Stories about: International Telecommunication Union

Finding ways to limit DoS attacks and SMS spam by making it harder to spoof the origin of electronic communications is on the agenda at a telecommunications standards meeting this week -- but civil rights advocates worry it could put an end to anonymity on the Internet.

Russ Housley is the first chair of the IETF with a particular expertise in network security. Housley, who runs consulting firm Vigil Security, has been active in the IETF for nearly 20 years and helped write early e-mail security and public key infrastructure standards. Three months into his job as chair of the leading Internet standards body, Housley talked with Carolyn Duffy Marsan about his strategy for bolting better security onto the freewheeling Internet.

Twenty-one year old John Leung was awarded a $US25,000 first prize by Bill Gates himself last week, in Microsoft's annual Next-Gen PC Design Competition. An undergraduate architecture student at the University of Melbourne, Leung's MADE in China submission took a novel approach to computing products and services, with the aim of bringing PCs to the emerging Chinese market.

The four-day United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was heavy on talk, light on action -- in line with its mandate to give interested parties a global stage to express their views on the future of the Internet.

Australia, the US and UK have joined forces in the fight against spam with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Washington over the weekend.

Government negotiators from nearly 200 countries narrowed their differences on how to manage the Internet and protect freedom of expression online in an important round of preparatory talks over the weekend in Geneva, but failed to agree on how to fund the Internet's expansion in developing countries.

Leaders of 36 IT standards bodies and industry consortia met last week at the Informal Forum Summit of the International Telecommunication Union's Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), where they shared insights and discussed possible areas of cooperation.

After more than three weeks of discussions, negotiators at an international radio frequency conference have agreed to allocate additional spectrum to the increasingly popular wireless LAN (WLAN) Internet technology.