I'm sure we've all heard about "the open Internet." The expression builds upon a rich pedigree of term "open" in various contexts. For example, "open government" is the governing doctrine which holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight, a concept that appears to be able to trace its antecedents back to the age of enlightenment in 17th century Europe. more
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the standards body for the Internet. It is the organization that publishes and maintains the standards describing the Internet Protocol (IP -- versions 4 and 6), and all directly related and supporting protocols, such as TCP, UDP, DNS (and DNSSEC), BGP, DHCP, NDP, the list goes on, and on... But how do they do that? How does the IETF produce documents, and ensure that they are high quality, relevant, and influential? more
Happy Launchiversary! It's been two years since World IPv6 Launch in 2012, the day many major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world started permanently enabling IPv6 for their products and services. In the last two years, participation and interest in IPv6 has only grown. Today nearly 250 network operators around the world are participating in World IPv6 Launch measurements, and we continue to see increased IPv6 deployment by network operators, websites, and home router vendors. more
Want to easily show people where a specific submarine cable goes? Or what cables terminate in a particular location? Last year I wrote about Telegeography's cool interactive submarine cable map and how useful it is to understand the submarine cable side of Internet infrastructure. In that article I mentioned how great it would be if you could get a link for a particular cable or location that you could pass along to other people. more
It has now been about eight months since I joined the Internet Society as the Director of Deployment & Operationalization and I still get asked on a fairly regular basis "what do you do?" Well, with ISOC's Chief Internet Technology Officer Leslie Daigle's recent departure, and with my time here having exceeded both my first 120 days and my first 6 months, this seems like the right moment to reflect on my brief tenure here so far and perhaps pontificate a bit on where we're going - and why. more
Given that I've written here about the original call for papers for the W3C/IAB "Strengthening The Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring (STRINT)" Workshop and then subsequently that the STRINT submitted papers were publicly available, I feel compelled to close the loop and note that a report about the STRINT workshop has been publicly published as an Internet-draft. more
It seems everywhere I turn, there's someone throwing around statistics for how the Internet and broadband will drive economic growth, create jobs, end world hunger and bring world peace (ok, maybe not the later). Sure enough, government officials are buying into that rhetoric and extending it in initiatives like national broadband strategies, cybercrime and cybersecurity plans as well as e-governance strategies. more
Are you interested in learning more about Bitcoin, cybercurrencies and Internet payment systems? On Monday, March 3, 2014, at 5:50pm UTC (London, UK) the Technical Plenary of the 89th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will be streamed live. The presentations during the "technical topic" part of the plenary will include... more
Want to read a wide range of views on how to strengthen the security and privacy of the Internet? Interested to hear how some of the leaders of the open standards world think we can make the Internet more secure? As I wrote about previously here on CircleID, the W3C and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) are jointly sponsoring a workshop on "Strengthening The Internet" (STRINT) on February 28 and March 1 in London just prior to the IETF 89 meeting happening all next week. more
In a recent blog post How to Sell IPv6 to Executives -- Guidance for Engineers, the feedback I got from mailing list discussions was that the case for IPv6 was more of mitigating risk than some inherent benefit of IPv6 itself. That is quite true depending on context. In this article, I will attempt to give more insight into the benefits of deploying IPv6. In a nutshell, viewed from the traditional lens of benefit as something we know and recognise based upon experience, IPv6 has little benefit apart from the large address space. more
BGP. Border Gateway Protocol. The de-facto standard routing protocol of the Internet. The nervous system of the Internet. I don't think I can overstate the importance, the criticality of BGP to the operation of the modern Internet. BGP is the glue that holds the Internet together at its core. And like so many integral pieces of the Internet, it, too, is designed and built on the principle of trust... The folks who operate the individual networks that make up the Internet are generally interested in keeping the Internet operating, in keeping the packets flowing. And they do a great job, for the most part. more
How can the open standards organizations of the IETF and W3C "strengthen the Internet" against large-scale pervasive monitoring? That is the topic up for discussion at the "Strengthening the Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring (STRINT)" workshop planned for February 28 and March 1, 2014, and jointly sponsored by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the W3C. The workshop is by invitation-only and has a deadline of Monday, January 20, 2014 (by 11:59 UTC) for submission of either position papers or Internet drafts. more
Internet security has been a primary focus this week for more than 1100 engineers and technologists from around the world gathered at the 88th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Participants are rethinking approaches to security across a wide range of technical areas. more
Now that IPv6 deployment is happening in major networks around the world, the question becomes -- what does "success" look like for IPv6? How much IPv6 traffic is "enough"? What are major milestones we should be tracking in IPv6 deployment? What is next for IPv6? more
The 87th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Berlin, Germany, concluded on August 2, 2013. IETF Chair Jari Arkko recently published his summary of IETF 87 on the IETF Blog highlighting what he felt were some of the more important aspects of what was a very successful IETF meeting. I also had the privilege of interviewing Jari on video about the meeting. more
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