Reading about NASA’s recent DNSSEC snafu, and especially Comcast’s impressively cogent description of what went wrong (i.e., a mishap that seems way too easy to ‘hap’), I’m reminded of the page I found most interesting in The Checklist Manifesto:
This month Internet2′s new UCAN project issued a call for white papers on how they could use their $65M BTOP grant in operationally sustainable ways, i.e., so the infrastructure they build will have a chance of surviving when the federal stimulus project money runs out.
We held a relevant workshop 5 years ago, part of which was published in CommLaw the following year. I’ve also written several other essays on related issues:
Internet infrastructure economics research”, and how to do reasonable examples of it, has come up a lot lately, so i’m posting a brief description of an academic+icann community workshop i’ve been recommending for a few years, which has yet to happen, and (I still believe) is long past due, and specifically more important than passing policies, especially emergency ones to allow IP address markets with no supporting research on the impact on security and stability of the Internet, and even at the risk of killing IPv6 altogether.]
Last month (23 March) I was on an NTIA panel at the Department of Commerce, to recommend conditions on this broadband stimulus money, aka arm wrestling between companies. Gigi covers it in her blog; today was the deadline to finish my recommendations to DOC and NTIA:
[drafted this entry a few months ago but have been reluctant to post because it's incomplete. but after reading about the ARIN Board's emergency proposal last week to create IPv4 address markets, variations of which have already been approved in European (RIPE) and Asia-Pacific (APNIC) IP address policy communities, i decided it's complete enough. -k.]
A few policy questions on which the RIR-community should funnel address-registration tax dollars into peer-reviewed research:
Last month I submitted two proposals to the National Cyber Leap Year call for input from the U.S. Networking Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. I submitted two ideas, the International Bureau of Internet Statistics, and Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS, a two-year old idea). The Bureau of Internet Statistics still strikes some as batty, but over the holidays I caught up on some panicky OECD state-of-malware-landscape papers on how uninformed we are and how little data we have, while the only concrete recommendation in the “ITU’s study on the financial aspects of network security: malware and spam” report was
Although the financial aspects of malware and spam are increasingly documented, serious gaps and inconsistencies exist in the available information. This sketchy information base also complicates finding meaningful and effective responses. For this reason, more systematic efforts to gather more reliable information would be highly desirable.
(gathered earlier this year upon a student’s request)
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[Originally written as a series of blog entries, this document was later converted to a booklet/pamphlet, see "Top Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet"]
#10: Moreover, even in the dim light of the underattended interdisciplinary research into the network, the available data implies clear directions for solutions, all of which cross policy-technology boundaries.
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#9: The news is not all bad: there is a reason everyone wants to be connected to all the world’s knowledge — as well as each other — besides its status as the most powerful complex system ever created by man. The Internet’s practical promise for individual freedom, democratic engagement, and economic empowerment, is also unparalleled. This promise is sufficient inspiration for an open, technically literate conversation about how to invest in technologies and policies to support articulated social objectives.