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The UN is more than a "forum for international discourse". It's also an umbrella for a number of functional and distinctly non-political international organizations. A good example is the ITU, another is the UPU. You never think about it, but you _can_ call any country on the phone or send snail mail there, and these systems are coordinated/governed by organizations that (AFAIK) never makes headlines. My guess is some think the Internet should be governed like this, and I can't see why not. It does sound a bit weird that a company would do this instead.

UN organizational chart
ITU

WorldSpace and the Club of Rome cordially invite you to a presentation by Professor Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman, MIT Media Lab and Founder of One Laptop per Child. Please join us on November 18, from 11:00am -12:00pm, at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Tunis, to hear Professor Negroponte discuss his $100 Laptop world-wide education initiative.

As do I. Unfortunately, the ITU can't seem to even keep a web site accessible (http://www.itu.int/ so how could they possibly be put in charge of administering DNS? The gory details on the upcoming conference should be available at http://www.itu.int/wsis -- at least that's the reference from the UN home page. I'd love to see just exactly what's being proposed before I decide whether it could be useful. I would hope that other /. participants would like to know the details before they shoot their mouths (fingers?) off. Doh! I forgot where I was, didn't I?

As do I. Unfortunately, the ITU can't seem to even keep a web site accessible (http://www.itu.int/ so how could they possibly be put in charge of administering DNS? The gory details on the upcoming conference should be available at http://www.itu.int/wsis -- at least that's the reference from the UN home page. I'd love to see just exactly what's being proposed before I decide whether it could be useful. I would hope that other /. participants would like to know the details before they shoot their mouths (fingers?) off. Doh! I forgot where I was, didn't I?

http://www.itu.int/home/

"The ITU, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland is an international organization within the United Nations System where governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services."

The UN/ITU tried foisting their version of the internet on folks in the 80's and 90's. Some sucess that was. Instead of simple well thought out protocols that needed a working implementation before the RFC would be accepted the ITU had large committees that would find a "compromise" solution between competing proposals. The agreed upon standards were almost always the logical sum of several proposals with several "modes" the protocols could run in. The result was large, complex protocols that were difficult to understand and implement. ITU provided a very graphic demonstration of why one should never allow people that have no interest writing the code, implement the specs.

It would be a shame if the ITU used its special talents to aid the IP development.

As you wish. Ever heard of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) which is part of the UN? Do you have a telephone? Do you ever call anyone in any foreign country? Guess what? The ITU is the agency responsible for all international telephone system links form many decades now. You were saying something about track record, no?

And moreso please don't let the UN fix it.

It might be worth dropping the silly jingoism and having a look at how the world actually works. International telecommunications are already being coordinated (very successfully) by a UN agency, and have been since 1947. http://www.itu.int/home/

AFAIK, the Common Carrier status for communication was introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte for telegraph wires, (as part of the ITU treaty) and is (or was) the same in all signatory countries. Of course, nationally, it can be open to interpretation -- but in Canada's case, Common Carrier is quite similar to the US status. The only difference is that in Canada, effort is made to resolve differences without resorting to lawsuits, leaving the suits as a method of last resort instead of being used as a warning shot.

I'm not interested in the U.S. "retaining" control of the 'Net, to whatever limited extent it *has* control over the 'Net.

No, I want the U.S., the UN, and anyone else for that matter to have *as little control over the 'Net as possible.* If you read the governing document to which the article links, the UN is trying to take a much more active controlling role than ICAAN currently does.

Your ITU analogy is flawed because 1) the amount of control exerted by the ITU over radio and phone services is far less than the control desired by the UN's group. For example, the ITU's regulations have almost no effect on radio broadcasting content in the U.S., a function handled entirely by the U.S. government (the FCC). By contrast, the UN grgoup wants to take responsibility for eliminating spam, leveling the costs of internet access globally, and solving "multilingualism" issues on the 'Net.

We don't need *any* group mandating a "solution" for spam. Bah.

The internet became a necessity of life when millions of people started relying on it to send emails to each other wherever they may be in the world, to get news from sources other than their own government, to set up online communities. The internet became a necessity of life when countries like India started relying on it to drive their economy forwards. Ask yourself: could you do your job without the internet?

The question then is: when countries like India and Japan and Brazil and South Korea and Germany and Britain are relying (or will rely) on the internet, but a significant part of the internet's global infrastructure remains solely within the control of the US government, why shouldn't they seek to have some sort of say in it?

Many comments here talk of "UN control" as if the Security Council will be in day to day charge of the internet. This is nonsense - the most likely scenario would be a specialised agency of the UN, under its auspices but not under its direct control. The closest parallel I can think of is the ITU.

I recognize that the rest of the world makes a valuable contribution to the internet, however:
The United States developed the internet, with many large investments (DARPA etc.), and now we are expected to just give it up?

Europe invented and developed the wheel. Clearly your cars and roads belong to Europe.

Stop cooking right now, Africa invented the fire.

Clearly we need an international patent system, so that each country can hoard and control its own inventions.

What happens when China decides that no one should use the word democracy? What happens when France decides that the word Nazi can't be used?

International collaboration through organizations such as the International Telecommunication Union must be brought to an end immediately. What if China decides that no one should use the word democracy on the phone? What happens when France decides that the word Nazi can't be used on the phone?

Note that the names and numbers that would be assigned correspond to the international country codes for telephone. For China to censor your Internet usage they'd have to invade your country, just like they'd have to do for censoring your use of the telephone. It's the same thing.

One question. If the root servers and the assignment of TLDs and numbers were controlled by Europe, would you like it to stay that way? Or would you, maybe, perhaps, want the US to have some part in it?

-- The price of eternal vigilance is a dollar a day and half an hour of your time.
Carefully choose a responsible newspaper. Support it, read it, write to it.
Do your part.

The International Telecommuncations Union is an international organization within the United Nations System where governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services. This is the supra-national organisation which should control and operate the DNS in the same way as it ultimately controls all international electronic communication. The first thing that urgently needs to be cleaned up is what is essentially the identity theft of TLD names from small countries with naive governments. I'm thinking particularly of .tv, .cx, and .to. These stolen domain names have been totally corrupted by a bunch of disengenious American 'entrepreneurs'. While the United Nations may not be exactly lily-white in absolutely all its dealings, the magnetude of the UN's sins pales into insignificance compared when compared with the identity theft of not just one, but three nations' names. The next item on the clean-up agenda is to ensure that the three-letter TLD names disappear as soon as possible. Thus all the .com names become .com.us, or whatever country they are actually situated in. Finally the effective introduction of IPv6 is long overdue. It's my belief that the creation of a totally erroneous perception of scarcity value in the current 32 bit addresses is yet another reason to take the administration of the DNS out of the control of a demonstrably corrupt nation.

The UN already controls the international telephone network via the ITU - see http://www.itu.int/home/.

This is the organisation that would run the internet

The ITU sets standards, it does not control the international telephone network any more than the W3C controls the World Wide Web.

Handing over DNS would hand over the technical, substantive administration of the key piece of infrastructure of the Internet. And would be as accountable as any other UN agency - not at all.

Apples to oranges... The UN does not regulate phone service, mobile or otherwise. Why should it regulate the use of the Internet. It's a bad idea plain and simple.

Well, international phone service is in fact regulated by the International Telecommunication Union, which is "an international organization within the United Nations System" (quoted from their web site). To quote further:

"The Union was established last century as an impartial, international organization within which governments and the private sector could work together to coordinate the operation of telecommunication networks and services and advance the development of communications technology."

It sounds a lot like the telephone equivalent of what is suggested for the internet.

The UN already controls the international telephone network via the ITU - see http://www.itu.int/home/.

This is the organisation that would run the internet.

Yeah well, the agency within the UN that would administrate the TLDs, should the US release control over them, is the very same agency that made sure that the world has one telephone standard, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The ITU was founded before the UN was, and oviously, it has very little to do with human rights issues, they just happen to share some organizational structure.

This constant ignorant whining of the "the UN is a worthless piece of garbage" kind, is getting on my nerves. Educate yourself instead of repeating soundbites you heard on the news.

More info here: ITU history

As the GP said, the summary for this submission is so remarkably incorrect that one wonders if the submitter just drew a conclusion from the headline.

http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/newslog/ITUs+New+Broadb and+Statistics+For+1+January+2005.aspx

Ok, I think I have a suitable smoking gun document.

First you'll need this definition:
ICT = Information (and) Communication Technologies.

Document. At first it sounds potentially innocent, but about half way through it becomes explicit that it is talking about a 2010 agenda for a Single European Information Space, a unified Trusted interoperable DRM Information Society. The source for it is the European Union's official portal for "institutions and bodies of the European Union, including the European Parliament, the Council of the Union, the Commission, the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors, the Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, the European Central Bank and the European Investment Bank."

The following list is merely to cite the government bodies, not specific documents...
The United Nations Press Release establishing the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). WGIG still seems relatively small and relatively early in their work. Far bigger and more developed is the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). And of course there's the Whitehouse with the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, almost a Megabyte worth of PDFs I haven't even begun to dig through.

-

But what does access mean in this context:

"In 2001 there was more international IP bandwidth (1.3Gbit/s) available to the 450 000 citizens of Luxembourg than the 820 million citizens of the African continent (1.2Gbit/s). Although available bandwidth is now slowly increasing, as new satellite providers enter the market a lack of bandwidth still threatens Internet usage and uptake."

"Under 6% of all Africans can access telecommunications of any kind with many of those outside urban areas unable to access fixed lines. The Internet is out of reach to the vast majority of Africans" What does broadband offer for Africa?

The DNS type scheme you are asking for is called ENUM aka E164, it exists today, it's an open standard and Asterisk supports it already. Roughly speaking, ENUM uses DNS to translate phone numbers into IP addresses.

http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/enum/

You could sign up for a free account on e164.org and enter your existing telephone number. The system will call you back and an automated message tell give you a verification code which you type into a form on the web site to verify that you are in fact at that phone number. Then you enter the DNS name or IP of your Asterisk server or IP phone and anybody dialing your phone number from a VoIP device which supports ENUM lookup, like for example Asterisk, will then be connected directly peer to peer to you, without any phone company or VoIP service provider involved.

http:www.e164.org/

So if everybody was to get a VOIP device with ENUM support, we get rid of phone companies and VoIP service providers altogether ;-)

Asterisk also supports another similar but decentralised scheme called DUNDi, short for Distributed Universal Number Discovery.

http://www.dundi.info/

I know this particular RFC is meant as a joke. But if this man succeeds in gaining more control over the internet, I would not be surprised to see something along these lines in the future.

It may well be a power grab on the telecomms administrators part, but I can understand why they feel it is grabbable (whether its a good idea or not is another question).

If US companies (Network Solutions etc.) screw up the internet then they would make such a power grab easier.

The ITU has nothing to do with the UN. It's basicly a trade association of the world's telephone companies. They're probably more competent than the UN to absorb ICANN, but that's not saying much.

From the ITU home page:

The ITU, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland is an international organization within the United Nations System where governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services.

It's a bit difficult to have the ITU involved in this without also having the UN. Granted, the General Assembly likely won't ever be asked to vote on an ITU (or Internet) standard if rational minds prevail.

After all, they are made up of communications companies. See their website.
In all fairness, it would make sense to move control to the ITU. Even though there will be a lot of people who will complain about a "political body", ie the UN controlling such things. Sure the UN is a Polititcal Body. So is any government, if you haven't already noticed; but the UN does more than just political work. think UNICEF, UNESCO, FAO, WHO, and the list goes on.
Is there going to be political influences in the ITU if it controls ICANN? Sure, just as there is now.
If I had a say in this, I'll vote yes. They are the body to control worldwide tele/data communications.

ICANN was also still in a confusing semi-democratic phase at the time (this seems to be steadily decreasing) and also weirdly self-imploding. Ester Dyson also gave the most contentless speech I think I have ever heard - no doubt to ensure minimum offense to anyone in the audience.

As with all these things wheels within wheels... but I do wish the call for some form of ICANN democracy would renew rather than lose it to a not very democratic body (i.e. the ITU) or to the corporations (kinda where it is now).

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there's cost e.g. in lost revenue, but really, they just blast them off using the remaining fuel to a higher orbit.. so that is not too expensive to do. Not much else is done with them, they are just moved out of the geo[syncrhonous|stationary] orbit slots to eventually disentigrate on reentry when their orbit gets too out of whack.

if a company is too sloppy about this, I suppose the ITU will not give them any new orbital slots, which would keep them out of business.. so yes, there are incentives.

H.264 is an international standard from MPEG and ITU, sometimes known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or MPEG AVC (Advanced Video Codec).

And yes, if they're supporting HD DVD, they will be supporting H.264, since it's one of the required codecs for HD DVD, along with VC-9 and MPEG-2.

Actually, telecomms standardization is the job of the ITU, which is part of the UN.

Spam is a global problem and the ITU is one of the few (arguably the only) international organisations with the ability to bring the various players together and focus their attention on the issues. The meetings webpage is here and, if you have the time/desire, you can listen to the meeting online.

Live Real WebCast available at:
www.itu.int/ibs/sg/spu/spam/index.html

Live Real WebCast available at:
www.itu.int/ibs/sg/spu/spam/index.html

spectrum allocation should be ... placed into the hands of an international body.

The military should stay on it's own damn part of the spectrum, and stay the hell OUT of everyone else's.

It was a double blind test (ABC/HR) adhering to ITU-R BS.1116-1. Read more about the methodology in the initial announcement.
In addition to being double blind results were also encrypted so manipulation is very unlikely.

The radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is not ultimately governed by the FCC. It is actually controlled by the United Nations through the International Telecommunications Union. The FCC must operate within the rules of the ITU.

So, while the FCC does have a good deal of control over broadcasting in the United States, there are certain things it cannot control and certain decisions it does not have the power to make.

Furthermore, the ITU is necessary to ensure the safe, reliable, and effective use of the electromagnetic spectrum. You wouldn't want some unlicensed broadcaster in Canada or Central/Southern America interfering with the radio services used by FEMA, would you?

"DNS is a global system that is important the better part of the world. It clearly falls under the purview of global government."

Ever hear of the story of the eggs and the basket? If you thought ICANN was a poorly managed and undemocratic beaurocracy, try the UN.

Besides DNS isn't a mandated or an official system. I could set up my own naming system at any point and translate yourdomainname into some other real address. AOL has done just exactly that with their AOL keywords. If I wanted I could hack mozilla to only use my name registry and distribute that instead.

If DNS becomes a political basketball, then we should take our game elsewhere.

IP address assignment on the other hand has become so central and standard to international telecommunications that it seems that it should rightly be given over to the ITU

Glad to see that the early hooting isn't only anti-VeriSign. People ought to consider that ICANN has been burying everything registries want to do in piles of bureaucracy, while trying to grab more and more money and power. ICANN should be reformed and stuck to technical operational issues rather than playing footsie with international bureaucrats. Think of all the nonsense that would come from the ITU/U.N. getting its mitts on "Internet governance," which is being discussed in Geneva today and tomorrow. VeriSign is no angel, but if it can take ICANN down a notch, I'm for it.

Well it's a good thing there is an international effort then isn't it?

However, since the majority of spammers are Americans in the United States, an American law that has the right form and the right enforcement should be able to dramatically reduce spam. Unfortunately, the US has neither.

At any rate, Niueans don't shy away from selling the .nu domain (means nude in French), and host many adult web sites under it.

Well, not exactly.

.nu has been a source of rivarly between the Niue people and an American who effectively stole it from the country through deception. The population have been trying to get it back with no luck. The Americans have been threatening the local people (whole story documented here)

No-one from Niue will benefit if you register a .nu domain, your money will just line the pockets of a shady entrepreneur.

remember this slashdot article that reffered to that
crypto-gram issue ???

quote :
Fun with Fingerprint Readers

Tsutomu Matsumoto, a Japanese cryptographer, recently decided to look at biometric fingerprint devices. These are security systems that attempt to identify people based on their fingerprint. For years the companies selling these devices have claimed that they are very secure, and that it is almost impossible to fool them into accepting a fake finger as genuine. Matsumoto, along with his students at the Yokohama National University, showed that they can be reliably fooled with a little ingenuity and $10 worth of household supplies.

Matsumoto uses gelatin, the stuff that Gummi Bears are made out of. First he takes a live finger and makes a plastic mold. (He uses a free-molding plastic used to make plastic molds, and is sold at hobby shops.) Then he pours liquid gelatin into the mold and lets it harden. (The gelatin comes in solid sheets, and is used to make jellied meats, soups, and candies, and is sold in grocery stores.) This gelatin fake finger fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.

His more interesting experiment involves latent fingerprints. He takes a fingerprint left on a piece of glass, enhances it with a cyanoacrylate adhesive, and then photographs it with a digital camera. Using PhotoShop, he improves the contrast and prints the fingerprint onto a transparency sheet. Then, he takes a photo-sensitive printed-circuit board (PCB) and uses the fingerprint transparency to etch the fingerprint into the copper, making it three-dimensional. (You can find photo-sensitive PCBs, along with instructions for use, in most electronics hobby shops.) Finally, he makes a gelatin finger using the print on the PCB. This also fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.

Gummy fingers can even fool sensors being watched by guards. Simply form the clear gelatin finger over your own. This lets you hide it as you press your own finger onto the sensor. After it lets you in, eat the evidence.

Matsumoto tried these attacks against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them. The results are enough to scrap the systems completely, and to send the various fingerprint biometric companies packing. Impressive is an understatement.

There's both a specific and a general moral to take away from this result. Matsumoto is not a professional fake-finger scientist; he's a mathematician. He didn't use expensive equipment or a specialized laboratory. He used $10 of ingredients you could buy, and whipped up his gummy fingers in the equivalent of a home kitchen. And he defeated eleven different commercial fingerprint readers, with both optical and capacitive sensors, and some with "live finger detection" features. (Moistening the gummy finger helps defeat sensors that measure moisture or electrical resistance; it takes some practice to get it right.) If he could do this, then any semi-professional can almost certainly do much much more.

More generally, be very careful before believing claims from security companies. All the fingerprint companies have claimed for years that this kind of thing is impossible. When they read Matsumoto's results, they're going to claim that they don't really work, or that they don't apply to them, or that they've fixed the problem. Think twice before believing them.

Matsumoto's paper is not on the Web. You can get a copy by asking:
Tsutomu Matsumoto

Here's the reference:
T. Matsumoto, H. Matsumoto, K. Yamada, S. Hoshino, "Impact of Artificial Gummy Fingers on Fingerprint Systems," Proceedings of SPIE Vol. #4677, Optical Security and Counterfeit Deterrence Techniques IV, 2002.

Some slides from the presentation are here:
presentati

The details:
T. Matsumoto, H. Matsumoto, K. Yamada, S. Hoshino, "Impact of Artificial Gummy Fingers on Fingerprint Systems," Proceedings of SPIE Vol. #4677, Optical Security and Counterfeit Deterrence Techniques IV, 2002.

Some slides from the presentation are here.

Sorry to nitpick, but you mention the standards body ITU. De facto is defined as a standard that is widely accepted and used, but lacks formal approval by a recognized standards organization. The International Telecommunication Union is pretty well recognized.

The World Summit on the Information Society is not a security conference. It is concerned with much broader issues of society and technology. You can find more info here

My friend Clif Cox did a networking project in Bhutan as a United Nations Volunteer (UNV). You might find his experances working in a lesser developed country of use in making your plans.

To the stupid posts above mentioning that "diplomats" are not competent to handle the technical issues: diplomats are there to focus on the process, not the specifics.

ITU (this is a UN-ITU joint summit, isn't it?) is perfectly competent to handle the technical issues linked with numbering and naming. They do it very well already for the phone and for a portion of the OID tree.

I don't see a description. All I see is an assertion.

OK, did a little more google. Here are a couple of real source articles.


And you are forgetting that I already stated that fingerprints were a bad example. For fingerprints, fine, they're already being used, and they're easy to copy. So let's not use them for anything else. But that's a strawman argument against a single implementation of biometrics.

Fingerprints do make a convenient strawman, but unfortunately they are still the dominant form of biometric systems. Look around you, count the products or services that propose to rely on biometrics. The majority (60% according to the latest article linked from slashdot) is fingerprint based. The next largest group is facial recognition, which is also not very secure. The rest (hand, iris, voice, writing) may or may not be better, I do not know. Combination systems are very rare today. Don't you think the strawman arguments are valid while the strawman is real? :)


If an ATM used [fingerprints], and your fingerprints were stolen, there's no way you could be personally held responsible unless you were somehow negligent. This protection is being used by the bank, not by the person, so there isn't "anything else that might be protected by that ID," as far as the victim is concerned.

So fine, the fingerprint is for the protection of the bank, and I won't be liable if their system turns out to be less then secure. There is also no harm done if the bank is the only one entity in my lifetime (or in the lifetime of a given technology) that uses that biometric. But there are not enough unique biometric systems that each bank, each id card, each company could use an independent measurement, so there will be inevitable overlaps.

If [birth certificates, passports, etc.] were required day to day, they wouldn't be sufficient to "steal my identity." Actually, the whole concept of "stealing someone's identity" is rather ridiculous. For instance, this article talks about stealing people's identity's, but what actually happened is people stole a bunch of cash from an ATM.

This is a good argument. As long as the compromised systems are compartmentalized (ie. one bank and their atms) then such a compromise is not a big deal. The problem comes if multiple systems will depend on the same biometric id.


The way I think about them is like a public/private key system that you cannot change. Biometrics are easy to recognize, but hard to reproduce. That's the key to their security.

As long as they are difficult to reproduce, I agree. In my opinion though there is a limited window when that is true. Once someone figures out how to do it, then that given biometric will become weaker.

Keep in mind that the difficulty only exists for physical attacks, where a person is trying to impersonate you in front of a trusted system. Biometric signatures offer no protection against electronic attacks. If these rigged ATMs can copy the PIN number and magnetic card info in a re-usable form, then they can also copy your biometric signature.

No one is forcing people to use biometrics on anything.

Oh, good, I'm relieved. :) "use it at your own risk" (whether that risk is lower or higher then alternatives) is fine with me.

The private key is "me," perhaps. But the public key, which I give out is not me. It's the parts of me that are recorded in those particular conditions at that particular time. And that's not going to be the same among different systems.

Unlike in public key cryptography, it only matters if someone can produce a good imitation of your public "image

But here, in Paragraph 2, is the tricky part. Not only does the WSIS want information for all, it wants "to harness the potential of information: Promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration, namely the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger...