting of the Specialized Technical Committee (STC) on Communication and ICT of the African Union in September 2015. It is probably the first time that such a survey was conducted, making its results quite interesting for anyone who...
    Date published 25 February 2016
  • This morning at the 2016 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), four papers were given “Distinguished Paper Awards.” They are listed here, with links to the full papers: Transcript Collision Attacks: Breaking Authentication in TLS, IKE, and SSH Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent (INRIA) ProTracer: Towards Practical Provenance Tracing by Alternating Between Logging and TaintingShiqing Ma, Xiangyu Zhang and Dongyan Xu (Purdue University) Forwarding-Loop Attacks in Content Delivery NetworksJianjun Chen, Xiaofeng Zheng, Haixin Duan and Jinjin Liang (Tsinghua...
    Date published 23 February 2016
  • The Internet Society has just signed the online petition at https://www.securetheinternet.org. In late 2014, the Internet Society Board of Trustees strongly supported the Internet Architecture Board's (IAB) statement that encryption should be the norm for Internet traffic. We further believe that this is an important additional step in ongoing efforts by the technical community to address the critical issue of pervasive monitoring. That norm is only meaningful if encryption is unlimited, as discussed in the petition. The Internet Society continues to recognize that increased use of encryption...
    Date published 15 February 2016
  • Of all the many protocols that run over the Internet some are more fundamental than others. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one of the more fundamental ones given that it provides the means for networks to announce their connectivity to each other. The Internet is a network of networks and BGP provides the glue that stitches the (approximately) fifty thousand networks that collectively deliver what we think of as the Internet together. As we mentioned late last year, the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) hosted the inaugural BGP Hackathon at their premises in the University...
    Date published 10 February 2016
  • I recently attended the 24th edition of Convergence India, the ICT and Broadcast expo in Delhi.  The theme of the exhibition and a conference track was the much talked about Digital India. This topic, like the project, has filled the 1.25 billion Indians with pride and evoked much emotion at the same time. In the words of Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India: “Digital connectivity should become as much a basic right as access to school … under Digital India, IT will be used to drive government processes to improve service delivery and programme implementation and provide broadband...
    Date published 03 February 2016
  • 30 years ago, on the 16th and the 17th of January 1986, a meeting of the so-called DoD Gateway Algorithms Task Force took place in San Diego, California. During that meeting a charter for an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was proposed. It defined the following mission: “The mission of this task force is to identify and resolve engineering issues in the near-term planning and operation of the DoD Internet. The goal of the effort is to improve and expand the service for operational users, including the gateway system and various networks operated (on behalf of all users such as Arpanet...
    Date published 15 January 2016
  • Today, the Internet Society issued a news release announcing that it is donating 150 000 USD to the African Network Operators Group (AfNOG) to support networking expertise within Africa as well as assist the development of the AfNOG program by supplying leadership expertise and program management. Internet Society has been at the forefront of Networks Operation capacity building since its early ages through the early INET workshops that trained many of the pioneers of Internet around the world but most particularly in Africa. The Internet Society has also been supporting continuously AfNOG...
    Date published 14 January 2016