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.)
I ended 2011 with a short (20 December) visit to a pleasantly warm Washington, D.C. for my 5th FCC Technical Advisory Council meeting. Some of the discussions from the third meeting were extended, others cut off for lack of time. We spent over an hour on the suggestion made by the Legacy Transition working group two meetings ago to advise the FCC to move forward in sunsetting (although we shunned that term at this meeting — “It’s a new beginning, not an end!”) the public-switched telephone network (PSTN). Many questions have arisen repeatedly in the discussions over the course of the last two meetings (and two FCC workshops in between), notably, “What happens to the telephony numbering system?” The initial strategy was imprecise, “The numbering plan will continue to exist but governance and allocation process needs to be considered.” Another repeated question has been “What exactly do we mean by PSTN?”
The last line of this FCC announcement is ominous enough:
Policy making has become predominated by sponsored research, politics, campaign contributions and rhetoric. In light of an apparent disinterest for the facts it comes as no surprise that the network neutrality debate highlights opposing perceptions about the impact from changes in the next generation Internet. Regrettably no unbiased fact finding appears readily available, because politicization at the FCC prevents fair minded assessment by the Democratic and Republican Commissioners and heretofore the conflict has not generated a question of law or fact reviewable by a court.
— Rob Frieden: Internet 3.0: Identifying Problems and Solutions to the Network Neutrality Debate, 2007.
in June I participated on a panel on network neutrality hosted at the June cybersecurity meeting of the DHS/SRI Infosec Technology Transition Council (ITTC), where “experts and leaders from the government, private, financial, IT, venture capitalist, and academia and science sectors come together to address the problem of identity theft and related criminal activity on the Internet.” Here is a belated recap of my thoughts on that panel, including what network neutrality has to do with cybersecurity.
[I posted the following on CircleID today:]
As is well known to most CircleID readers — but importantly, not to most other Internet users — in March 2011, ICANN knowingly and purposefully embraced an unprecedented policy that will encourage filtering, blocking, and/or redirecting entire virtual neighborhoods, i.e., “top-level domains” (TLDs). Specifically, ICANN approved the creation of the “.XXX” suffix, intended for pornography websites. Although the owner of the new .XXX TLD deems a designated virtual enclave for morally controversial material to be socially beneficial for the Internet, this claim obfuscates the dangers such a policy creates under the hood.
In response to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s recent Further Notice of Inquiry on the Internet Assigned Names and Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions [Docket No. 110207099-1319-0], I submitted the following comment:
My third FCC Technical Advisory Council meeting (3-hr. video archive here) was the most exciting yet. The TAC’s Critical Legacy Transition working group, studying the legacy public switched telephone network, recommended that the Council advise the FCC to set a concrete date to sunset (shut down) the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). (!) The working group recommended the year 2018 as a starting point for lively discussion.
Although the outcome is not good news, it is gratifying to see the predictions of a model of the Internet ecosystem being validated by the real world. Specifically, the recent spate of ISP consolidations is precisely what our network formation model predicts. First, Level3 acquired Global Crossing in a deal valued at $3B. A few months later, Centurylink (QWEST) acquired Savvis for $2.5B. Our model predicts that this consolidation will continue unless ailing tier-1 providers find a new source of revenue to compensate for their losses on IP transit.