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:
Finally, a process we started almost three years ago has reached a milestone: the first public draft of The Menlo Report: Ethical Principles Guiding Information and Communication Technology Research and its Companion Report were posted on the DHS and SRI web sites (respectively) last month.
DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, through its PREDICT program, sponsored this report on ethics in Information and Communication Technology Research (ICTR). The culmination of a multi-year effort by network and security research stakeholders to lay out a guiding framework to identify, navigate, and resolve ethical issues in ICTR, this report is intended to be a dialogue launch point for the community of researchers, oversight entities, and policymakers to reflect on ethical issues in security and network research. Public comments are encouraged via the Federal Register through 27 February 2012. I’m pretty sure all comments are responded to and/or integrated into the next version of this report. Hopefully the report will also be the topic of discussion at some conferences and workshops this year, so that the community can get out ahead of these issues before we find ourselves facing legislative overreaction to catastrophe (or even perceived catastrophe). Please consider reading and submitting a comment.
I kicked off 2012 with a visit to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO to attend the principal investigators (PI) retreat for the Named Data Networking Project, one of four projects funded under NSF’s “Future Internet Architecture” (FIA) program. Impressive progress since the first FIA meeting, with substantial development and coordination of the NDN Testbed connecting the initial participating institutions, including network status reporting, state of (phase-one) OSPF routing, and testbed status pages. This two-day meeting packed in a wide range of collaborative discussions of architecture and implementation issues, including: topology and namespace structure and constraints; organizational structure and network management; routing and forwarding strategy; security issues such as attribution and privacy; early experiences with application development; evaluation and measurement; social and ethical values in technology design; and educational outreach (classes teaching NDN concepts). We also discussed how to dispel the misconception that NDN is simply collaborative web caching. (The caching is essential but the most revolutionary piece of this new communication model is retrieving data by names.)