Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW) Call for Papers Due 20 April

We’re excited to share news of the third edition of the Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW2018), which will take place in Montreal, Quebec, on Monday, July 16 at the venue of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 102 meeting. The workshop program already includes some great invited talks and the Call for Papers is open now, with a deadline of 20 April.

ANRW2018 will provide a forum for researchers, vendors, network operators and the Internet standards community to present and discuss emerging results in applied networking research. The workshop will also create a path for academics to transition research back into IETF standards and protocols, and for academics to find inspiration from topics and open problems addressed at the IETF. Accepted short papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

ANRW2018 particularly encourages the submission of results that could form the basis for future engineering work in the IETF, that could change operational Internet practices, that can help better specify Internet protocols, or that could influence further research and experimentation in the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).

If you have some relevant work and would like to join us in Montreal for the workshop and maybe stick Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 101: Internet Infrastructure Resilience

In this post of the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 101, I’ll focus on important work the IETF is doing that helps improve security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure.

BGP

What happens if an IXP operator begins maintenance work on the switches without ensuring that BGP sessions between the peers have been shut down? A network disruption and outage. A draft now in the RFC editor queue, “Mitigating Negative Impact of Maintenance through BGP Session Culling”, provides guidance to IXP operators on how to avoid such situations by forcefully tearing down the BGP sessions (session culling) affected by the maintenance before the maintenance activities commence. This approach allows BGP speakers to pre-emptively converge onto alternative paths while the lower layer network’s forwarding plane remains fully operational.

Another draft also in the RFC editor queue, “Graceful BGP session shutdown”, addresses issues related to planned maintenance. The procedures described in this document can be applied to reduce or avoid packet loss for outbound and inbound traffic flows initially forwarded along the peering link to be shut down.  These procedures trigger, in both Autonomous Systems (AS), rerouting to alternate paths if they exist within the Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 101: Back to London

Starting next weekend, the Internet Engineering Task Force will be in London for IETF 101, where about 1000 engineers will discuss open internet standards and protocols. The week begins on Saturday, 17 March, with a Hackathon and Code Sprint. The IETF meeting itself begins on Sunday and goes through Friday.

As usual, we’ll write our ‘Rough Guide to the IETF’ blog posts on topics of mutual interest to both the IETF and the Internet Society:

• Overview of ISOC @ IETF
• Routing Infrastructure Security Resilience
• Internet of Things
• IPv6
• DNSSEC, DANE and DNS Security
• Identity, Privacy, and Encryption
• Community Networks

More information about IETF 101:

• IETF 101 main page
• Remote participation & live stream information

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

IETF Journal

Catch up on the world of the IETF and open Internet standards by reading the IETF Journal. The November issue marked the final printed version; now we plan to share longer-form articles online and via our Twitter and Facebook channels. Our two most recent articles are “Big Changes Ahead for Core Internet Protocols” by Mark Nottingham and “QUIC: Bringing flexibility to the Internet” Continue reading

CGN, IPv6 and fighting online crime…

DNSSEC Activities at ICANN 61 in San Juan on March 11-14, 2018

Sunday marks the beginning of the DNSSEC activities at the ICANN 61 meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As per usual there will be a range of activities related to DNSSEC or DANE. Two of the sessions will be streamed live and will be recorded for later viewing. Here is what is happening.

All times below are Atlantic Standard Time (AST), which is UTC-4.

DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide – Sunday, 11 March

On Sunday, March 11, we’ll have our “DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide” session that will include our usual skit where a bunch of engineers act out how DNS and DNSSEC work! Yes, it’s a good bit of fun and people have told us it has helped tremendously.

• 17:00-18:15 – Room 102
  
• More info: https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/647720
• WATCH LIVE: https://participate.icann.org/sju61-102abc

Please come with your questions and prepare to learn all about DNSSEC!

DNSSEC Workshop – Wednesday, 14 March

Our big 6-hour workshop will take place on Wednesday, March 14, from 09:00 – 15:00 in Room 208-BC. Lunch will be included. Thank you to our lunch sponsors: Afilias, CIRA, and SIDN.

The very full agenda includes:

• DNSSEC Workshop Introduction, Program, Continue reading

U.S. SEC Targets Unregulated Cryptocurrency Exchanges

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could soon crack down on unregulated cryptocurrency trading platforms after the agency sent a strongly worded warning to them this week.

The SEC warned that unregulated online trading platforms may be misleading investors by calling themselves “exchanges,” which implies federal oversight. An SEC-related securities exchange, among other safeguards, has rules designed to prevent fraud and other manipulative practices, the SEC said in an advisory issued Wednesday.

The SEC advisory served as much as a warning to investors using cryptocurrency trading platforms as to the platforms themselves.

“The SEC staff has concerns that many online trading platforms appear to investors as SEC-registered and regulated marketplaces when they are not,” the advisory said. “Many platforms refer to themselves as ‘exchanges,’ which can give the misimpression to investors that they are regulated or meet the regulatory standards of a national securities exchange.”

The SEC does not review the trading protocols used by unregulated trading platforms, it said. “Although some of these platforms claim to use strict standards to pick only high-quality digital assets to trade, the SEC does not review these standards or the digital assets that the platforms select, and the so-called standards should Continue reading

A Collaborative Effort for pretty Easy privacy (p≡p)

Since the 2013 Snowden revelations of mass surveillance, the level of trust in Internet services has plunged. While discussions around privacy protection have advanced considerably, little progress has been achieved in designing operational tools that can be used on a daily basis by citizens around the world without a need to reconfigure their digital communications or change their behavior online. At the Internet Society, we believe such solutions need to be developed in a collaborative and multistakeholder fashion to be effective.

In July 2017, the Internet Society Switzerland Chapter (ISOC-CH) and the Swiss p≡p foundation teamed up to provide a practical solution, namely to implement privacy-enhancing standards at the basic level of Internet protocols and document them in the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the main organization creating voluntary standards to maintain and improve the usability and interoperability of the Internet.

In the framework of a two-year Beyond the Net project with funding from Internet Society (‘Implementing Privacy via Mass Encryption’), we will formalize and help in standardizing the pretty Easy privacy (p≡p) protocols, which can be deployed automatically via encrypted means in order to provide the user with a secure and trustworthy Continue reading

CEO Succession at the Internet Society – Open Call for CEO Candidates

As I discussed in my notes to the community during the last months, at our last board meeting Kathy Brown, ISOC’s (Internet Society’s) President & CEO, informed the Board of Trustees that she will not seek another extension of her contract. Consequently, the board formed a CEO Search Committee, which is a subset of the board. The CEO Search Committee selected Perrett Laver as the search firm that will support the committee and the board during the whole process. Please, read my last note for further background information.

Per our plan, we are launching the Open Call for Candidates today, Friday, 9 March 2018.

The deadline for applications is 23:59 UTC on Friday, 6 April 2018.

If you would like to download the Candidate Pack or apply for the position, please visit the Perrett Laver web site using the following link:

https://candidates.perrettlaver.com/vacancies/726/ceo/

Per the web page above, if you would like to have a conversation with Perrett Laver regarding the role, please email the lead researcher on this search, Daniel Flynn:

[email protected]

The search firm will generate a short list of candidates so that the CEO Search Committee can make a final decision and select one. Continue reading

Voting open for 2018 Internet Society Board of Trustees elections

The 2018 Internet Society Board of Trustees elections have begun!

Electronic ballots were emailed today to all voting representatives. They will have until Monday, 9 April at 15:00 UTC to cast their ballots.

In this year’s election cycle, Organization Members are asked to elect one Trustee to the Board. So voting representatives may vote for only one of the candidates on the Organization Members ballot.

Similarly, in this year’s election cycle, Chapters are asked to elect one Trustee to the Board. So voting representatives may vote for only one of the candidates on the Chapters ballot.

All new Trustees will serve three-year terms commencing in June.

Additional details on the elections, as well as information on all of the candidates can be found here:

https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-trustees/elections/

To facilitate dialogue between OMAC members and candidates for the Organization Members election, and between Chapter leaders and candidates for the Chapters election, the Elections Committee has again launched an online Candidate Forum. In response to feedback from members, we moved the Forum from the Connect platform to a Mailman mailing list.

Everyone subscribed to the OMAC list was subscribed automatically to the ISOC Organization Members Candidate Forum list. Everyone subscribed to the Continue reading

Kate Ekanem: Promoting the Education, Literacy, and Empowerment of Girls in Nigeria

While the personal is almost always political, sometimes the person affected takes action that changes the course of history. That’s what Kate Ekanem has done. The founder of Kate Tales Foundation has spent her entire adult life promoting education, literacy, and empowerment of girls in her home country of Nigeria. And it started with herself.

“I was born into a family stuck with intense adversity, and a rural community with no access to quality education, basic health facility, reliable or no Internet facility, or social and educational opportunities,” Ekanem said. “There was no public library, no clean water, poor power supply, and streets filled with littered debris. Girls were resolving to getting pregnant [by] older men to escape the sting of poverty they were born into.”

After losing her mother at the age of two, Ekanem struggled as the only girl in a family of half-brothers. Her education took a backseat to the boys—something that she never fully accepted.

“I know what it feels like to rise in the morning and have nothing to eat. I know what it feels like to have an unending burning question, but dare not ask, because girls were not supposed to talk when Continue reading

Makkiya Jawed: At The Intersection of Technology and Medicine

The intersection between technology and medicine is perhaps one of the most important junctions of our time, and, in a world where access is king, many people—in fact, entire countries—can be left behind in the dust. That’s where Makkiya Jawed comes in as the director of social enterprise for Sehat Kahani in Pakistan.

The tech wiz joined forces with two doctors who launched the health tech enterprise, which circumvents Pakistan’s tradition of women having to choose family or career. It also caters to populations often overlooked by established medical communities.

“Sehat Kahani is a tele-health platform that aims to democratize healthcare via nurse-assisted video consultations by ensuring quick access, prevention and efficiency for healthcare,” Jawed explained.

Dr. Sara Saeed Khurram and Dr. Iffat Zafar, the co-founders of Sehat Kahani, both encountered the socio-cultural barriers to healthcare, but instead of giving up, they used their medical background to “democratize healthcare by building an all-female health provider network to deliver quality healthcare,” Jawed said. “They are the people who have taught me the power of team work and the importance of patience and dedication…In all honesty, whatever I have learned, they have had a major role to play in it. And the best thing is, they Continue reading

The Power of Women to Change the World: A message from our CEO on International Women’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day, with the goal to empower women in all settings. This year, the Internet Society is celebrating by shining a light on the women who are shaping the Internet, including our own CEO, Kathy Brown. She shared her thoughts how we can ensure that all women have a place at the table in our increasingly-connected world.

The Internet Society: Who are the women who have inspired you throughout your career? How have they inspired you?

Kathy Brown: It is sometimes seen as cliché to point to the women who raised you as your first inspiration — but for many of us, and for me, I believe it is nevertheless true that our mothers are the first fuel for our activism. My mother was a “community organizer” in the 1960’s War on Poverty in the U.S. She was an activist in rural, upstate New York — organizing communities to alleviate poverty. She was a mover and a doer; she was fearless and never yielding to powerful forces who either did not see or would not see the effects of poverty on individuals and families. Having grown up with a woman with that kind Continue reading

Shine the Light: Six Women Making a Difference

This International Women’s Day, we’re boosting the profiles of incredible women around the world who are pushing boundaries using technology – and we encourage you to do the same!

Last month, during Safer Internet Day – a call to action for everyone to play their part in creating a better Internet for everyone – women in the Internet Society’s 25 Under 25 group, using just their smartphones to record video, answered the question, “What does a safer Internet mean to me?”

Watch the videos, explore the different ways these young women are using technology to shape tomorrow, then Shine The Light on some of the incredible women you know who are making an impact. Join the #ShineTheLight tweet chat with @SIGWomenISOC on March 8th… then join SIG Women!

Poornima Meegammana (Sri Lanka)
“A safer Internet to me is a place where a girl’s voice can be heard without harassment.”

Mary Helda Akongo (Uganda)
“To me, a safer Internet would be a place that is free and safe for me to have my voice heard, a place where I can share my creative content, share my opinions and my thoughts without ridicule, backlash and hate from different people Continue reading

Routing Security BoF – APRICOT 2018

On Sunday, 25 February, the first day of APRICOT 2018, a “Routing Security BoF” (birds of a feather: An informal discussion group) was organized to address the ever-growing routing related incidents happening on daily basis. We have discussed routing security in general within the Asia Pacific region but there was a need to have a platform for open and candid discussion among the network operator community to find a possible way forward, where operators can share their approach in securing their own infrastructure and keeping the internet routing table clean as well.

A quick introduction was provided by the moderator (Aftab Siddiqui) on why it is important to have this BoF. Here are the introductory slides:

The first technical community presenter was Yoshinobu Matsuzaki (Maz) from Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ), the first ISP in Japan started in 1992. IIJ is one of the few ISPs in the region implementing prefix filtering, source address validation for their end customers, and making sure that all their routing information is reflecting the current status in the peeringdb for AS2497. IIJ was the first Asia Pacific ISP to join MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security), a global initiative, supported by the Continue reading

Routing Security is a Serious Problem – and MANRS Can Help. A Report from APRICOT 2018.

Last week, at APRICOT 2018 in Kathmandu, Nepal, there were a lot of talks and discussions focused on routing security and the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS).

First, there was a Routing Security BoF, attended by about 150 people, where we talked about what it takes to implement routing security practices, how CDNs and other players can help, and why it is so difficult to make progress in this area. The BoF included an interactive poll at the end, and it showed some interesting results:

• Participants almost unanimously see lack of routing security as a serious problem.
• Slow progress in this area is largely seen as due to a lack of incentives
• Participants see community initiatives (like MANRS) as the main driving forces for improvement, followed by CDNs and cloud providers. They doubt that governments or end-customers can effectively drive change.

My colleague Aftab Siddiqui is writing a separate blog post just about that BoF, so watch the blog in the next day or two.

Later, in the security track of the main APRICOT programme, Andrei Robachevsky, ISOC’s Technology Programme Manager, presented statistics on routing incidents and suggested a way forward based on the MANRS approach. In his Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Working Toward a Better Internet

Fixing the Internet: Is the Internet broken? Politico’s EU site looks at the work of the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network, which met in Ottawa, Canada, last week to discuss how to fix problems like poor cybersecurity, inaccurate information spread on social media, and other bad behavior. The Internet Society covered the first day of the Ottawa event.

The hills are alive with the sound of broadband: Motherboard has a story about the  Los Angeles Community Broadband Project, which plans to deliver wireless broadband to parts of the city using inexpensive equipment and dish-shaped antennas on hilltops and rooftops.

AI joins the force: The Verge has a long story about a secretive AI-assisted policing effort that started in 2012 as a partnership between the New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining company founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm.  The program apparently used AI technologies for predictive policing, a controversial practice used to trace suspects’ ties to other gang members, analyze social media, and predict the likelihood targeted people would commit violence or become a victim. Science Magazine also has a story examining predictive policing.

Women wary of Blockchain bros: The New York Continue reading

Empowering Education for the Next Generation In Paraguay

Colegio Técnico National (CTN) of Asunción is one of the top schools in Paraguay offering the technical baccalaureate. It was created by the country’s Ministry of Education and Science in 1980. The school is attended by more than 1,500 students from the capital city and from nearby towns like Luque, Fernando de la Mora, San Lorenzo, Lambaré, and Capiatá.

As with most of Paraguayan state schools, the CTN does not have the right infrastructure for an appropriate development of modern education. The little equipment owned by the CTN, donated more than 25 years ago by private or charitable institutions, are today too obsolete. Classes do not have any type of interactive material due to the lack of an Internet connection, equipped laboratories, and modern computers. A new project lead by the Paraguay Chapter and supported by the Internet Society Beyond the Net Funding Programme will provide the school with Internet access and set up a high-tech electronics lab to ensure a quality environment for the development of innovative solutions based on robotics, automation, e-learning systems, and the Internet of Things. 250 students will be trained in the use of online tools. ReVa , a virtual library, will be available Continue reading

ICANN seeking public comment on Root KSK rollover process for DNSSEC

On 11 October 2018, should ICANN roll the Root Key Signing Key (KSK) that is at the heart of DNSSEC? ICANN is planning to restart the rollover process for the Root KSK and is therefore seeking public review of their new plan.  It includes more publicity about the need to be prepared for the rollover, and analysis of data indicating the level of preparedness.

The Plan for Continuing the Root KSK Rollover describes how ICANN intends to roll the root key signing key (KSK), and is based on input from the technical community following their decision to postpone the rollover last year.

Further input is requested by 2 April 2018. This will be used to prepare a final plan that will be presented to the ICANN Board for approval. ICANN is seeking public comments and we encourage you to read the plan and submit your views.

Learn how to submit your comments to ICANN

The Root KSK was originally planned to be rolled over on 11 October 2017, but ICANN postponed the rollover due to collected data that showed that a significant number of resolvers used by network operators were not ready for this. This meant that significant sections of the Internet could experience Continue reading

Final Slates of Nominees for the 2018 Internet Society Board of Trustees Elections

In the name of the Internet Society Nominations Committee, I am pleased to announce the final slates of nominees for the 2018 Internet Society Board of Trustees elections.

The ISOC  Nominations Committee received many responses to the call for applications, with the following regional and gender distribution of candidates:

Total applications received: 26

Regional distribution:

• Africa: 7
• Asia Pacific: 1
• Europe: 4
• Latin America and Caribbean: 6
• North America: 8

Gender distribution:

• Female: 3
• Male: 23

The Nominations Committee chose a slate of 3 candidates for each election slate. One nominee, Stefano Trumpy, was added to the Chapters slate after he launched a successful petition. Therefore, the final slates consist of 3 candidates for the Organization Members election, and 4 candidates for the Chapters election.

The final slates are as follows. The candidates for each election slate are listed in alphabetical order by last name.

Organizations (one seat available)

• Tejpal Bedi
• Róbert Kisteleki
• Robert Pepper

Chapters (one seat available)

• Walid Al-Saqaf
• Matthew Rantanen
• Stefano Trumpy
• Roberto Zambrana

Biographical information on all the candidates is available here:

https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-trustees/elections/2018/nominees/

Voting representatives can expect to receive e-ballots from the ISOC Elections Committee by email on Thursday, 8 March and will have Continue reading

Information Gatekeeping: Not a Laughing Matter

There’s a joke that goes something like this: How do you make a little money in the online news business?

The punchline: Start with a huge pile of money, and work your way down from there.

It seems the same joke would work for the online comedy business, judging by the layoff news coming out of Funny or Die in January. Recently, Splitsider.com published an interesting Q&A with comedy veteran Matt Klinman, and he talked about the woes of online comedy outlets.

Klinman focused his ire on Facebook and its role as an information gatekeeper, in which the site determines what comedy clips to show each of its users. But much of his criticism could have just as easily been targeted at a handful of other online gatekeepers that point Internet users to a huge percentage of the original content that’s out there.

As Klinman says about Facebook, these services have created their own “centrally designed Internet” in which they serve as “our editor and our boss. They hide behind algorithms that they change constantly.”

As a thrice-laid-off online journalist, I can sympathize. I’m pretty sure I can’t blame any of the current gatekeepers for my 2002 layoff Continue reading