Guysoft’s Weblog

IGF 09 Day 2 – Internet Security, Social Networking IPv6 and a football match

Hi all,

Today was the second day of my visit, tomorrow IGF starts! Nearly all of the day I was in the 4th Symposium of GigaNet – a network of academic people that research Internet governance.

Although I am a technical person, and had to figure the basic relation the following: ICANN, IANA, ISOC, IGP, ccTLD and plenty more. However I’ll leave that to another post, since entire doctorates were written on how these organizations interact with each other (well ccTLD is not an organization, but you get the idea).

I managed to separate three topics I found interesting in particular so find the one you like:

Internet security/censorship – Same tools, different goals

One of the lectures that I found interesting was by Ronald Deibet who talked about the new technological implementation of the government’s censorship. I was surprised that governments  do DOS attacks (denied of service) on servers which they want to stop for a short period of time. DOS is a traditional hacker tool, and here are governments using it. One of the reasons they are using DOS is because its hard to pinpoint and confirm the attacker’s origin. Apparently there is an Internet arms race in the world. And countries like the US China and other superpowers are actually not in support for a treaty against digital arming.

Ronald also mentioned visits he had to Internet exchange points called (or IXPs), those are like  national Internet routers, check wikipedia for more info, apparently there are tapping attempts to IXPs by hacks. If you hack in to an IXP, you can listen to the traffic of an entire country!

In Israel I found that nearly no one (apart from the people in ISOC-IL) knows that all he Israeli Internet traffic goes via a single point, and mostly when told this people are surprised that the Israeli exchange point (called IIX) seems to work, and it works well.

Social networks – privacy and usage pattens

There was a talk by Robert Bodle who talked about Social networking and how they are developing, he had a few points I liked. The first was the different attitude of some cooperates and organization have to twitter. That some use it to talk to their customers while others just use it to announce material from their websites. A way to see it is simply checking the following divided followers radio. I personally think that for announcements the world has RSS feeds, but they seem less trendy to most of the world.

The second was a quick mention on how social network are developing in a way that is quite problematic and are making us lose are privacy. For example the fact that the social networks are founded by advertisements is in a way invading our privacy. Also, there is the widely known trade-off that user are aware of – you get to see your friend’s personal network, but the pay is that you become transparent to others. I personally have no solution to that problem, but here must be one there.

IPv6 – How to govern a smooth transition

There was a talk today on IPv6, the new IP system that is here to save us from the running shortage of IPv4 Internet addresses. I hope in the coming days I will find a technical person to explain me how to get a IPv6 server up and running, however this talk was about the governance of IPv6, not technical, still, its interesting. The organization that is in charge of IP allocation is called IANA. They are faced now with a problem – How to make it so people adopt and support IPv6 and not fall back using IPv4, due to its support for both in old and new systems. They want to avoid a situation which they call “a black market” where people start trading IPv4 among themselves IPv4 addresses in high rates because demand is high, due to limit on supply of IPv4 addresses.

Out in Sharm In a football match – pictures of the day

After the end of the GigaNet symposium Dima two more and myself went to the main street in Sharm for supper in an Egyptian restaurant. The place was full with football fans because there was a big football match which was important for the Egyptians to win on their way to the world cup, the waiter told us the world cup is a dream of 80 million people for the last 10 years. As we were eating Hummus and Labane the crowed around us all of a sudden burst in to cheers and started parading  down the street with the Egyptian flags. It was some experience. I got a youtube video of it.

Tomorrow the conference starts, and the amount of people should grow, amoung them friends of mine from ITU Telecoms, and our own ISOC president Rimon Levy. It feels like tomorrow will be a big day.

Celebrating the football victory