Information Policy

A Survey of DNS Security: Most Vulnerable and Valuable Assets

The following provides and introduction to a study by Venugopalan Ramasubramanian and Emin Gun Sirer, called “Perils of Transitive Trust in the Domain Name System” [PDF].

The paper presents results from a large scale survey of DNS, illustrating how complex and subtle dependencies between names and nameservers lead to a highly insecure naming system. It is well-known that nameservers in the Domain Name System are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. We recently performed a large scale survey to answer some basic questions about the legacy DNS: Which domain names are the most vulnerable?; Which servers control the largest portion of the namespace and are thus likely to be attacked?; Are there any servers with known security holes, and which domain names do they affect? We present the results from this survey below in the hope of identifying problem spots in the Internet and thus improving the security of our common cyberinfrastructure. This study is based entirely on public data - all information available on these pages is also available to others with less-than-honorable intentions.

http://www.circleid.com/posts/survey_of_dns_security/

ITU Broadband Statistics for 1 January 2006

ITU has just released its new statistics on global broadband penetration per 100 inhabitants as of 1 January 2006. Iceland has taken over as this year's leader from Korea with Netherlands, Denmark and Hong Kong, China rounding out the top five.

http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/newslog/ITU+Broadband+Statistics+For+1+January+2006.aspx

Amnesty International targets internet repression

Amnesty International has launched a new campaign calling for an end to the repressive use of the net.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5020788.stm

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/Amnesty-launches-campaign-against-online-censorship/2006/05/28/1148754855866.html

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/488120/727825

Electronic Government and the Rural Poor: The Case of Gyandoot

This article from the MIT "Information Technologies and International Development" journal evaluates whether the Gyandoot ICT project, which since January 2000 has tried to make government services more accessible to villagers in the poor and drought-prone rural district of Dhar in Madhya Pradesh, India, is benefiting the local population.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1544752044193434?cookieSet=1

EU Wants More Cross-Border Telecoms Competition

The European Commission has urged greater cross-border competition in the European telecommunications market, according to reports from the Associated Press (AP). While acknowledging the benefits of its year-old push for better exploitation of digital technologies, the Commission said that stronger investment and more effective cross-border competition are needed to reduce the gap between Europe's research spending and that of the United States. Commission spokesman Martin Selmayer hailed Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden for embracing European Union (EU) telecoms rules, but rebuked the German government for shielding Deutsche Telekom's new high-speed network from competitors. Meanwhile, European Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding has asked EU member states to pursue ambitious plans to exploit technologies such as improving access to broadband internet and freeing up spectrum for new users.

http://www.telecomdirectnews.com/do.php/120/18053?7649