Internet Protocol

Book Review: Forks in the Digital Road - Key Decisions in the History of the Internet

At first glance, this book looks like another history of the Internet, but it is much, much more. The authors use their engineering and scholarly understanding of what constitutes Internet history to identify forks in the digital road and key past decisions that shaped the Internet's path. The first part of the book maps out the core technical and policy decisions that created the Internet.

Deadline of September 6 for Grant Funding for Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)

If you operate an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) or are interested in creating one, the Internet Society has a “Sustainable Peering Infrastructure” funding program that is open for applications until this Friday, September 6, 2024... Grant funds from USD $5,000 up to $50,000 are open to all regions and are available to assist in equipment purchases (switches, optic modules, servers, and routers), training, capacity building, and community development.

A Transport Protocol’s Perspective on Optimizing Starlink Performance

Digital communications systems always represent a collection of design trade-offs. Maximizing one characteristic of a system may impair others, and various communications services may choose to optimize different performance parameters based on the intersection of these design decisions with the physical characteristics of the communications medium.

Digital Sovereignty and Internet Standards

There have been a number of occasions when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has made a principled decision upholding users' expectations of privacy in their use of IETF-standardised technologies. (Either that, or they were applying their own somewhat liberal collective bias and to the technologies they were working on!) The first major such incident that I can recall is the IETF's response to the US CALEA measures.

Digital Sovereignty and Internet Standards

There have been a number of occasions when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has made a principled decision upholding users' expectations of privacy in their use of IETF-standardised technologies. (Either that, or they were applying their own somewhat liberal collective bias to the technologies they were working on!) The first major such incident that I can recall is the IETF's response to the US CALEA measures.

Challenges in Measuring DNS Abuse

From the creation of DNSAI Compass ("Compass"), we knew that measuring DNS Abuse1 would be difficult and that it would be beneficial to anticipate the challenges we would encounter. With more than a year of published reports, we are sharing insights into one of the obstacles we have faced. One of our core principles is transparency and we've worked hard to provide this with our methodology.

Unbundling the Social Media Stack - Could a Decentralized Protocol Bring Real Choice and Control?

Project Liberty's Institute sat down with Wendy Seltzer, an advisor to the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). Wendy was counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and has served on the boards of The Tor Project, Open Source Hardware Association and ICANN.

2023 Routing Security Summit Starts July 17 - Participate Virtually

Interested in learning more about routing security? How it can affect your connectivity supply chain? What are best practices for enterprises and organizations? What is the role of CSIRTs in securing routing? What are governments doing now, and planning to do in the future around routing security?

Happy 50th Birthday Ethernet

ome 50 years ago, at the Palo Alto Research Centre of that renowned photocopier company Xerox, a revolutionary approach to local digital networks was born. On the 22nd of May 1973, Bob Metcalf authored a memo that described "X-Wire," a 3Mbps common bus office network system developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

How to Design a Decentralized Social Media Protocol – Be Ruthless About Technical Requirements and Eager to Build Coalition

Project Liberty's Institute sat down with Dave Clark, an early contributor to the TCP/IP protocols that built and run the Internet, and one of the expert advisors on DSNP, the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. Dave Clark is Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

50 Years of Ethernet

The idea for Ethernet was born fifty years ago in May 1973 when Robert Metcalf coined the word Ethernet. He had been studying ALOHAnet, developed at the University of Hawaii in 1971 and was the first public demonstration of a wireless packet data network. Metcalf used the work Ethernet as a reference to luminiferous aether, a concept postulated in the 17^th century to explain how light could be transmitted through a vacuum.

Building a More Secure Routing System: Verisign’s Path to RPKI

At Verisign, we believe that continuous improvements to the safety and security of the global routing system are critical for the reliability of the internet. As such, we've recently embarked on a path to implement Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) within our technology ecosystem as a step toward building a more secure routing system. In this blog, we share our ongoing journey toward RPKI adoption and the lessons we've learned as an operator of critical internet infrastructure.

Failed Expectations: A Deep Dive Into the Internet’s 40 Years of Evolution

In a recent workshop, I attended, reflecting on the evolution of the Internet over the past 40 years, one of the takeaways for me is how we've managed to surprise ourselves in both the unanticipated successes we've encountered and in the instances of failure when technology has stubbornly resisted to be deployed despite our confident expectations to the contrary! What have we learned from these lessons about our inability to predict technology outcomes?

An Economic Perspective on Internet Centrality

The IETF met in November 2022 in London. Among the many sessions that were held in that meeting was a session of the Decentralised Internet Infrastructure Research Group, (DINRG). The research group's ambitions are lofty: DINRG will investigate open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity management, name resolution, resource/asset ownership management, and resource discovery.

Trust and Insecurity

When I was first advocating home networking at Microsoft, we encountered a problem. The existing systems and applications had implicitly assumed they were inside a safe environment and didn't consider threats from bad actors. Early Windows systems hadn't yet provided file system with access control and other protections though there were some attempts to have separate logins to keep some settings separate.