The nonstop news about Internet security vulnerabilities and incidents could lead one to despair for the future of the Internet. However, what often does not make the news is all the quality research that contributes ultimately to a more secure, private, and trustworthy Internet. Quality academic research that is open and easily accessible is one of our best long-term investments in a truly open and trustable Internet.
The Internet Society African Regional Bureau has worked with Network Operator Groups (NOGs) in Africa, providing financial and technical support to organize trainings and events at the local level. We recently shared many of their stories. There are also a number of NOGs that seek to attract women engineers to share knowledge and experience as well as to encourage young women to take up technology-related fields – which are largely perceived in the African region as “men only.” Here are their stories.
The best education materials are inclusive, equitable, and high-quality, and they promote lifelong learning. One of the best tools for sharing these types of materials is the Internet. However, the body of education materials currently available online is not yet as inclusive and equitable as it could be.
So many of us default to looking online for anything we want to know. Wikipedia alone covers more than 40 million articles in nearly 300 languages. With this scope, it can sometimes feel like things that haven’t happened online haven’t happened in real life. And that’s a problem — especially because so many of the facts that don’t make their way online are about women, people of colour, and the global south.
Top African and international Internet companies are supporting this year’s Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF), set for August 22-24 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Netflix, Facebook, Google, Akamai, DE CIX, LINX, YAHOO, Netnod and FranceIX are among the global players supporting AfPIF while Liquid Telecom, Seacom, Angola Cables, Angonix, AFRINIC, and MainOne are the leading supporters from Africa.
In the last seven years, AfPIF has established itself as the most important Internet event with respect to peering and interconnection in Africa and any operator that is looking at growing their local, regional and global interconnection is best served at AfPIF.
The 5th Africa Domain Names System (DNS) Forum was successfully closed on 28 July after three days of insightful reflections on the Africa DNS Industry and the business opportunities it can provide. This forum follows on the success of previous fora that have taken place in Africa over the past few years – namely South Africa in 2013, Nigeria in 2014, Kenya in 2015, and Morocco in 2016.
To mark its 25th Anniversary, the Internet Society is beginning a global dialogue on the impact of the Internet on societies. So far, we have held discussions at Chatham House in London, and opened up the dialogue in a recent public forum with more than 100 participants from 30 countries across Africa, the Middle East, Europe & Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia.
This month at the Asia-Pacific Regional IGF in Bangkok we will release the fourth annual Internet Society Survey Report on Internet Policy Issues in Asia-Pacific.
Findings from this year’s report show that cybersecurity, access, data protection, connectivity and privacy are the top five concerns for Internet users. These issues have more or less remained constant since 2014, however, not surprisingly this year cybersecurity has become the top issue.
Other issues that respondents expressed concern for relate to fake news, increasing digital surveillance that violates privacy rights, and more frequent instances of censorship and site-blocking that impact freedom of expression.
I was recently invited to contribute a paper on personal data in the healthcare context to a journal on the Privacy and Security of Medical Information published by Springer-Nature. The paper, “Trust and ethical data handling in the healthcare context” examines the issues associated with healthcare data in terms of ethics, privacy, and trust, and makes recommendations about what we, as individuals, should ask for and expect from the organisations we entrust with our most sensitive personal data.
It's a topical subject, from an Internet Society perspective, because the Internet appears to offer some attractive solutions to pressing problems that confront people and governments, around the globe.
Know an amazing woman or girl in tech who’s working for access, skills, or leadership? Why not shine the light on them and nominate them for an EqualsInTech Award!
Equals is an initiative delivered by a committed partnership of ITU, UN Women, GSMA, ITC, and UN University joined by the Internet Society and over 20 corporate leaders, governments, non-profit organizations, communities, and individuals around the world working together to bridge the digital gender divide – by bringing women to tech, and tech to women.
For over a decade, the Internet Society, along with many in the Internet community, have been strong advocates of using multistakeholder approaches to make decisions in a globally distributed network environment. We are encouraged that, within the Internet ecosystem, the multistakeholder model has grown in understanding and acceptance over the past several years. But we also know that the open, global Internet faces enormous challenges and that it is crucial that we not take this progress for granted.
Encryption is once again a hot topic, and there’s much to discuss at IETF 99 this week in Prague. This time the hottest action will definitely be in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) working group. TLS is considering everything from privacy implications for TLS1.3 to how to reduce handshake latency. As mentioned in previous Rough Guide blogs on the topic, the working group is busy on the completion of the TLS 1.3 specification. It has completed working group last call, and the working group is addressing the comments received during that process. Draft 21 was released on 3 July in anticipation of this week’s discussion.
Trust, Identity, and Privacy continue to be topics of interest for the IETF community. Below I will highlight a few of the many activities. There is something for everyone interested in these areas here at IETF 99 in Prague this week!
[Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the MANRS blog.]
Verisign, a renowned security solutions provider and a DNS registry and root server operator, demonstrated its commitment to ensuring that the global routing system becomes more secure by joining Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) today.
In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 99, I’m reviewing what’ll be happening at IETF 99 in Prague next week.
There's a good bit of DNS secrurity and privacy activity happening at IETF 99 next week in Prague, although not all of that is in working groups. Here is a view of what is going on.
Once again there will be a good-sized "DNS team" at the IETF 99 Hackathon over the weekend (15-16 July). The IETF 99 Hackathon wiki outlines the work (scroll down to see it). From a security point of view, major projects include:
IETF 99 is next week in Prague, and I’d like to take a moment to discuss some of the interesting things happening there related to Internet infrastructure resilience in this installment of the Rough Guide to IETF 99.
Simple solutions sometimes have a huge impact. Like a simple requirement that “routes are neither imported nor exported unless specifically enabled by configuration”, as specified in an Internet draft “Default EBGP Route Propagation Behavior Without Policies”. The draft is submitted to IESG and expected to be published as a Standards Track RFC soon.
The Five Eyes – Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand – recently met in Ottawa to discuss national security challenges. The resulting joint communiqué noted that “encryption can severely undermine public safety efforts by impeding lawful access to the content of communications during investigations into serious crimes, including terrorism.” The Internet Society believes that this view of encryption is misleading and bodes badly for a trusted Internet. Any weakening of encryption will hurt cybersecurity and individual rights and freedoms.
The July 2017 issue of the IETF Journal is now online at http://www.ietfjournal.org/journal-issues/july-2017/. With IETF 99 in Prague just over one week away, this is the perfect time to get caught up on what's been happening in the world of Internet standards lately.
In this post I'll highlight some of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) groups meeting during the IETF 99 meeting in Prague next week. These groups are working to explore and address more sophisticated ways to use and share available bandwidth, improve Internet performance, and otherwise efficiently get Internet content to where it needs to be.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a buzzword around the Internet industry and the broader technology and innovation business. We are often asked what the IETF is doing in relation to IoT and in this short post I'd like to highlight some of the relevant sessions scheduled during the upcoming IETF 99 meeting in Prague. Check out the IETF Journal IoT Category or the Internet Society's IoT page for more details about many of these topics.