Stories about: Internet Engineering Task Force

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.

We posed a few questions to Russ Housley, chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, about why the standards body is developing network address translations for IPv6 when IPv6 was supposed to eliminate the need for NATs on the Internet. Here's what Housley had to say.

A targeted advertising vendor being used by several US broadband providers hijacks browsers, spies on users and employs man-in-the-middle attacks, according to a report released Wednesday by two advocacy groups.

Early and extensive deployment of firewalls gave internet users "a false sense of security" and compromised the ideal end-to-end transparency of the internet, says former Internet Engineering Task Force head Brian Carpenter.

Fighting insomnia one night, all Robert Topolski wanted to do was send digital recordings of 19th-century barbershop quartet music to some friends.

The Internet engineering community will be eating its own dog food tonight. For one hour, the 1,250 network experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting will be able to access the Internet only through IPv6. The IETF created IPv6 in the mid-1990s, but this upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol has not yet been widely deployed -- even by the technology's biggest proponents here. Network World National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan talked with IETF Chair Russ Housley about the group's IPv6 experiment, why the transition to IPv6 is taking so long, and whether the IETF leadership is starting to panic about IPv4 addresses running out. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that's not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group's staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) engineers, reacting with unusual speed, have moved to address a serious security lapse in IPv6 before it becomes too widespread.

The Internet Architecture Board has a new leader: Olaf Kolkman, a DNS expert from the Netherlands.

Discussions about super computer performance almost always center on processing speed -- how many gazillion operations per second can be performed by the giant machines. Makers and users of supercomputers also like to brag about things like the number of processors, the amount of memory and the bandwidth available for moving data about.

Zfone, a free piece of software that encrypts voice over IP calls in a way that may circumvent government eavesdropping laws in some countries, is now available to Windows users, its developer said on Sunday.