Chapterthon Wins 2018 WSIS Prize for International and Regional Cooperation
We are proud to announce that Chapterthon 2017 on Digital Schools was recognized today as the winner of a 2018 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prize under the category “International and Regional Cooperation,” awarded by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
For the Internet Society, this award is a strong affirmation of the valuable work that our Chapters are doing on the ground to empowering their communities through the Internet and, as so, advancing sustainable development.
Chapterthon is a global Chapters marathon, where our chapters work hard with their communities to develop a project within a timeline and budget for achieving a common goal. In 2017, the topic was Digital Schools and 30 Chapters from all 6 regions carried out specific projects to improving education by using the Internet.
Great ideas were taken into action and each project contributes to making a difference not only in their communities but also beyond them. Connecting schools to the Internet through community networks, teaching coding to girls, training teachers and parents, raising awareness about the safe use of the Internet and developing an online platform for a school were not isolated actions but part of global efforts towards improving people’s lives. Together Continue reading
Streaming Telemetry: View from the Trenches
I asked David Gee to review my streaming telemetry blog posts to make sure I didn’t make too many blunders, and he sent me a nice summary of his view on the topic in return.
The only thing I could do after reading it was to ask him for permission to do a copy-paste. Here it is:
Read more ...Future Thinking: Wired Editor in Chief Nicholas Thompson on the Role of Media
In 2017, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. Last month we interviewed Nicholas Thompson, Editor in Chief of Wired, to hear his perspective on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.
Prior to joining Wired, Thompson was a journalist at The New Yorker, where he was also the editor of newyorker.com. Thompson has written about politics and technology for numerous publications, and has spent time reporting from West Africa on the role technology plays there. He is also the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.
The Internet Society: You recently published (and co-wrote) a long feature on Facebook’s difficulties over the past two years, focusing to a large extent on its role in distributing news and misinformation (or fake news) alike. As policy leaders shape future norms in this field, do you think platforms face stricter regulatory measures? How?
Nicholas Thompson: Platforms need to do better. They need to play a better role in Continue reading
IT Operations and the Cloud Skills Gap
Enterprises jeopardize their automation efforts if they don't invest in developing their network and security teams' cloud skills.
IT Operations and the Cloud Skills Gap
Enterprises jeopardize their automation efforts if they don't invest in developing their network and security teams' cloud skills.
Go Beyond The Resume; Build A Portfolio Of Your IT Career – Video
Build an IT portfolio of blogs, code, or community engagement. A portfolio goes beyond a resume to really demonstrate your skills, knowledge, and growth.IETF 101, Day 3: TLS & DPRIVE is no Diet Coke
This week is IETF 101 in London, and we’re bringing you daily blog posts highlighting the topics of interest to us in the ISOC Internet Technology Team. There’s plenty of variety on Wednesday, following the themes of Trust and Identity, IPv6 and the Internet-of-Things.
TLS has its second session of the week starting at 09.30 GMT/UTC, and will be focused on the big development of the TLS 1.3 specification being approved by the IESG. Some further work is required, but there are a number of TLS 1.3 related drafts up for discussion.
These include Datagram Transport Layer Security, DTLS Connection Identifer, Exported authenticators in TLS, DANE Record and DNSSEC Authentication Chain Extension for TLS, TLS Certificate compression, SNI Encryption in Tunnelling via TLS, and Semi-static DH Key Establishment in TLS 1.3.
NOTE: If you are unable to attend IETF 101 in person, there are multiple ways to participate remotely.
Running in parallel is LPWAN which is working on enabling IPv6 connectivity with very low wireless transmission rates between battery-powered devices spread across multiple kilometres. There’s a draft providing an overview of the set of LPWAN technologies under consideration by the IETF Continue reading
Cloudflare Global Network Spans 137 Cities: Launching Durban and Port Louis Data Centers
Our newest data centers in Durban (South Africa) and Port Louis (Mauritius) expand the Cloudflare network to 137 cities globally. We are delighted to reach this special milestone, and even more excited to help improve the performance and security of over 7 million Internet properties (and growing!) across 69 countries.
Just in March, so far, we've launched new data centers across Beirut, Phnom Penh, Kathmandu, Istanbul, Reykjavík, Riyadh, Macau, Baghdad, Houston, Indianapolis, Montgomery, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Mexico City and Tel Aviv!
Growing Africa network
Just three years (and about 100 cities ago!), we launched our very first Africa deployment in Johannesburg (South Africa). It was an exciting day for members of our team to facilitate an especially substantial latency improvement for our customers.
Since then, we’ve turned up additional deployments in Cairo (Egypt), Cape Town (South Africa), Djibouti (Djibouti), Luanda (Angola), and Mombasa (Kenya).
Durban is our third deployment in South Africa, where mobile adoption continues to drive traffic growth amongst 20 million Internet users. Other countries with three (or more) Cloudflare data centers are Australia, Canada, China, Germany and United States (with two European states joining this list very Continue reading
Oracle’s Larry Ellison Teases More Autonomous Cloud Services Coming Soon
Oracle will announce more autonomous cloud services over the next few months, said CTO Larry Ellison. These will include autonomous “analytics, mobility, application development, and integration services.”
Security for Public Clouds (AWS) with vRealize Network Insight
Enterprise IT needs visibility into the network and security status of their workloads, whether hosted on premises, or within AWS. While many AWS workloads are sandboxes for application development teams (DevOps), it is important to analyze these workloads. Increasingly, public cloud workloads are also fulfilling mission-critical production needs for many organizations. Enterprise IT must be ready to determine the best location, security posture, and bandwidth allocation when deploying workloads. Having traffic pattern details as well as security analysis and recommendations readily available, helps organizations make the ideal hosting decisions to meet their business needs.
vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) Supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Cloud. The vRNI traffic monitoring features provide visibility into native AWS constructs such as Virtual Private Clouds, VMs, Security Groups, firewall rules, and tags. vRNI also analyzes AWS traffic flows to provide security and micro-segmentation views of cloud workloads. This means you’ll be able to plan micro-segmentation and understand traffic patterns using data collected from your AWS instances.
Let’s review a simple Amazon Web Services (AWS) VPC setup to articulate the value vRealize Network Insight can offer from a Day 1 Day 2 perspective.
- We have an on-premise instance of vRealize Network Insight managing AWS.
- Continue reading
Verizon and Cisco ICN Trial Finds Names More Efficient Than Numbers
The trial mainly focused on management of streaming video content, which could account for up to 80 percent of Verizon's network traffic.
Facebook, Google, Big Switch Demo Network Operating Systems Built on Open Hardware
Facebook’s FBOSS and Google’s Stratum use Open Network Linux hardware. ONL is a Linux distribution for bare metal switches and it is one of OCP’s several open hardware projects.
CA Veracode Validates Application Security, DevOps Processes
Eighty-four percent of software buyers include security requirements in new vendor contracts.
Hyperledger Intros Caliper to Measure Blockchain Performance
Currently, there is no open source blockchain benchmarking tool.
Side Channel Attacks in the Wild: The Smart Home
Side channel attacks are not something most network engineers are familiar with; I provided a brief introduction to the concept over at The Network Collective in this Short Take. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, it might be worth watching that video (a little over 4 minutes) before reading this post.
Side channel attacks are more common, and more dangerous, than many engineers understand. In this post, I’ll take a look at a 2017 research paper that builds and exploits a side channel attack against several smart home devices to see how such a side channel attack plays out. They begin their test with a series of devices, including a children’s sleep monitor, a pair of security cameras, a pair of smart power plugs, and a voice based home assistant.
The attack itself takes place in two steps. The first is to correlate individual traffic flows with a particular device (where a traffic flow is a 5 tuple. The researchers did this in three different ways. First, they observed the MAC address of each device talking on the network, comparing the first three octets of this address to a list of known manufacturers. Most home device manufacturers use a Continue reading
European Consortium Delivers Superfast 5G Fronthaul Data
The focus is to reduce fronthaul and backhaul cots by using Ethernet-based networking and virtual networking in the fronthaul, the BBUs, and the remote radio heads.
Ferghana Valley IXP – Reducing the Digital Gap in Central Asia
The Internet Society Kyrgyzstan Chapter is implementing one of its first major projects supported by Beyond the Net Funding Programme. The aim of the Ferghana Valley Internet Exchange Point (FVIXP) project is to establish an IXP in the city of Osh in the south of Kyrgyzstan and to bring more affordable Internet for the residents of Ferghana Valley.
Ferghana Valley is located on the crossroads of three countries – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan – and is the most populated area in Central Asia with over 14 million residents. Historically, this area has been a source of regional interethnic tensions due to water irrigation and land disputes, poverty and lack of access to communication services.
Internet prices for end users in Ferghana Valley are higher than in other districts of Kyrgyzstan. Residents in the southern cities pay five times more for the same bandwidth than their countrymen in the capital city Bishkek located in the north of Kyrgyzstan. Users in the neighboring countries of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan face even higher prices due to very limited options for international connectivity and to challenging domestic market conditions.
With this project, the Kyrgyzstan Chapter hopes to increase regional cross-border collaboration between stakeholders and communication Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: Quantum Computing vs. Encryption
RIP encryption? Quantum computers, cutting-edge machines that promise to be much more powerful than binary PCs, could eventually defeat current encryption schemes, said Jason Matheny, director of the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The agency is looking for new encryption standards that could stay ahead of quantum computers, he told Federal News Radio.
Taking fake news by surprise: During the SXSW conference, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced plans to add Wikipedia text to videos the service determines to be conspiracy related. YouTube didn’t notify Wikipedia of its proposal to fight fake news and conspiracy theories, however, reports The Verge. While the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t require notice or a licensing deal for other organizations to use its content, it suggested companies that repurpose its articles contribute to the service in the “spirit of sustainability.” Vanity Fair called the YouTube announcement a “Band-Aid” for a much larger problem.
Blockchain the vote: Sierra Leone has used Blockchain technology to assist with a nationwide election this month, according to a story in Quartz. In the country’s most populous district, Swiss foundation Agora offered digital voting services using a permissioned Blockchain. The goal was more system transparency by recording each vote using Continue reading