One of the few regrets of Vint Cerf, who is often referred to as the 'father of the Internet', is the fact that encryption using public cryptography was not baked in the original ARPANET design. While the early Internet was meant to meet a number of requirements such as resilience and openness, encryption was not one of them. Some of this was because of the high cost associated with encryption, and some if it was for other reasons.
The government of Narendra Modi has set out ambitious goals for the digitalization of India, through a program called Digital India. It is hard to see this program get fully realized when state or local governments keep turning the Internet off.
Since January 2016, we have tracked that state governments have switched off the Net more than 34 times across India.
Sixty-two incidents of Internet shutdowns across 12 Indian states have been recorded by SFLC.in from 2012 till date.
In the country's northeast, in Nagaland, there was no Internet service at all from January 30 until February 19 .2017
In Kashmir, there have been 27 shutdowns since 2012, in a region market by long-standing conflicts.
RightsCon 2017 is kicking off today (29-31 March, Brussels) so we wanted to give you an update and also ask for your help amplifying our message.
Restrictions to Internet access are on the rise globally. Data shows that between 2015 and 2016, the number of Internet shutdowns bumped up from 15 to 56 worldwide. Not only is this causing collateral damage to the Internet, but we’re also putting the society and economy at risk. If we don’t do anything, we are at serious risk of eroding the trust that people have in the Internet - to the point of no return.
It should come as no surprise that there are numerous activities related to Trust, Identity, and Privacy on the agenda for IETF 98. Below I will highlight a few of the many activities and provide pointers to a number of additional ones. There is something for everyone interested in these areas in Chicago in the coming week!
Internet access is critical to support the enjoyment of Human Rights. The most commonly referenced example is freedom of expression, but its potential goes far beyond that. Day after day, it’s demonstrating its ability to support access to all sorts of opportunities – not least to support education for all children facing emergencies and crises, another fundamental Human Right. This is what’s been discussed this week at the Mobile Learning Week.
IETF 98 in Chicago next week seems to be relatively quiet from an encryption perspective compared to some past meetings. However, this could be viewed as an indication of the progress that has been made in recent years as the IETF community has focused heavily on enabling encryption across protocols and updating the cryptographic algorithms being used in those protocols. There is not a great deal of activity specific to encryption in Chicago, and the work represented here this week is quite mature.
If we had to choose music to accompany all our activities at APRICOT 2017 it would surely be Chopin’s Minute Waltz (Op 64, No 1)! No, we did not manage to fit 138 bars of music into 60 seconds but the tempo was very lively with frequent crescendos and diminuendos and a lengthy trill. Call it efficiency, but we all managed to share and exchange a lot of information working within the new shortened APRICOT 2017/APNIC 43 programme.
It is a remarkably quiet week for DNS security and privacy topics at the IETF 98 meeting in Chicago next week. Both the DANE and DPRIVE working groups are moving along very well with their work on their mailing lists and so chose not to meet in Chicago. Similarly, with DNSSEC deployment steadily increasing (as we outlined in the 2016 State of DNSSEC Deployment report in December), the work to be discussed in DNS Operations (DNSOP) is more about exploring ideas to make DNSSEC even more secure.
Here is a quick view of what is happening in Chicago.
In this Rough Guide to IETF 98 post I'll highlight some of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) groups meeting during the IETF 98 meeting in Chicago 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 tsvwg WG will include presentations and discussions on the L4S and DualQ approaches demonstrated at previous meetings. The WG has two meetings on Monday and Thursday afternoons.
In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 98, I’m reviewing what’s happening related to IPv6 at IETF 98 in Chicago next week.
IPv6 global adoption rates increased by over 50% last year as pools of IPv4 addresses approached depletion at 4 of the 5 Regional Internet Registries, encouraging more network operators and content providers to actively deploy the protocol. With more large ISPs and mobile operators having announced plans to deploy IPv6 during 2017, and increasing interest in Home Networking and the Internet of Things, IPv6 is at the forefront of standardisation work at the IETF.
Africans at the IETF Meeting
Background
Let’s look at what’s happening in the area of Internet infrastructure resilience in the IETF and at the upcoming IETF 98 meeting. My focus here is primarily on the routing and forwarding planes and specifically routing security and unwanted traffic of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS) attacks. There is interesting and important work underway at the IETF that can help address problems in both areas.
The latest issue of the IETF Journal (Volume 12, Issue 3) is now available online: https://www.ietfjournal.org/journal-issues/march-2017/
Our cover article is a manifesto of why Internet-enabled businesses should care about the open standards and open source communities. We present the first two of a series of interviews with IETF leadership, in this case outgoing IETF chair Jari Arkko and his successor Alissa Cooper.
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 98 meeting in Chicago next week. Check out the IETF Journal IoT Category for more details about many of these topics.
It’s almost here! Pack your bags (or start your remote participation browser) and get ready for IETF 98! Starting on Sunday, 26 March, the Internet Engineering Task Force will be in Chicago, Illinois, where about 1000 engineers will spend a week discussing the latest issues in open standards and protocols. As usual, the agenda is packed, and the Internet Society is providing a ‘Rough Guide’ to the IETF via a series of blog posts on topics of mutual interest:
Today, the Internet Society hosted a special Community Forum, “Youth on the Internet.” Hundreds of participants from across 6 continents joined the conversation to share their views on what the Internet means to them.
A special thanks to our Next Generation Leaders who were panellists - Evelyn Namara (Uganda), Veronica Arroyo (Peru), Yuza Setiawan (Indonesia) for a vibrant discussion on topics such as how young people can address privacy and security concerns, and how the Internet can help close the gender gap.
We’re excited to share news of the second Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW2017), which will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, on July 15. This one-day workshop will be co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Internet Society and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). The Call for Papers is open now, with a deadline of 3 April.
The continued advancement in technological landscape enabling more people having Internet access in the global arena has meant that IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) remains at the forefront of integrating technology with humanity. In fact, IETF has made significant use of social dimension to articulate its area of work and research. It is beautifully reflected in section 4.1 of the RFC 3935 wherein it states that “We want the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts such as decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values of the IETF community”.
In times like these, it’s easy to be paranoid.
Almost every day there is a new story about an app, a TV or a child’s toy that is collecting too much data, or a massive data breach, or the latest kind of ransomware doing the rounds of the Internet.
We may not know the specifics, but we do know that somewhere out there someone is tracking us online: in fact, most of the data monetization machine is invisible to consumers -- the individuals whose data fuels it.
All this has, understandably, left many people wary. Why WOULD you trust someone or something that is gathering information on you with no real insight into how it will be used? And, no real sense of how your data will be handled.
When Armenia declared independence in 1991, the Internet access finally became available, allowing people to be part of the world again. The creation of an Internet Availability Center in 2012 (funded by Internet Society’s grant) at the Culture House for the Blind in Yerevan, triggered creative ideas among active members of the center.
They came to conclusion that an Internet radio station would be the greatest opportunity for helping the blind and visually impaired. The project started in January 2016 supported by the Internet Society’s “Beyond the Net Funding Programme”. Today, it is a dream come true.