This was a great MAAWG conference and there are a couple sessions I can write about. There were multiple sessions where representatives from various blocking groups and ISPs talked about what they block on. I have extensive notes and will be writing things up in the next few days.
The awesome folks at Mailchimp brought t-shirts for us.
Unfortunately, I am still in the throes of a week long ear worm related to the shirt.
On a post from earlier this week, John asks about joining the blocklist doc I mentioned. This is actually a document coming out of M3AAWG and you must be a member of M3AAWG to participate. If you are a member, you can log into the website and join the working group.
This document will be made available to the public once the membership and the board approves it.
The M3AAWG keynote address today was a talk from Ladar Levinson about the shut down of Lavabit mail service after receiving demands from the NSA to hand over their SSL keys.
@maawg tweeted different quotes from the session. There is a conflict between privacy and security, and these are questions we need to resolve.
Ladar talked about his potential new service called darkmail, which pushes encryption back to the user level. I think there is relevance to this, as many online services are used for political and other organizing. As someone said to me last night, some of the people using our service could be killed if we don’t protect their privacy. He wasn’t speaking of the US residents, but people in places like Ukraine or Arab countries or other places undergoing violent revolutions.
Privacy is important, how we treat privacy is important. Handing over SSL keys to governments strikes me as a big problem.
Last week at MAAWG went much like all MAAWG conferences go: too much to do, too many interesting panels to attend, too many people to connect and work with, a plethora of very interesting keynote speakers and a total lack of sleep. Most of what happens at MAAWG is not public, but some of the events are.
One of the things that I can talk about is the J.D. Falk award. This award was established by MAAWG, Return Path and J.D.’s family to recognize people who work, usually behind the scenes and without fanfare, to enhance the Internet and protect end users. I sat on the award committee and we had a number of nominations for very worthy work. But the nomination that stood out was the one for Tom Grasso. Tom was the driving force behind the creation of the DNS Changer Working group. He was responsible for connecting experts from throughout the Internet industry, including ISPs, anti-virus vendors, and the broader security community to prevent the Internet for going dark for hundreds of thousands of infected individuals.
I am very proud of the decision the committee made. The bar has been set high for future recipients. Tom did an amazing job convincing lots of players to work together. His involvement definitely made the internet better for everyone, not just those infected by Rove Digital’s malware. What he did is a model for private / public partnerships in the future.
I don’t think I could say it better than the MAAWG press release, so I’ll just end with that.