Dustin’s Internet Community Roadtrip: In the Bay Area, The People Who Make the Internet Ecosystem Thrive

Dustin Phillips, Co-Executive Director of ICANNWiki, is traveling across the United States in his red Toyota Corolla, making connections with the people who are making their communities – and the Internet – a better place. He visited the Bay Area, first making a stop at the Redwood National and State Parks, where he learned about redwood communities and how their survival is dependent on interconnection, a metaphor for the Internet itself.

What is the Internet Ecosystem?

The Internet affects nearly every aspect of society, creating an extremely wide range of stakeholders. There is still a community of stakeholders engaged directly with the Internet’s policymaking processes, but increasingly there are Internet-related discussions occurring at what would traditionally be considered unlikely venues.

CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

Meeting with Dr. Brandie Nonnecke at the University of California, Berkley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute was a fitting way to kick off my time in the Bay Area. We had a great discussion on the important role of civic participation and collaborative processes for informed decision-making in key issue areas.

Like the incredibly diverse plant life that grows in the understory Continue reading

Canadian Youth Advocates Participate in Enhancing IoT Project

On May 14, a group of young people who are currently working on or are studying tech, politics, computer science, and the Internet of Things (IoT) met for a two-hour Youth Advocates for IoT Security round table. This event was a part of the Internet Society’s year-long initiative, the Canadian Multistakeholder Process – Enhancing IoT Security in partnership with Innovation, Science and Economic Development, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, CANARIE, and CIPPIC. It serves as just one of several workshops that will be held during the process to develop recommendations for a set of norms and policies to secure the IoT in Canada.

The round table offered an opportunity for young people in school or their early careers to voice their opinions and provide unique inputs for consideration on the following aspects of IoT security:

• How young people currently use IoT devices;
• How they anticipate these devices will be used in the future; and
• Effective ways of educating young consumers about IoT security.

The group discussed the ways in which IoT devices have become seemingly ubiquitous in youth’s lives. IoT devices have also become integral, and often required, parts of classroom learning and workplaces. Now, the lines Continue reading

US Senate Makes Moves to Reinstate Net Neutrality, But Sustainable Rules Are Still Necessary

On May 16, the Senate passed a Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) repeal of the 2015 Open Internet Order. A CRA allows Congress to review regulations issued by government agencies and overrule them with a majority vote. This vote, led by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), is a step towards reinstating the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules.

The CRA will now move to the House, where it will require a majority vote in order to pass before heading to President Trump’s desk for his signature. If the CRA passes the House and gets the President’s signature, the 2015 Order will be reinstated.

Despite the CRA’s success in the Senate, it is unlikely that it will pass the House. In the Senate, every Democrat, two Independents, and three Republicans were needed to pass the CRA. In the House, Democrats hold just 193 of 435 seats and would need to be joined by 25 Republican or Independent Representatives to move the CRA to the President’s desk. Even then, the bill would face another major hurdle, as President Trump has previously expressed support for overturning the FCC’s Open Internet Order.

This is not to mention the court cases Continue reading

Building the Digital Silk Road Together: Kyrgyz Chapter Proposes Ideas for Internet Development in Central Asia at Cambridge University Forum

Central Asia, the most remote landlocked mountainous region in the world, has some of the most expensive Internet in global comparison. The cost of it can easily reach 10-20% of average monthly salary. In absolute terms, the price of the Internet can reach triple digits for 1 Mbps.

Acknowledging such challenges and considering the benefits that the Internet can bring, Central Asian governments are embarking on national digitalization strategies. The Kyrgyz Republic has launched a national program on digital transformation “Taza Koom” (“Transparent Society”). The program focuses on building an open government and a digital economy.

When it comes to digital development strategies, cooperation among countries is a mutually beneficial approach. To foster such collaboration, Cambridge University initiated a common platform called Digital Dialogue for Central Asia. The first meeting of this platform Making Inroads into Digital Transformation took place in Astana in April 2018.

Speaking at the forum on behalf of the Internet Society’s Kyrgyz Chapter, I proposed to jointly build the Digital Silk Road guided by the slogan: “free movement of ideas, people, creativity, technology and innovation”. Central Asia, with its favourable geographical location in Eurasia, could become the connecting host and focal point – a Continue reading

Global Editathon: Making Women in Tech Visible

Why is it necessary to “edit” the biographies of women who are doing an incredible job on issues of technology and the Internet? Simple: the contributions of these women do not have visibility on the Internet.

At many Internet Governance forums, we often highlight the contributions of the founding fathers, but how do we inspire girls to join ICTs – information and communication technologies – if we never mention women?

For this year’s International Girls in ICT Day, the Internet Society’s Special Interest Group for Women organized the 1st Global Editathon Girls in ICT. With the support of Chapters and organizations from all around the world, this initiative had a clear goal: to create local content written about and by women to make their work in technology visible.

Read about the Editathon on Twitter!

Only 17% of the Wikipedia content is about women and approximately 8.8% of the content in Wikipedia in Spanish is about women scientists. Where are those women who make a difference in science and technology? Do they exist? Of course they do!

The Week in Internet News: Email Encryption Has Efail Moment

Encryption fails: A couple of stories in the news this past week demonstrated problems with encryption, or at least, problems with deployment of encryption. One researcher demonstrated an exploitable loophole he called Efail in PGP/GPG and S/Mime software used by email clients, reports Engadget. Efail abuses the active content of HTML emails to access plain text. In addition, a malware called Telegrab is targeting the encrypted Telegram messaging service. Telegrab steals encryption keys and cache data from Telegram running on the desktop, Tom’s Hardware says.

Artificial investment: The Chinese city of Tianjin is getting serious about funding artificial intelligence projects, with an investment of about US$16 billion, reports Reuters via the Straits Times. Yes, that’s billion with a “b.” It’s part of a Chinese push to be the leading nation in AI development.

AI knows nudes: In other AI news, Facebook has released stats on the numbers of hate speech posts and posts containing nudity that its technology removed in the first quarter of 2018. In short, the social media provider’s AI is much better at flagging nudity than hate speech, reports CNBC. About 60 percent of hate speech taken down on Facebook required human intervention.

DNS attacks on Continue reading

Dustin’s Internet Community Roadtrip: In the Bay Area, What Redwoods Can Teach Us About the Internet

Dustin Phillips, Co-Executive Director of ICANNWiki, is traveling across the United States in his red Toyota Corolla, making connections with the people who are making their communities – and the Internet – a better place. While making his way to the Bay Area from Portland, Oregon, he took a slight detour.

On my way down to the Bay Area from Portland, I made a trip through the Redwood National and State Parks of Northern California. These Coastal Redwoods have existed for over 20 million years and individual trees can live over 2,000 years. What makes these ancient giants so resilient?

They find strength in community.

Redwoods grow in groves, or “communities,” where the roots only go down 10-13 feet (3-4 m) before spreading outward 60-80 feet (20-27 m). In this phenomenon, survival is dependent on interconnection, meaning the roots intertwine and fuse with each other to provide resiliency against the threats of nature and share the resources necessary to thrive.

This lesson from the redwoods is directly applicable to the Internet. The “network of networks” would be nothing without interconnection or the shared resources of open standards and protocols. Expanding wider, not deeper, is essential to the resilience Continue reading

Digital Self-Defense for Palestinian Schoolgirls

Cyber-bullying is a growing phenomenon amongst preteens. Studies have established that nearly 43% of children are victims of cyberbullying and girls are twice as likely to be targeted. Students who experienced cyber attacks suffer drops in school grades and have more suicidal thoughts than those who had never dealt with such forms of peer aggression. A link between cyber harassment victimization and noncompletion of school has been demonstrated resulting in increased risk of poor education and substance abuse in adulthood.

Sadly, the majority of the victims do not report the incidents to adults or authorities due to fear of negative effects and social scandal. The tacit support given to the bullying perpetrators through silence contributes to the escalation of victimization. Banning technology is not the answer. Cyberbullying prevention in schools is crucial to defend students from this new face of violence.

The Internet Society Palestine Chapter is conducting a campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of electronic blackmail and cyber harassment. The project, funded by the Internet Society Beyond the Net, has already reached more than 2250 schoolgirls in 25 Palestinian schools in phase I of the project.

Ahmad Alsadeh, assistant professor at Birzeit University and Continue reading

Sovereignty Is More Than a Designation, It Is a Responsibility

The Internet can provide access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunity, but many indigenous communities face challenges to Internet access and inclusion. Brian Tagaban, Director of Government Policy at Sacred Wind Communications and former executive director of the Navajo Nation Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, is at RightsCon this week – the world’s leading conference on human rights in the digital age – to discuss the digital divide in indigenous communities in North America. He’s there as an Internet Society fellow and joined by other fellows Bill Murdoch, an IT specialist at the Manitoba First Nation School System and the First Nations Health & Social Secretariat of Manitoba, and Madeleine Redfern, the mayor of Iqaluit in Nunavut, Canada.

We spoke to Tagaban at the first Indigenous Connectivity Summit. The event was the start of a critical conversation about how indigenous communities can connect themselves to the Internet on their own terms. He detailed the time, diligence, and effort required to build a regulatory framework, and hoped that other Summit participants could “see how things are possible, celebrate success stories, share those success stories so that they can be built upon, and gain exposure to the political circumstances, social circumstances, geographic Continue reading

RIPE 76 Sees Strong Focus on Routing Security

The RIPE 76 meeting is happening this week in Marseille, France, held at the fantastic location of the Palais du Pharo overlooking Marseille’s Old Port. And it’s also another record attendance with over 850 people registered.

The first couple of days have primarily been devoted to plenary sessions, and there’s been a big focus on routing security. Erik Bais (A2B Internet) kicked off the discussion with a presentation on ‘Why are we still seeing DDoS traffic?‘, which highlighted that DDoS attacks are still originating from the same networks. Looking at the list of the worst offenders, there’s even one amongst the regular RIPE attendees, and he called for networks to clean up their acts. This was also a good opportunity to highlight the MANRS initiative, which of course includes measures to mitigate amplification attacks, and encourages networks to make good routing practices the norm.

Alexander Azimov (Qrator Labs) reinforced this message by outlining the current problems with BGP, including the ongoing route leaks and hijacks affecting the Internet. There are currently only moral obligations to not use other providers’ address space or to support anti-spoofing policies, yet major providers (including Tier 1 providers) continue to both originate Continue reading

The Piikani Cultural and Digital Literacy Camp Program

The Piikani Nation in Southern Alberta, concerned they were in danger of losing their Blackfoot culture and traditions, sought out an innovative way to share it with younger generations. Elders and school officials in Piikani focused on how they could use technology to engage youth and preserve their knowledge and history. As a result, the Piikani First Nation, University of Alberta, First Nations Technical Service Advisory Group, and Piikani Board of Education created a youth-based project, the Piikani Cultural and Digital Literacy Camp Program, that combines digital technology and cultural and language studies for grade 9 students.

From the beginning, Piikani Elder Herman Many Guns and University of Alberta Assistant Professor Dr. Rob McMahon knew it was crucial to combine traditional Blackfoot and digital teaching styles in the program. To accomplish this, Herman reached out to community ceremonial Elders with transferred rights who could ensure the project followed traditional protocol. The partners decided to host a summer camp that would teach students about their culture, as well as gain digital skills, such as video production, editing, and data stewardship. Students apply these new digital skills to the preservation of the ancestral knowledge shared by the Elders at an outdoor Continue reading

Together Let’s #SwitchItOn and #KeepItOn! The Internet Society Releases Joint Statement with Access Now

This week the Internet Society is at RightsCon, one of the world’s leading conferences on human rights in the digital age. The event brings together business leaders, policy makers, government representatives, technologists, and human rights defenders from around the world.

We are proud to stand together with Access Now in our belief that a globally connected, secure and trusted Internet is the foundation for exercising our online rights. We are proud to release this joint statement calling for an open Internet that includes everyone.

Please support our call to the nations of the world to #SwitchItOn and #KeepItOn.

Read the statement here

Visit our #SwitchItOn page and find out more about Community Networks.

Image © Nyani Quarmyne: Ucha Seturi (left), Murmani Tcharelidze and a helpful visiting journalist giving raising a tower near Koklata in Tusheti, Georgia, on 23 July 2017.

The post Together Let’s #SwitchItOn and #KeepItOn! The Internet Society Releases Joint Statement with Access Now appeared first on Internet Society.

Internet Companies Have More Work to Do on Privacy, Freedom of Expression, Report Says

Top Internet, mobile, and telecom companies across the globe still have many steps they could take to better protect their users’ freedom of expression and privacy, a new report says.

The 2018 Corporate Accountability Index, released recently by Ranking Digital Rights, gave Google a top score of 63 among 22 companies rated for protecting freedom of expression and privacy. But with a perfect score being 100, all the companies rated fell far short, with most receiving failing grades, the group said.

The good news for users is that 17 of the 22 companies evaluated for the 2018 Index improved scores from last year in at least one area, and many had improvements in multiple areas. Ranking Digital Rights, a nonprofit research center tied to the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, rates the companies on 35 indicators.

“We’ve seen some improvement, but there’s a long way to go,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, director of the Ranking Digital Rights project. “At the same time, some of the improvements we’ve seen have been genuinely meaningful.”

A second piece of good news for users: Some of the companies, particularly the rank-and-file employees, seem to pay attention to their rankings in consumer-focused studies, Continue reading

Encryption Isn’t Perfect, That’s Why Choices Are Important

Encryption is a critical building block for online trust, but it’s never perfect. Any encryption you use is the product of many steps. Encryption methods have to be defined; protocols for implementation have to be specified; and then the protocols have to be implemented. Each step is handled by different people and potentially introduces vulnerabilities along the way. Even with the best lock design in the world, if someone builds the lock with variations in the design (either intentionally or accidentally), it might be easily picked.

When you own a broken lock, you have it fixed or use a different one – encryption is no different.

Yesterday (14 May 2018), the Internet security community was alerted to newly discovered vulnerabilities in the secure email ecosystem, dubbed “EFAIL”. EFAIL can make the content of emails encrypted with PGP and S/MIME readable to an attacker. While there are some fixes users and companies can make to mitigate EFAIL, cases like this underscore the importance of choice when it comes to secure communications.

How does the EFAIL attack work?

EFAIL abuses a combination of vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP and S/MIME specifications and the way that many email clients render remote content in Continue reading

Innovative Licensing Approaches: Enabling Access in Hard-to-Reach Places Through Collaborative Partnerships

In the Republic of Georgia, high in the mountains of the Tusheti region, a community network has been built to bring faster Internet connectivity to those that did not have it. The story is compelling, not only for the determination of people to make sure that the Internet is available in one of the remotest places in the world, but also for their strong belief of what connecting to the Internet could bring to the people of Tusheti. “Tourism is a beacon of hope for us,” said Ia Buchaidze, who owns a local bakery, “and the Internet is very important for that.”

The project was a true collaborative partnership involving many parties: the Georgian Government, the Internet Society and its Georgia Chapter, the Small and Medium Telecom Operators Association of Georgia, LTD Freenet, and the Tusheti Development Fund (TDF). This network did not need a license, but it did need an authorization from the Georgian Government for it to be built and for the spectrum to be used. The objective was to provide access to a remote region through a locally-built and developed community network.

Similarly, in Mexico, a community network has been built in a remote and Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Artificial Intelligence Heads to the Final Frontier

Coming to a space station near you: Artificial intelligence is going to space – maybe not a space station, but a satellite – predicts an aerospace executive, quoted in SpaceNews.com. So-called geospatial intelligence, housed on satellites, will collect massive amounts of data in space and analyze it, she says.

More blockchain believers: Tech giant Oracle plans to release its own blockchain software with a platform-as-a-service product coming this month and decentralized ledger-based applications coming next month, Bloomberg notes. Oracle is working with Banco de Chile to log inter-bank transactions on a hyperledger and with the government of Nigeria to document customs and import duties on blockchain.

Does blockchain even lift? Blockchain can help improve the sports and fitness industry by allowing instructors to securely stream workouts, allowing customers to avoid that annoying trip to the gym, Forbes suggests.

Social media eyes encryption: Facebook and Twitter are both looking at encrypting some user communications, according to news reports. Facebook has voiced support for end-to-end encryption on its blog, apparently in response to concerns it was moving to weaken encryption on its WhatsApp messaging service, BGR.com notes. However, Facebook hasn’t enabled encryption by default on it Messenger service, the story Continue reading

Minimizing Risk: How to Be Secure on Twitter and Other Social Networks

Last week’s news that the passwords of every Twitter user around the world had been exposed in plain text is a stark reminder of the sometimes-fragile nature of security in the online places we trust with our personal information.

In this latest example, Twitter says it was a technical error that led to the exposure of the passwords of the social network’s 330 million users. Twitter also says it’s fixed the bug and has no evidence that anyone’s accounts have been breached or misused.

While the error led to exposure only within Twitter’s internal systems, the social network has urged everyone to change their passwords anyway.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. You can change your Twitter password anytime by going to the password settings page.”

It’s sound advice, and it’s a step we have taken at the Internet Society with our own social media channels.

Yet, you may wonder what the point is in changing your password if a mistake like this can happen. If it happened once, surely it can happen again.

Yes, it could, there’s no doubt. We have compelling Continue reading

Dustin’s Internet Community Roadtrip: In Portland, Recognizing the Role of Women in Tech

Dustin Phillips, Co-Executive Director of ICANNWiki, is traveling across the United States in his red Toyota Corolla, making connections with the people who are making their communities – and the Internet – a better place. First stop: Portland, Oregon, where attended the ICANNWiki’s Girls in ICT Day Edit-a-thon and met up with Hack Oregon.

On the first day of the Internet Community Roadtrip, I headed down to Portland for ICANNWiki’s Girls in ICT Day Edit-a-thon. Making this my first stop was particularly special for me, because it is where I was introduced to the world of Internet governance three years ago. In my time at ICANNNWiki, I’ve experienced the important role that collaborative resources and tools play in the bottom-up, community-driven processes that keep the Internet free and global. At ICANNWiki, we focus on providing capacity-development, an informative resource and a sense of community. We build community by capturing and promoting the work that is being done, in order to provide well-deserved recognition and increase awareness for what is happening in the Internet governance ecosystem.

The stop in Portland focused on increasing the recognition for the role of women in the Internet’s history as planned, but also included Continue reading

RIPE 76 dans le Midi

The RIPE 76 meeting starts next week in Marseille, which surprisingly is only the second RIPE meeting to have ever been held in France. RIPEs are always a key event for the Internet Society, with one of our colleagues, Jan Žorž, being a member of the RIPE Programme Committee, and another, Salam Yamout, being a member of the RIPE NCC Board. Andrei Robachevsky will be presenting during the Connect Working Group, and I’ll be there reporting on the highlights of the meeting, as well as staffing the MANRS stand on Thursday, so please come and say hello!

The Internet Society is also sponsoring the new RIPE on-site childcare service, whilst on Thursday we’ll be raising awareness of the MANRS initiative by organising a lunch for MANRS advocates, as well as having a stand in the exhibition area with goodies such as MANRS t-shirts and stickers.

The RIPE meeting is back to its usual Monday morning start after Dubai, and there’s three tutorials to choose from on Event-driven Network Automation and Orchestration using Salt (Mircea Ulinic), SRv6 Network Programming (Pablo Camarillo Garvia, Cisco), or IPv6 Security (Alvaro Vives, RIPE NCC).

The opening plenary commences at 14.00 CEST/UTC+2, and after the Continue reading

Women in Africa Call for a Trusted and Inclusive Internet

Creating a safer and trusted Internet MUST involve education building and awareness raising. This is one message that came up at the women’s event during the 2018 Africa Internet Summit held in Dakar.

“Education should target mothers who do not always believe that they can have an important role in the Internet world and who are the ones educating the future generation of women in tech. Also, we should educate developers of applications used on the Internet to consciously include safety by design, as well as governments to enact cyber laws that protect their citizens,” one of the participants stated during her presentation. With this, they meant that not only individuals, but also companies and governments have an important role in building a safer and trusted Internet.

Raising awareness of Internet safety was another point raised by many of the participants. “In school, we are taught to use computers and the Internet, but we are not taught about how to use the Internet safely,” one participant stressed. The attendees called for educational systems to change. They also suggested addressing online privacy and safety concerns so girls can be aware from the very beginning.

Privacy of personal data was another important Continue reading