Marouen Bloggin' his Life

No I won’t talk about Jamiroquai’s Album. I want to talk about one of the best communities I discovered in London. The Couchsurfers.

Let’s be honest! What do young travellers need when they discover the world? I’ll give you the answer: A place where to spend the night (not even a bed if you have a sleeping bag) with the option of having a nice shower and change, a safe place where to leave the heavy backpacks during the day and, of course, a guide (usually a book) to tell you where to go and what to avoid (I’m used to buy the lonely planet).

How many times you take a room in a hotel and you pay an entire 24 hours for just a nap of few hours. Also, guide books are usually subjective and written by tourists without giving a local taste or vision of the area visited. What if you have a full list of local contacts you can trust and who might host you or at least meet you to give you the right tips/directions around a cup of local tea/drink.

The best solution I found for this was the couchsurfing.com website. Even with the fact that I wasn’t able to host people, I was invited to many picnics/partys/BBQs in many parks/houses in London and I met a variety of people (hosts, travellers or intruders like me). I remember also the London Calling where during one weekend I was able to meet “theoretically” a couple of hundreds of people not fearing the rain or late buses. It was amazing. All these people gave me enough confidence to start “couchsurfing” and hosting people and all my hosts and guests were so nice and very friendly.

From a southern perspective, I see this community also a good opportunity for Africans to meet travellers, learn about other cultures and improve foreign languages without having to struggle with travel expenses and visa restrictions. That’s what I call travelling without moving.

Come on guys (and girls): Join the community www.couchsurfing.com

PS: if you live in Tunisia, don’t forget to join also Tunisia Group and check out local events/meetings I’m willing to organise.

Ralf Bendrath, Research Fellow, University of Bremen

The panellist presented security as a warranty for the future from a scientific perspective since he has security policies background then he reminded that total security cannot be reached. “Actual security discussions are linked to the famous national security but maybe in future IGF meetings we may discuss other issues related to cyber wars for example”. “There is between bad and good the issue of well intended actions like hacking tools which are used by administrators to monitor their networks”.

Huang Chengqing, Secretary-General, Internet Society of China, Beijing

Internet security should be included in the social agenda of governments. Two levels are suggested to study the issues of internet governance at an upper level and then a lower level including Private Sector and Civil Society to discuss the technical aspects with the help of UN and ITU which should have a bigger role in this process. “Fresh” statistics show that Spam coming from China is decreasing compared to other countries. However other problems like phishing or cyber attacks increased. Information security issues are due to the change from technical challenges to income reasons to hackers.

Marco Gercke, Professor of Criminal Law, University of Cologne

Legal standards Important and we can use for the moment what we have already. People in the room now do not share the same tools but share the same technical standards which works. Law enforcement agencies have to cooperate. We have only one international convention concerning cyber crime by the Council of Europe and signed only by 43 countries mainly developed already. No success to reach more developing countries even if the increase rate in information technology users is higher than the one in developed countries. We need more people involved in the discussion and to join the group in order to make progress in the field especially with the help of the ITU which is already organizing meetings in the area.

Lamia Chaffai, Director, Tunisia Internet Agency, Tunisia

Tunisia is trying to take profit from the electronic economy. However, this is not easy at the regional level especially with the fact that our country is the only with an alert centre to avoid being used as a relay for bigger attacks against other countries. This has to be improved at the regional level. Tunisia is trying to help other African countries to use more e-commerce by organizing regional events to enhance the security awareness.

Cristine Hoepers, Leader, Brazilian CERT

Policy, legislation and technical solutions are the main pillars of security issues. The centre of response is dealing with day to day issues and undertaking studies in the field. The studies show that some major problems have more than 20 years old. We need to think how to introduce security awareness in the minds of future engineers and explain it as a hole process not only as a technical aspect. With the cooperation required between all the actors we need also to work on preparing the next generation to reduce future problems.

Zahid Jamil, Senior Partner, Jamil & Jamil Barristers-at-Law

The Pakistani government was surprised by the use of IT in terrorism act before having the right law against such activities. The one thing we need to find is the harmonious definition of cyber crimes and the convention of the council of Europe is the only initiative for that. It’s not the mandate of the ITU to regulate the internet.

The session entitled “Security and Privacy Challenges for new Internet Applications: A Multi-stakeholder approach” during the IGF started with the presentation of the link between privacy, Technology and Globalisations by Anne Carblanc (OECD). To do so, she explained the new movement offered by new technologies, new trends in these technologies, the change of user’s and businesses and other organisations behaviour, legal policy frameworks that exists now, the limit of recent initiatives.

Joanna Shelton (Google) explained after the efforts made by Google in order to protect the privacy of their users within their services and especially by offering the option of using some of the services anonymously. She moved then to speak about the corporate social responsibility at the level of advertisement that her company is respecting. “The Users’ trust is the most important asset of Google” she added “A lot of miss information is circulated about what Google does with the information we collect”. Joanna made clear that the information collected is just technical and anonymous, used later just to improve the search results for future requests. “How do we protect the data ?” – “We are not a profiling company caring about the history of users so the storage time of data is limited”. “We are a company of engineers” she added before saying that Google has a 2-ears-cookies policy and a limited discloser of data so they do ‘never’ provide data to 3rd parties including governments and a ‘very strong’ network and security policies and architecture. At the end, she claimed that Google encourages and is keen to participate in any effort to establish global policies in the privacy area.

Simon (Privacy International)
Privacy International always believed since the beginning of internet that a catastrophe will happen sooner or later related to privacy. PI undertook few months ago a research concerning this issue at the corporate level and it appeared that Google was the worse privacy-respectful company among the 34 studied. “No communication or transparency”. A ‘bizarre’ meeting took place in Montreal after that involving these companies for the first time and was not politicized. The aim was to finally discuss the issue of privacy but what was discovered is that there isn’t any previous full understanding of the definition of the word privacy.

The next speaker also (Marie Georges - DPA) attacked smoothly companies like Google about the fake privacy-protection initiatives and compared the cookies information or search requests history to a similar analogy within libraries where keeping the list of consulted books for 2 years is inconceivable. Education and parliamentary programs are very important to explain the issue of privacy. The challenge is today to have world standards but the problem is that there are now no binding principles in the field.

Carlos (Argentina)
“The problem in Latin America is the balance between data protection and dissemination of judicial information”. The panellist gave the example after of a service provided in Argentina to consult online the previous legal cases for information needs but personal details were required to access to this service. A company started later dumping these data and publishing it online and offline and this created a breach in the privacy of citizens.

During the Q&A session, a dilemma was raised between interactivity level in web 2.0 which the aim and privacy. The moderator added that only 25% of Facebook users exploit the privacy tools.

Before going further in the IGF process, I wanted to speak about the team of young researchers that I had the pleasure to be selected with and to meet in Rio. They are also supposed to blog about the IGF process and all their profiles are listed in this link

Two other Tunisian friends and bloggers Tarek and Rafik are attending the forum with different hats and reasons but it is nice to meet them again thousands of miles from our home land. .

In this session organised by the Oxford Internet Institute (among others), many speakers presented their experience/views (or the one of their organisations/companies/Countries) in the field of the management of security. More focus was dedicated to the transaction level and identity (ID) management architectures used on the online work nowadays.

Caspar Bowden, Chief Privacy Advisor EMEA Microsoft, started his speech by presenting the evolution of solutions used to check IDs online. He presented later the identity relationships in the real world where somebody shows an ID token and he is offered another one (the example of the hotel where a room key is given after presenting a passport in the reception). He presented after that a general abstraction of this model in the online world and linked it to the work of Microsoft in this area by confirming the identity of the person of the organisation in the real world and translating it into an encrypted data encapsulated in the set of ID tokens. Answering to the question of a German chap concerning the privacy, he explained the actual technical ability of interaction between several ID management web services. However, the issue of the right to use it or not remains a policy question which is a decision not only limited to the private sector. This said, Microsoft is always working on new designs for a safe transactional model in terms of privacy and liability.

According to the second panellist, Tulika Pandey, additional director in the department of Information Technology of India, many efforts were made in order to make internet banking transactions safer for end users like pushing the banks to provide softwares for customers to limit the impact of phishing with the new customers. He confirmed then that this is not enough and a lot remains to do but the costs of ID management are usually very high.

Simon Davies, founder of Privacy International presented few examples in Europe and the US of online services guaranteeing that the final services host only hashs of passwords and not the original ones. He continued by explaining that new systems are taking over slowly and electronic tokens are not the unique solution for the ID management issue. Solutions like biometrics are good if people agree with especially when they have other possibilities too. Concerning phishing, as one of the examples of ID theft, he reckon that the effort and investments spent at the policy level should be redirected to education purposes and to find technical solutions for the issue without threatening the final consumer like what some countries does. He also suggested at the end of the session a root identity system as a ‘gate keeper’ which should be set up and administrated by the governments.

I’m here, struggling with mi tie, seating among hundreds of representatives – well dressed – of several countries and international organisations, in a big conference room during the opening session of the IGF I presented in the previous post. Well, I know I have to speak a bit about Rio de Janeiro but I’ll try to do it later from my hotel room, if I find the time.

The opening ceremony and session were like a ‘défilé’ of many ministers and heads of several organisations thanking the organizers of the event before reviewing beginning of the process since when it started during one of the UN meetings in order to see how it is possible to bridge the digital divide. The most important part was when one of the representatives of the Brazilian government (I think so) asked in his short presentation the ICANN to leave the management of internet for another more open organisation under the UN wings. ICANN president spoke an hour after and avoided making any comments related to that. APC, ISOC, ICC, and many other country ministers presented also their views and values in the ICT4D field. The list of speakers is here and here

I liked also the fact that, in the agenda, Arriette, the executive director of the APC, spoke just after the actual secretary general if the ITU, Hamadoun Touré, and she managed to thank him even if, few years ago, when he was elected in this position, she wasn’t really happy with that and I remember seeing once online a long list of reasons she presented explaining here disagreement in this point. Irony of fate.

Another speech I enjoyed, as usual, the one of Adama Samassékou, who excels always in using French language to present another vision of the issues with a very positive perspective. I think that all Africans have to learn from him because wherever he goes, he gives a good image of African visions in all the international matters. .

Well, I’m pretty sure that my blog is more than upset with me because I neglected it for more than a year. I always manage to find reasons for postponing writing posts (blogging).

Now I have no reasons to do so, I’m here in Milan’s airport, ready to spend more than 7 hours waiting for my flight to Brazil. Not in the mood for reading. No interest in shopping (I never had this interest anyway). Not in the mood for eating, maybe the excitement of going to South America or the huge “Panini” offered by the generous crew of Alitalia in this morning’s flight. Fortunately, wireless internet is here to save my day and to keep me away from trying to flirt with Spanish girls behind me here even if everyone looks sleepy today. I was glad to see that the price of a 24 hours wireless internet link was just 10 euros. In Tunis’ airport, it is exactly the same price …. for just 2 hours. Well, at least, compared to the last time I saw the page of the provider (http://epay.Planet.tn/produits_wifi.asp) a year ago, only the payment method using international credit card was accepted. Now, other local methods are accepted too with the option of acquiring some vouchers offline. Good to notice that things change right here.

I forgot to answer the famous question: What am I going to in Brazil ? Well, the answer is not far from what I was talking about concerning internet differences between northern and southern countries. I had the honour and the pleasure to be selected by the IDRC (http://www.idrc.ca) to attend as a ‘young researcher’ the second Internet Governance Forum (http://www.igfbrazil2007.br) which is the second meeting (I’m tempted to use the word “round”) of discussions and debates around internet issues. These discussions started in 2004 within the framework of the World Summit on the Information Society (http://www.itu.int/wsis/ ) and continue until today after a previous meeting I missed in Athens in 2006.

In all the cases, I’ll try to do my best to write often about the discussions and especially the topic of security which I selected for many reasons I’ll explain later on.

To be continued …

I'm facing some troubles with my blog (spam in comments) and that's why I'll tell more about my new life and what a crazy September month I had in my next post in few days.

This was valid until yesterday August 13th.

With immediate effect, the following arrangements apply to all passengers starting their journey from airports in the UK or the United States of America (excluding flights from Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando and Tampa to London Gatwick) and to those transferring between flights at a UK airport.

All cabin baggage must be processed as hold baggage and carried in the hold of passenger aircraft departing UK airports.

Note: Passengers are advised that ALL electrical or battery powered items including laptops, mobile phones, portable music players, remote controls etc cannot be carried in the cabin and must be checked in as hold baggage.

Passengers may take through the airport security search point, in a single (ideally transparent) plastic carrier bag, only the following items. Nothing may be carried in pockets:-

* pocket size wallets and pocket size purses plus contents (for example money, credit cards, identity cards etc (not handbags));
* travel documents essential for the journey (for example passports and travel tickets);
* prescription medicines and medical items sufficient and essential for the flight (eg diabetic kit), except in liquid form unless verified as authentic.
* spectacles and sunglasses, without cases.
* contact lens holders, without bottles of solution.
* for those travelling with an infant: baby food, milk (the contents of each bottle must be tasted by the accompanying passenger) and sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight (nappies, wipes, creams and nappy disposal bags).
* female sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight, if unboxed (eg tampons, pads, towels and wipes).
* tissues (unboxed) and/or handkerchiefs
* keys (but no electrical key fobs)

Every other item must be carried in customer’s hold luggage.

All passengers must be hand searched, and their footwear and all the items they are carrying must be x-ray screened.

Pushchairs and walking aids must be x-ray screened, and only airport-provided wheelchairs may pass through the screening point.

In addition to the above, all passengers boarding flights to the USA and all the items they are carrying, including those acquired after the central screening point, must be subjected to secondary search at the boarding gate. Any liquids discovered must be removed from the passenger.

Customers travelling to the UK from overseas airports may be subject to local airport restrictions and therefore customers should plan to travel with the very minimum of hand luggage.

From BA.com website