InternetPolicy.net

Group promotes "digital ubiquity" at home

"The job of connecting all the consumer electronics devices in your home is getting a boost with the formation of an alliance of some 145 consumer and electronics companies," Michael Singer wrote on Wi-Fi Planet . "The consortium [is] now known as the Digital Living Network Alliance... The group outlined its Digital Home Interoperability Guidelines v1.0 as well as plans for compliance workshops and certification programs at a press event [in San Francisco on 22 June]. Some 60 engineers from various member companies worked on the 204-page specification...

"'As more and more consumers bring digital technology into their homes, the need to move their "digital stuff" from one device to another will become a major issue but for this market to really take off, the sharing of that digital content between devices must be seamless and extremely easy to set up...' Tim Bajarin president of research firm Creative Strategies, told internetnews.com... Jupiter Research Vice President and Research Director, Michael Gartenberg [added that] 'Streaming music from their PC to their stereo is the number one reason why consumers desire a home network and 51 percent of consumers are interested in recording TV content on their PC but playing back on their TV sets. As interest in digital ubiquity in the home increases, the work of the DLNA to foster standards and reduce technical complexity will help make the vision a reality.'

"...[The] rest of 2004 will be spent working on the construction of digital rights management content protection with interoperability between platforms targeted for 2005... Currently, the [Digital Home Working Group] has agreed on HTTP as the default for media transports and Universal Plug-and-play (UpnP) architecture for device discovery and control. The group is also pushing the next generation of Internet Protocol - IPv6... DHWG says any format it chooses must be an open standard that has been formally ratified by an internationally recognized standards organization, and [intellectual property] must be licensed under reasonable, non-discriminatory terms..."

Approval expected today for Wi-Fi security spec

Mark Hachman reports in eWeek that the long-discussed IEEE 802.11i specification may be approved today, "adding a needed layer of security to the Wi-Fi standard... If the specification is approved, most manufacturers will be able to push out firmware upgrades in a matter of weeks, if not sooner... Actual 802.11i hardware-based support will probably be baked into the next revision of chips, the sources said." The IEEE 802.11 Task Group will announce their decision here.

UPDATE: 802.11i approved as predicted.

Pleased to announce an emergency?

"People For Internet Responsibility (PFIR) is pleased to announce an 'emergency' conference aimed at preventing the 'meltdown' of the Internet - the risks of imminent disruption, degradation, unfair manipulation, and other negative impacts on critical Internet services and systems in ways that will have a profound impact on the Net and its users around the world. The dates for this conference are Monday through Wednesday, July 26 through 28, 2004 -- with all sessions and working groups at the Furama Hotel Los Angeles, just five minutes north of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)...

"The ultimate goal of the conference is to establish a set of specific actions and contingency plans for the Internet-related problems that could lead to the meltdown. These may include (but are not limited to) technical, governance, regulatory, political, and legal actions and plans. Scenarios to consider may also include more 'radical' technical approaches such as 'alternate root' domain systems, technologies to bypass unreasonable ISP restrictions, and a wide range of other practical possibilities... If you are interested in attending or have any questions, please e-mail a note to: [email protected]

PFIR consists of Lauren Weinstein, moderator of the Privacy Forum; Peter G. Neumann, moderator of the ACM Risks Forum and chairman of the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy; and Dave Farber, Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and moderator of the Interesting People email list.

UK firm develops material to block wi-fi

"UK defence contractor BAE Systems has developed a stealth wallpaper to beat electronic eavesdropping on company Wi-Fi and wired LANs...but let other radio and mobile phone traffic get through," Ron Coates reports for Silicon.com. "The FSS (Frequency Selective Surface) panels are made in the same way as printed circuit boards - layers of copper on Kapton polymer... They come in two varieties: passive, which is effectively permanent, and active, where various areas can be switched on and off to enlarge or limit the area of the network. The panels are 50 to 100 microns thick and can be applied to most surfaces including glass... BAE Systems developed the new material with £145,000 of funding from the Radiocommunications Agency, which is now part of Ofcom. BAE says the material is cheap and it will be developing it commercially through BAE's corporate venture subsidiary. There is no timescale for its commercial availability."

IP phones a network security risk

Angus Kidman writes for ZDNet Australia: "While mobile telephone viruses have been the subject of headlines recently, IP-based telephones could represent a more immediate security threat... 'Attacks on IP phones are actually quite frequent,' said Roy Wakim, convergence solutions manager at Avaya South Pacific. 'Security is a major issue.'

"...While there are no acknowledged reports of actual viruses aimed at IP telephones, the fact that they have their own IP address means they are frequently probed as potential attack sites, Wakim said. Poorly configured networks could allow voice calls to be monitored.... Virus attacks such as Nimda which slow down network performance can also render phones inoperable. As IP telephones move beyond simply handling voice calls to running applications which directly access enterprise data networks, the virus risk is likely to increase...

"Vendors have long recognised the potential for attacks via IP telephony networks. 'Voice networks are juicy targets for hackers with ulterior motives,' Cisco notes in a white paper on the topic. 'The main issue with voice networks today is that they are generally wide open and require little or no authentication to gain access.'"

DDoS attack on Akamai

eWeek's Chris Gonsalves reports: "An apparent DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on the [domain name servers] run by Akamai Technologies Inc. slowed traffic across the Internet early Tuesday and brought the sites of the firm's major customers to a screeching halt for roughly two hours... At around 8:30 a.m. EDT, Internet performance deteriorated sharply according to officials at Keynote Systems Inc. By 9 a.m., the availability of sites in Keynote's Business 40 Internet Performance Index had dropped to 81 percent, said Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technology and operations for San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote, which monitors Web performance. Keynote was able to determine that the problems were limited to several large sites, including MSN.com, Microsoft.com and Yahoo.com, that outsource DNS services to Akamai. Those sites were all but inaccessible until the service was restored around 10:45 a.m., Taylor said. Keynote officials said they were still investigating the cause of the outage but that the event had all the signs of a denial-of-service attack..."

FCC creates Broadband Radio Service

Jeffrey Silva wrote for RCR Wireless News on 10 June: "The [US] Federal Communications Commission today opened a huge swath of spectrum for wireless broadband services, creating incentives for businesses to invest in a third digital pipe to homes and businesses across the country... Nearly 200 megahertz in the 2.5 GHz band will become available for wireless broadband services. By revamping the 2.5 GHz band, it is now technically feasible and financially attractive to deploy wireless broadband systems [in the United States].... The FCC set a three-year transition period for [existing licensees in the 2.495 - 2.690 GHz band] to adapt to new rule changes, and established guidelines for negotiations among stakeholders. At the same time, the commission launched a new inquiry to study whether other mechanisms—including auctions—can be employed to maximize use of 2.5 GHz frequencies."

Additional details from Roy Mark at Internetnews.com: "The new rules restructure the band currently used by Multipoint Distribution Services (MDS) - commercial operators who send data and video programming - and Instructional Television Fixed Services (ITFS) used by schools and other educational entities... In addition, the FCC renamed the MDS service the Broadband Radio Service (BRS)... 'The magnitude of today's ruling is apparent when one considers that this band is double the spectrum that sparked the Wi-Fi explosion at 2.4GHz and equivalent to the entire spectrum devoted to terrestrial mobile wireless services,' FCC Chairman Michael Powell said."

Click here for the FCC news release about this decision...which came on the same day that the FCC unveiled their Internet history website.

WWWD4: 4th WorldWide WarDrive

"The WorldWide WarDrive is an effort by security professionals and hobbyists to generate awareness of the need by individual users and companies to secure their [Wi-Fi] access points. The goal of the WorldWide WarDrive (or WWWD) is to provide a statistical analysis of the many access points that are currently deployed... During the Third WorldWide WarDrive, which took place in July 2003, over 88,000 unique access points were discovered worldwide. The statistics compiled for the WWWD have become the defacto standard for statistics used by many media outlets and wireless security vendors to further generate public awareness of wireless security issues.

"The Fourth WorldWide WarDrive will take place 12-19 June 2004. The WorldWide WarDrive has teamed with the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE) to provide real time maps and statistics as data from each area is uploaded... Coordination of drives throughout the world is done at the WorldWide WarDrive Forums... As in the past, discussions pertaining to the WWWD can also be conducted on the WarDriving mailing list... For general information about the WorldWide WarDrive visit the WorldWide WarDrive website..."

This map - greatly reduced - shows the 1.1 million wireless networks already in WiGLE's database.

First quantum-encrypted net goes operational

From the HPC Wire: "BBN Technologies announced that it has built the world's first quantum cryptography network and is now operating it continuously beneath the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Today the DARPA Quantum Network links BBN's campus to Harvard University; soon it will stretch across town to include Boston University as a third link...

"Quantum cryptography, invented by Charles Bennett and Giles Brassard in the 1980s, prepares and transmits single photons of light, through either fiber optic cable or the atmosphere, to distribute cryptographic keys that are used to encrypt and decrypt messages. This method of securing information is radically different from methods based on mathematical complexity, relying instead on fundamental physical laws. Because very small (quantum) particles are changed by any observation or measurement, eavesdropping on a quantum cryptography system is always detectable.

"The DARPA Quantum Network has improved on these techniques to create a highly robust, six-node network that is both extremely secure and 100% compatible with today's Internet technology... 'People think of quantum cryptography as a distant possibility,' said Chip Elliott, a Principal Scientist at BBN and leader of its quantum engineering team, 'but the DARPA Quantum Network is up and running today...' "

NetReliefKit

This doesn't have much to do with policy but it's a cool tool: On InterLink, Brian King tells about a recent workshop on disaster relief communications where he learned that "Nethope is developing a suitcase-sized NetReliefKit in a collaborative effort between Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and Inmarsat. The kit would integrate an RBGAN terminal, wireless and wired networking capability, IP Telephony and specialized relief applications. It would be available only to NetHope members..."

RBGAN stands for "Regional Broadband Global Area Network" - a service provided by Inmarsat. An RBGAN terminal is a portable satellite modem for Internet data. Nethope is a collaboration among international NGOs aimed at applying Internet support to emergency relief operations around the world.