More Girls in ICT: The Internet Society Signs MoU with the Mexican Government

Women and girls are significantly less likely to choose ICT (Information and Communication Technology) studies than men. There are many reasons for this. Barriers to access, but also retention in ICT studies are complex as they are often related not only to economic but also to social and cultural barriers.

A lot of initiatives are being developed worldwide to break these barriers, and at the Internet Society we believe that only if we join efforts we can overcome them and help to close the digital gender gap.

For this reason, on July 19, the Internet Society and the Secretariat of Communications and Transport of the Mexican government signed a cooperation agreement to support the “Women in STEM, Future Leaders” project.

In Mexico only 35.5% of tertiary graduates in ICT are women. The initiative aims to change these numbers. It provides training and support to young women from public high schools with the purpose of encouraging them to pursue a career in science and ICT.

The program, launched at the beginning of 2018 in coordination with the U.S.-Mexico Foundation, has already reached more than 180 girls from all over the country. It is working closely with 32 Mexican Connected Points (Puntos Mexico Conectados), which are centers that provide Internet access and training to Continue reading

Steven G. Huter – The 2018 Jonathan B. Postel Service Award Winner

With so many moving parts to advancing Internet access and enabling communities to reach the rest of the world, the biggest key to success, according to this year’s Jonathan B. Postel Award winner, is listening.

Steven Huter listens. He says it’s his most important job. The Director for the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) and a Research Associate at the University of Oregon says before configuring community networks and setting Internet development goals, his organization has to make sure they are solving the right problems.

“Listening first to what local Internet developers request and desire in terms of assistance, based on their respective conditions and challenges, is vital for a successful outcome,” Huter says.

Only half the people in the world have Internet access, and the NSRC works on creating “a sustainable community of Internet-savvy engineers and local operators that can enable continuous progress in their countries to bring more affordable Internet access and better network performance for their respective communities.”

Essentially, they go to areas in need, help set up the hardware and digital necessities for Internet access, and train local operators and system workers to handle that network independently. And Huter has been an integral part Continue reading

Bienvenue au Chapitre ISOC Madagascar! 35e Chapitre de l’Internet Society en Afrique.

Le Directeur Régional Afrique de l’Internet Society (ISOC),  Dr. Dawit Bekele a rejoint la communauté Internet de Madagascar les 15 et 16 Juin 2018 pour l’inauguration du Chapitre ISOC Madagascar (ISOC Madagascar Chapter), le 35^e Chapitre de l’Internet Society en Afrique. Cette inauguration a été marquée par une série de deux conférences  : la première a eu lieu le 15 juin 2018 à l’Akademia Malagasy sur le thème «Quel Internet voulons-nous réellement à Madagascar ? », et la seconde le 16 juin 2018 à l’Hôtel du Louvre sur le thème «Future de l’Internet : Enjeux et Opportunités». Dr. Bekele a profité de cette occasion pour présenter l’Internet Society à la Communauté Internet malgache et discuter des opportunités de collaboration et de partenariat pour le développement d’un Internet pour tous, ouvert, sécurisé et digne de confiance à Madagascar.

Pendant la première conférence  du 15 juin 2018, Dawit a discuté avec toutes les parties prenantes de l’écosystème Internet malgache sur l’état des lieux, les challenges et opportunités du développement de l’Internet à Madagascar. Il a profité pour présenter les axes prioritaires (campagnes) de l’Internet Society pour l’année 2018 avec un accent particulier sur l’alternative Réseaux Communautaires comme solution durable pour connecter Continue reading

IETF 102, Day 4: DNS, IoT & TLS

Collaborative Governance Leaders, Canada, and Senegal Exchange Notes on IoT Security Frameworks

Canada and Senegal partners are meeting for a comparative learning exchange on developing robust Internet of Things (IoT) Security frameworks in Ottawa, Canada 18-19 July. The two countries are strong supporters of the collaborative governance, or multistakeholder, model in addressing critical Internet infrastructure. Both countries have already begun adopting the model for domestic policy development focusing on IoT security. The learning exchange is part of the Internet Society supported Internet Governance campaign activity for both countries and will explore issues of mutual interest, connect stakeholders, and exchange notes on the process.

In Canada, the Internet Society partnered with Innovation, Science and Economic Development, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, CANARIE, and CIPPIC to convene stakeholders to develop recommendations for a set of norms/policy to secure the Internet of Things in Canada. The partners have agreed to focus on two specific thematic areas: consumer protection and network resilience. While in Senegal, the Internet Society partnered with the ISOC Senegal Chapter, the Ministry of Telecommunications and Digital Economy, and the Senegalese Commission for Data Protection to explore the same.

Canada and Senegal are amongst the countries that are leading in demonstrating the collaborative, multistakeholder model of Internet Governance. These Continue reading

IETF 102, Day 3: DNSSEC, DPRIVE & IoT

The Philippines Embraces the Multistakeholder Model in the Development of Its National ICT Ecosystem Framework 2022

Earlier this month in Manila, the Philippines Government Department of ICT (DICT) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Internet Society (ISOC) to facilitate the development of its National ICT Ecosystem Framework (NIEF) 2022.

The NIEF 2022 – a successor to the Philippine Digital Strategy initiative from 2011-2016 – will serve as a roadmap for the management and development of national Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the country’s plans, programmes, and projects. NIEF will also serve to promote innovation and development of the ICT sector, encourage collaborative use of ICTs, and promote accessibility, security and sustainability.

Some 67 million people are connected to the Internet in the Philippines today – and a large number are prolific users. The country is a significant market for a number of multinational social media and content providers and has a strong Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. These facts make ICTs a key area of development and critical for the future of the economy.

The multistakeholder model will help facilitate perspectives from a range of stakeholders, which in turn will help NIEF 2022 to be in tune with what would work best for the people of the Philippines. This collaborative approach encourages inclusivity Continue reading

Innovative Approaches to Connecting Indigenous Communities

In November 2017, the Internet Society hosted its first Indigenous Connectivity Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This event brought together over 200 Indigenous community members to talk about Internet access solutions, and the importance of connectivity for socioeconomic, health, community empowerment, education, and cultural and language preservation.

It was an incredible two days that resulted in new, meaningful relationships, partnerships, and opportunities for all those present. But the work isn’t done yet.

Connectivity in Indigenous communities continues to lag far behind non-Indigenous areas. Low speeds or non-existent service, high costs, and data caps plague many communities. In some Arctic communities in Canada, it is often cheaper and faster to mail a USB drive south, upload data, and mail it back North than it is to download the content on the slow and expensive services available.

To continue the conversation that was started in Santa Fe, the Internet Society will hold the second Indigenous Connectivity Summit in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada on October 11-12. This event will bring together Indigenous community leaders, technical experts, researchers, policy makers, and service providers to address the unique connectivity issues Alaska Native, American Indian, Inuit, First Nation, and Métis communities face and how they Continue reading

IETF 102, Day 2: Trust in the IETF

Encryption Is Critical for the Australian Economy

On 17 July 2018, the Internet Society and its locally based chapter, Internet Australia, joined 75 organizations in signing a letter urging Australia not to pursue legislation that could undermine the security of encrypted services and devices used by Australians.

As Internet Society CEO Kathy Brown wrote last year, “strong encryption is an essential piece to the future of the world’s economy … it allows us to do our banking, conduct local and global business, run our power grids, operate communications networks, and do almost everything else”.

Encryption should be the norm for all Internet traffic and stored data.

The Internet Society recognizes the concerns of law enforcement and remains firm in its conviction that encryption is an important technical solution that all Internet users should use to protect their communications and data. Legal or technical measures that weaken encryption or other digital security tools will place the well-being of law-abiding Australians, and the Internet at large, at risk.

We urge you to stand with us in support of encryption.

Voice your support via #aussiesencrypt.

The post Encryption Is Critical for the Australian Economy appeared first on Internet Society.

Smart Shopping Starts Today!

Let’s face it – things are different now than when we were kids.

I grew up with technology. My weekends consisted of frantically switching out floppy disks while on 13-inch-green-screen missions to destroy cubism-esque dragons, orcs and whatever else I could with my wizard powers. It taught me critical reasoning, innovative thinking, and gave me the courage to try new things.

Now that I’m a mom, I’m an advocate for my kids to use tech. But today’s tech is different. Now the Internet is everywhere and it’s a part of our everyday lives, in everyday things. Coffeemakers, toothbrushes, toasters, televisions and, yes – even teeth.

Did you ever think we’d have connected homes, let alone bras that might detect breast cancer?

These everyday things are known as the Internet of Things – IoT for short. It’s already everywhere.

Manufacturers are building connected things faster than most of us can keep up. While that means there’s lots of cool things hitting the shelves, many haven’t been built with our security or privacy in mind. That’s why we hear stories ranging from the somewhat humorous to the terrifying.

But we’re hungry for IoT devices – buying them as fast as manufacturers can Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Startup Finds a Way to Glue Fiber to Roadways

Why don’t we glue it in the road? A technology startup has patented a way to integrate broadband fiber to blacktop, reports Motherboard. The patented technique, inspired by dentistry, uses a blend of resins to stick fiber optic cables to roads.

Major spending to fix IoT security: The Internet of Things security market will grow to US$6 billion by 2023, with spending to rise 300 percent between 2018 and 2023, according to Juniper Research. However, poor long-term device support and little fear of ramifications will keep security spending on connected homes lagging behind other markets, the research firm says.

Data breaches cost big bucks: The average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million, up more than 6 percent from last year, according to a study from IBM and the Ponemon Institute. Compromised organizations took 197 days to identify a breach and an additional 69 days to contain it, reports IT Pro. A data breach cost organizations an average of $148 per lost or stolen record.

AI takes over the world: About three-quarters of all consumers have interacted with artificial intelligence systems, reports ComputerWeekly.com. A Capgemini survey of 10,000 consumers found, however, that more than half of consumers prefer Continue reading

IETF 102, Day 1: IETF arrive à Montréal

Tomorrow sees kickoff of the Working Groups sessions at IETF 102 in Montreal, Canada, we’re bringing you daily blog posts highlighting the topics of interest to us in the ISOC Internet Technology Team. Monday is an important day, with meetings of the TLS, 6MAN and SIDROPS Working Groups, along with two other IoT related groups.

6MAN commences at 09.30 EDT/UTC-4, and has six new drafts up for discussion covering IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Extensions for Prefix Delegation, IPv6 VPNs, ICMPv6, OAM in Segment Routing Networks with an IPv6 Data plane, allowing low or zero valid lifetimes to be accepted in Router Advertisement Prefix Information Options where it’s known that there can only be one router on the link; as well as introducing a new IPv6 ‘unrecognised’ option for ICMPv6 that conveys whether an underlying network can transmit IPv6 packets.

There are also three working group sponsored drafts, adopted from the last meeting. Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6 describes an extension that causes nodes to generate global scope addresses from interface identifiers that change over time; IPv6 Segment Routing Header specifies how a node can steer a packet through a controlled set of instructions (segments) by prepending an SR header Continue reading

ISOC’s Hot Topics at IETF 102

The 102nd meeting of the IETF starts tomorrow in Montreal, Canada. This is will be the third time that an IETF has been held in the city, and tenth time in Canada – the first being way back in 1990.

The ISOC Internet Technology Team is as always highlighting the latest IPv6, DNSSEC, Securing BGP, TLS and IoT related developments, and we discuss these in detail in our Rough Guide to IETF 102. But we’ll also be bringing you daily previews of what’s happening each day as the week progresses.

Below are the sessions that we’ll be covering in the coming week. Note this post was written in advance so please check the official IETF 102 agenda for any updates, room changes, or final details.

Monday, 16 July 2018

• IPv6 Maintenance (6man) – Laurier @ 09.30-12.00 UTC-4
• Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environments (ace) – Viger @ 09.30-12.00 UTC-4
• IP Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (ipwave) – Laurier @ 13.30-15.30 UTC-4
• SIDR Operation (sidrops) – Viger @ 13.30-15.30 UTC-4
• Transport Layer Security (tls) – Place du Canada @ 13.30-15.30 UTC-4

Tuesday, 17 July 2018

• Distributed Mobility Management (dmm) – Van Horne @ 09.30-12.00 UTC-4
• Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 102: DNSSEC, DNS Security and Privacy

DNS privacy will receive a large focus in the latter half of the IETF 102 week with attention in the DPRIVE, DNSSD, and OPSEC working groups. In an interesting bit of scheduling (which is always challenging), most of the DNS sessions are Wednesday through Friday. As part of our Rough Guide to IETF 102, here’s a quick view on what’s happening in the world of DNS.

Given that IETF 102 is in Montreal, Canada, all times below are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), which is UTC-4.

IETF 102 Hackathon

The “DNS team” has become a regular feature of the IETF Hackathons and the Montreal meeting is no different. The IETF 102 Hackathon wiki outlines the work that will start tomorrow (scroll down to see it). Major security/privacy projects include:

• Implementing a part of draft-bortzmeyer-dprive-resolver-to-auth
• Setting up and measuring leakage avoidance using root loopback at privacy server
• Oblivious DNS
• Proof of concept of the Multi-Provider DNSSEC draft.

Anyone is welcome to join the DNS team for part or all of that event.

DNS Operations (DNSOP)

The DNS sessions at IETF 102 start on Wednesday morning from 9:30am – 12noon with the DNS Operations (DNSOP) Working Group. Paul Wouters and Ondrej Sury Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 102: IPv6

In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 102 I’ll review what’ll be happening at the IETF meeting in Montreal next week on the topic of all things IPv6.

IPv6 global adoption rates have shown slow growth since IETF 101 and are currently approaching 25% overall. With the almost total depletion of the remaining pools of new IPv4 addresses, more-and-more networks have been increasing their IPv6 deployments, with the top 15 network operators supporting nearly half-a-billion IPv6 users. In addition, 28 percent of the Alexa Top 1000 websites are IPv6-enabled, including many of the large content providers who are now delivering native IPv6 traffic to mobile devices in particular. The US recently reached 40% deployment with nearly 80% of smartphones using IPv6, whilst along with Belgium, India, Germany, Brazil and Japan who still lead the way, we’re starting to see significant growth in countries such as Switzerland, Portugal, Estonia, Uruguay, Ecuador, Peru and New Zealand.

IPv6 is always an important focus for the IETF, particularly with respect to the standardisation work related to the Internet-of-Things.

The IPv6 Maintenance (6man) Working Group is a key group and it will be meeting on Monday morning. It hasn’t published any RFCs since Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 102: Internet of Things

The buzz around the Internet of Things (IoT) is only increasing, to the surprise of, well, no one. We are often asked what is happening in the IETF in relation to IoT and in this short post I’d like to highlight some of the relevant activities and sessions scheduled during the upcoming IETF 102 meeting in Montreal. Also check out the IETF Journal IoT Category, the IETF IoT page, the IETF IoT Directorate, the Internet Society’s IoT page, or the Online Trust Alliance (OTA, which became an Internet Society Initiative in April 2017) IoT page for more details about many of these topics.

The IETF Hackathon, held on the weekend preceding the main IETF meeting (July 14-15), includes projects directly related to IoT, with the possibility of more being added. More information is on the Hackathon wiki. Projects of interest include those relating to:

• Software Updates for Internet of Things (suit)
• Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environments (ace)
• IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan)
• Work on IoT Semantic / Hypermedia Interoperability (WISHI)

The Thing-to-Thing Research Group (T2TRG) investigates open research issues towards turning the IoT into reality. The research group will be meeting on Thursday afternoon Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 102: Internet Infrastructure Resilience

As usual, in this post I’ll focus on important work the IETF is doing that helps improve the security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure.

At IETF 102 there are a lot of new ideas being brought to the community in the form of Internet Drafts aimed at improving the security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure, and I’d like to introduce some of them to you. But keep in mind – an Internet Draft does not indicate IETF endorsement, is not a standard, and may not result in any further work at the IETF.

So, let us look at what is happening in the domain of BGP, the routing protocol that connects the Internet.

Route leaks

There has been slow progress in the work on mitigating route leaks in the IDR Working Group (WG). One of the reasons for the slowness was that the group was considering two proposals addressing the route leak problem and both are IDR WG documents:  “Methods for Detection and Mitigation of BGP Route Leaks”, and “Route Leak Prevention using Roles in Update and Open Messages”. Plus, there is a third submission “Route Leak Detection and Filtering using Roles Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: WhatsApp Looks to Combat the Spread of Fake News

Fake messaging: WhatsApp, the popular messaging tool, will pay researchers up to $50,000 to study the spread of fake news through its platform, notes Mashable.com. The announcement came after reports of mob lynchings in India fueled by false information spread on WhatsApp, reports the Washington Post. India’s government asked the app maker to take immediate action to stop the spread of fake news.

Defining fake news: While we’re still on the topic of fake news, Cambodia’s recent crackdown on false information is raising concerns about press freedom in the country, reports The Guardian. A new directive aimed at fake news on websites and social media allows for violators to be jailed for two years and fined US$1,000, but civil rights groups said the new rules could give “authorities the power to silence individuals at the click of a button.”

Fired by a computer: A Los Angeles worker was recently shown the door by an automated process that seemed to assume he was let go after his original manager was laid off, the BBC reports. The case could raise questions about artificial intelligence processes, but the real fix would be a more intelligent machine, The Conversation says.

AI manages Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 102

Starting next weekend, the Internet Engineering Task Force will be in Montreal for IETF 102, where over 1,000 engineers will discuss open Internet standards and protocols. The week begins on Saturday, 14 July, with a Hackathon and Code Sprint. The IETF meeting itself begins on Sunday and goes through Friday. We’ll be providing our rough guides on topics of mutual interest to both the IETF and the Internet Society as follows:

• Overview of ISOC @ IETF (this post)
• Internet Infrastructure Resilience
• Internet of Things
• IPv6
• DNSSEC, DANE and DNS Security
• Identity, Privacy, and Encryption

For more general information about IETF 102 see:

• IETF 102 main page
• Remote participation & live stream information

Immediately prior to the IETF meeting, ICANN are hosting a DNS Symposium on the theme “Attention, Domain Name System: Your 30-year scheduled maintenance is overdue.” The ICANN DNS Symposium will take place in the same venue as the IETF 102 meeting on Friday 13th July.

Here are some of the activities that the Internet Society is involved in during the week.

Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW 2018)

The ACM, IRTF and ISOC Applied Networking Research Workshop will take place on the Monday of IETF week, Continue reading