Stories about: Internet Architecture Board

A press conference taking place on Thursday in Miami is expected to mark the last allocation of internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses by the central authority that assigns them.

The Internet has run out of IPv4 address space.

Internet security gurus and leading vendors are urging the US federal government to rapidly deploy security and authentication mechanisms at the top level of the DNS hierarchy, which is known as the root zone.

Thirty years have passed since the Internet Protocol was first described in a series of technical documents written by early experimenters. Since then, countless engineers have created systems and applications that rely on IP as the communications link between people and their computers.

The Internet engineering community is grappling with what to do about a serious flaw in the DNS discovered mid-year, and the ongoing debate brings to mind a famous quotation from Voltaire: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that's not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group's staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

The Internet Architecture Board has a new leader: Olaf Kolkman, a DNS expert from the Netherlands.