CS Dept. in the News
Internet Alert Registry Mentioned in InformationWeek
Josh Karlin, a PhD student in the CS Dept, has a website hosted here at the CS Dept. called the Internet Alert Registry (IAR) which monitors Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) updates for anything suspicious. BGP is how the various networks that make up the Internet communicate routing information to each other.
His IAR was recently highlighted when an ISP in Pakistan, attemping to implement a government-ordered censoring of YouTube, inadvertently broadcast information that prevented users worldwide from accessing the wildly popular home of viral videos.
The incident, which lasted around 2 hours on February 24, 2008, was mentioned in InformationWeek, as a site helping to highlight the problem by listing dozes of potentially suspicious changes to BGP per day. A paper with co-authors Jennifer Rexford and Dept. Chair Stephanie Forrest, offers a way to greatly mitgate the security issues with BGP with Pretty Good BGP.
Related links: Information Week article; Renesys blog entry; IAR site; Jennifer Rexford; Stephanie Forrest
Chinese Firewall Studies Get Noticed
New CS professor Jed Crandall and a research team at UC Davis have been studying the Chinese firewall, and getting noticed in place like Slashdot and on the BBC web site for their surprising findings. They found that contrary to expectations, the firewall did not always stop censored traffic at the border of the network. Using an automated tool called ConceptDoppler, a sort of weather report for censorship, they tested various censored phrases from the Chinese wikipedia and discovered that as often as 28%, the data made it through.
Related links: Jed Crandall; Slashdot; BBC; eWeek
CS Tech Report Earns Clauset Trip to Nation's Capital
Aaron Clauset attended the unclassified part of the Community Wide Predictive Analysis Workshop, held December 5th at the MITRE Corporation, (a sponsor along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DOD, and the Defense Intelligence Agency). Clauset presented "Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism" (PDF, 263Kb), which he wrote with Maxwell Young. The report, mentioned in The Economist and Nature, finds that the relationship between the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks is scale-free.
Related links: "Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism" (PDF, 263Kb); MITRE; Aaron Clauset; Maxwell Young
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