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Encryption should be the norm, says internet overlord

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ENCRYPTION SHOULD BEa matter of priority and used by default. That's the message from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the worldwide body in charge of the internet's technology infrastructure.

The IAB warned in a statement that "the capabilities and activities of attackers are greater and more pervasive than previously known".

It goes on to say: "The IAB urges protocol designers to design for confidential operation by default. We strongly encourage developers to include encryption in their implementations, and to make them encrypted by default.

"We similarly encourage network and service operators to deploy encryption where it is not yet deployed, and we urge firewall policy administrators to permit encrypted traffic."

The purpose, the IAB claims, is to instill public trust in the internet after the myriad high-profile cases in which computer traffic has been intercepted, ranging from bank details to email addresses and all points in between.

The news will be unwelcome to the security services, which have repeatedly objected to initiatives such as the default encryption in iOS8 and Android L, claiming that it is in the interest of the population to retain the right to intercept data for the prevention of terrorism.

However, leaked information, mostly from files appropriated by rogue NSA contractor Edward Snowden, suggests that the right of information interception is abused by security services including the UK's GCHQ.

These allegations include the collection of irrelevant data, the investigation of cold cases not in the public interest, and the passing of pictures of nude ladies to colleagues.

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Encryption should be the norm, says internet overlord

Proud Sponsors of the 2014 New Zealand Open Source Awards

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NZOSA Media Release Proud Sponsors of the 2014 New Zealand Open Source Awards

The New Zealand Open Source awards are a biennial event to promote, recognise and celebrate the contributions of New Zealanders to free and open source projects and free and open source philosophy. Exemplary use of free and open source by organisations is also recognised.

These awards could not happen without the generous support of our sponsors. Every two years, a group of organisations who recognise the importance of free and open source to New Zealand and the world support these awards through their sponsorship.

Catalyst are once again delighted to be the main organisers and Platinum sponsors of the awards. Don Christie, Director of Catalyst and the chair of the NZOSA judging panel states As New Zealand's and Australasia's leading open source company Catalyst and our clients benefit hugely from the generosity of spirit that is represented by the open source software community. These awards are an acknowledgement of that spirit and one small way in which we can recognise and promote the open source software community in general.

InternetNZ, the other Platinum sponsor, said As a voice, a helping hand and a guide to the Internet for all New Zealanders we wholeheartedly support open source. The generosity and innovative spirit of open source represents the best of the Internet. It is a great honour for us to be associated with such a wonderful evening.

Sigurd Magnusson, one of the founders of Gold sponsor SilverStripe, says As strong advocates of open source software we are proud to sponsors the 2014 NZ Open Source Awards. SilverStripe was founded in New Zealand in 2000, we first open sourced our CMS software in 2006 and have continued to help push awareness and adoption for open source ever since.

.nz Registry Services, the other Gold sponsor says At NZRS, the folks behind operation of .nz, we are keen supporters of open source developments and proud to share in the recognition of projects and software that build on open source philosophies. It is exciting to see and contribute to the level of innovation and collaboration that open source engenders. Our congratulations go out to all the finalists.

Silver sponsors IITP notes IITP is a strong supporter of both open source and recognising excellence, so we're proud to be supporting the NZ Open Source Awards. The awards recognise the massive contribution New Zealand's diverse open source community makes and we're very happy to be part of it.

Dragonfly Data Science, one of the Bronze sponsors says we are scientists by training, specialising in data analysis. Openness is integral to the scientific process. Data analysis should be reproducible, so that given the same data and the same software, another researcher can reproduce the results. Open source software supports this reproducible approach, and we recommend it to all researchers and analysts.

Open data makes the results of scientific research available to the broader community, gaining more efficiency from public funding, and building trust in any analyses which use the data.

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Proud Sponsors of the 2014 New Zealand Open Source Awards

Amnesia review Peter Carey turns to hacktivism in his diffuse 13th novel

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WikiLeaks? It all started in 1975 Peter Carey, photographed in London, 2014. Photograph: Sarah Lee

Peter Careys new novel tells the story of Felix Moore, a leftwing Australian journalist at work on a biography of a wanted hacker whose virus has infected a corporation responsible for securing prisons in the United States. Felixs commission comes with exclusive access to his subject, Gaby Baillieux, but working conditions are less than ideal; at one point hes beaten up and taken to a secret location in the boot of a car. Bankrolled by a shady tycoon who knows that Felix once hung out in the same radical circles as Gabys actress mother, the job represents a lifeline for a man who has just lost a defamation suit and whose specialist subject is the history of ill will between Australia and America.

That overlooked history is what Amnesias title nods to; although the novel might not have taken this form had WikiLeaks and Anonymous not come to prominence, you feel its themes have long preoccupied Carey. Recent interviews with him offer an idiosyncratic take on why WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange exposed the civilian cost of Americas invasion of Iraq: Careys emphasis on Assanges Australian nationality places WikiLeaks in a tit-for-tat geopolitical narrative that dates back to 1975 and the CIAs suspected role in unseating Australias Labour prime minister Gough Whitlam as payback for his withdrawal from Vietnam.

Viewed in that light, Amnesias interest in hacktivism is more symbolic than anything, and the novel doesnt aim to compete with the abundance of thriller-like journalism on the topic. Little is said about the mechanics of the cyber attack for which Gaby risks extradition; what material there is about computers mostly concerns how she got into hacking in the 1980s after hanging out with a boy who plays the text-based adventure game Zork.

Careys main concern is for what Australia looked like during the second world war and after: we read in particular about the hardships of Gabys grandmother in 1940s Brisbane, when local women were prey to the Australian and American soldiers who fought each other in the streets.

What makes the novel so unwieldy is our uncertainty about the status of what were reading. Its filtered through Felixs consciousness, but not straightforwardly: we toggle between Felixs transcription of Gabys audio-tape memories and his first-person speculative recreation of what she and her mother and grandmother thought and felt during various episodes in their lives. Some of the jerkiness seems designed to be true to the nature of Felixs shiraz-fuelled composition under virtual house arrest, but why does Carey refer to him interchangeably as the fugitive, the hermit, the writer, as well as Felix, sometimes in the space of a paragraph or two? Gaby, as transcribed by Felix, says freakerated and disgustitude but talks too about the contrails of my thoughts, which sounds more like Felix, who describes his body as a human envelope.

With sub-threads about ecology, in-fighting among the Australian left, and race (Gabys Samoan classmate winds up as the fall guy for one of her early hacks), the splintered focus can give the impression that there are several novels fighting to get out of Amnesia. Felixs encounter with Gaby gives rise to a reflection on how the targets of activism have shifted over time: where he goes after governments, she easily saw that the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself. The problem is that Carey ends up having to spell all of this out: maybe the form he needs right now is the essay. Amnesia is published by Faber (18.99). Click here to buy it for 15.19

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Amnesia review Peter Carey turns to hacktivism in his diffuse 13th novel

EVERYTHING needs crypto says Internet Architecture Board

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Beginner's guide to SSL certificates

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has called for encryption to become the norm for all internet traffic.

Last Friday, the IAB issued a statement saying that since there is no single place in the Internet protocol stack that offers the chance to protect all kinds of communication, encryption must be adopted throughout the protocol stack.

The statement reflects earlier, more piecemeal moves in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to start spook-proofing the Internet.

Rather than looking at a particular protocol proposal, the IAB statement is designed to lay down a fundamental principle for designers: encryption, the board says, should be the norm for Internet traffic.

Encryption should be authenticated where possible, but even protocols providing confidentiality without authentication are useful in the face of pervasive surveillance.

The statement strengthens a long-held view within the Internet Engineering Task Force articulated in 1986 in RFC 1984, which stated that government policies to monitor the Internet are against the interests of consumers and the business community, are largely irrelevant to issues of military security, and provide only marginal or illusory benefit to law enforcement agencies.

This year, RFC 7258, described pervasive monitoring as an attack.

Even where a protocol's own operation doesn't need encryption, the IAB wants protocol designers to think beyond their immediate problem, because information leaked by one protocol can be made part of a more substantial body of information by cross-correlation.

In other worlds, even if a protocol doesn't particularly deal with user traffic, such as one handling negotiations between routers, its designers should adopt encryption to ensure it doesn't reveal information that does somehow compromise privacy.

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EVERYTHING needs crypto says Internet Architecture Board


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