This summer the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will meet in Berlin but before the meeting even gets underway, teams of students from around the world will be coding and competing to win the Maniac Challenge 2013. The MANIAC Challenge is a competition to better understand cooperation and interoperability in ad-hoc wireless networks. The specific focus of this year's challenge is on developing and comparatively evaluating strategies to offload infrastructure access points via ad-hoc forwarding using subscriber handsets (e.g. smartphones and tablets). The incentive for subscribers is discounted monthly fees, and the incentive for operators is decreased infrastructure costs.

The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) has been hosting some of the most interesting talks at recent IETF meetings as the Applied Networking Research Prize winners are given the stage to present the work for which they have been recognised. At the IETF86 meeting in Orlando earlier this month, Gonca Gürsun, a PhD student from Boston University and the most recent recipient of the ANRP, discussed a new metric for analysing the structure of Internet routing.

Today, 13 March 2013, I stepped down as Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). At the IETF 86 meeting in Orlando, Florida, I gave some parting comments to the engineers, computer scientists, and researchers that attended the meeting. In closing, I have a message to governments from around the world:

If you’ve embraced the Internet, you should also embrace the standards that make the Internet work.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the pre-eminent global standards organisation for Internet technologies and it will be meeting all next week in Orlando, Florida. Prior to each IETF meeting, three times a year, we put together a guide to the sessions most relevant to our programmatic work. At this IETF meeting we are focussing on the following broad categories of work:

I've had the pleasure of attending the APRICOT 2013 conference  in Singapore this week.  As always, it has featured an interesting technical agenda -- part emerging standards and technologies, and part operator experience discussions.  Many of the faces are familiar -- the technology developers show up in different parts of the world to talk through recent IETF working group items, etc.   And, they take away valuable insights about how local networks and businesses work, that could impact how a technology will deploy.  It turns out that, while Internet technologies are global, impacts and evolution are not always uniform.  

I just finished reading a recently published "Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report" by Arbor Networks. It is the eighth one in the series of annual reports produced by the company.

Internet engineers have a simple shorthand way to describe graphs relating to aspects of the Internet's evolution - they go up and to the right. Growth, often exponential growth, is a feature of so much of the technological change that makes up the Internet, and that is driven by the Internet, that we can be fooled into taking it for granted.

Do you have a published work? Are you a creative artist finding your audience? Have you ever seen your blog posts or posted photos in that light? If so, you probably are published, and more creative than you give yourself credit for!

But, have you been surprised when your work appeared on someone else's website or Facebook page? Did you feel your rights had somehow been transgressed? Or were you excited to see your work "go viral?”

If someone took your money and gave you nothing in return, you'd think you were being hard done by... right?

If someone gave you something, didn't mention charging for it, but then debited your bank account anyway, you'd think something was wrong... right?

But in the information economy, personal data is currency.