Free Republic

Net freedom could suffer after the US steps back from its role as ultimate overseer of the global network, former US President Bill Clinton has said. Many of the governments keen to help oversee the net just wanted to use it to silence dissent, he said. Mr Clinton made his comments during a debate sponsored by his charitable foundation, Clinton Global Initiative. The US had been a good steward of the net and had helped keep it open and accessible, he said. Free speech Mr Clinton said it was clear ongoing revelations about National Security Agency surveillance had fuelled demands...

Bob Briscoe (Chief researcher at the BT Network Research Centre) is on a mission to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the Internet. He wants the world to know that TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) congestion control is fundamentally broken and he has a proposal for the IETF to fix the root cause of the problem. The Internet faced its first congestion crisis in 1986 when too much network traffic caused a series of Internet meltdowns when everything slowed to a crawl. Today’s problem is more subtle and lesser known since the network still appears to be working correctly and...

WASHINGTON - Researchers found a serious security flaw that left core Internet technology vulnerable to hackers, prompting a secretive effort by international governments and industry experts in recent weeks to prevent global disruptions of Web surfing, e-mails and instant messages. Experts said the flaw, disclosed Tuesday by the British government, affects the underlying technology for nearly all Internet traffic. Left unaddressed, they said, it could allow hackers to knock computers offline and broadly disrupt vital traffic-directing devices, called routers, that coordinate the flow of data among distant groups of computers.