Today is the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) awareness day.

We have announced the shortlist for our annual Best Practice Challenge, a competition that recognises British organisations, groups or individuals who have embraced the challenge of making the Internet a secure, open, accessible or diverse experience for all. Symantec, Barclays, E-Victims organisation and the British Computer Association of the Blind are four of thirty organisations to make the shortlist in 2008.

The winners will be announced at an award ceremony in London on 9th July 2008. These outstanding entries will be promoted as examples of best practice to industry, government, academia and in the media in the UK and internationally. They will also be invited to take a leading role in the UK preparatory meeting for the next Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting in Hyderabad and be showcased at the IGF on 3rd to 6th December as examples of the best of British in the Internet world.

A twelve-strong panel of independent judges, from organisations including the Confederation of British Industry, the British Computer Society, the Royal National Institute for the Blind and the Press Association is being chaired by Rt Hon Alun Michael MP. The judging panel met on 10th June to discuss the high calibre entries and decide on the winners for each of the six award categories:

Best Development Project
Best Security Initiative
Raising Industry Standards
Personal Safety Online
Internet For All
Open Internet

The full shortlist is as follows:

Best Development Project

Recently we were pleased to be a part of the release of Unbound, a new open source alternative to the BIND domain name system (DNS) server, which we helped to develop.

Released by NLnet Labs, VeriSign Inc, Nominet and Kirei, Unbound is a recursive DNS server, which is used by Internet Service Providers to support DNS look-ups by Internet users. DNS is the feature of the Internet that matches domain names (such as www.nominet.org.uk) with IP addresses and is used for web browsing, email, messaging, and Internet-based telephony.

From its first prototype in 2004 Unbound was designed to be a faster, more secure alternative to BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) which has been the most popular choice for DNS servers since the 1980s.

One of the main advantages of Unbound is that it is high performing and very fast. It also supports DNSSEC, a security enhancement that is essential to help protect DNS transactions. By making the software freely available to developers (at http://unbound.net/) we hope to spread the deployment of DNSSEC. This in turn will enable Internet Service Providers to provide a faster, safer Internet experience for their customers.

Recently, the UK Internet Governance Forum was launched at an event in Parliament attended by over 100 people from industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society. The launch event featured a report from the Internet Governance Forum in Rio last November; a plan of action up until the next IGF meeting in India and beyond; the launch of Nominet

We were interested to see two high profile examples of organisations taking a stand against domain tasting recently.

Domain tasting is the practice of registering domain names, assessing revenue generation potential and, if they create an insufficient return, deleting the domain names before the registry requests payment.

Yesterday ICANN announced that they are proposing to remove their five-day

There has recently been some suggestion of governments attempting to control their citizens

ENUM is an internationally approved method for connecting the telephone communications network to the Internet. It will allow you to call someone on different electronic communications devices and software applications by using a single identifier

Last week we presented our domain name industry report at our first .uk registrar conference. It was well received and has provoked subsequent interest from a broader audience.

The report shows that the domain name industry both globally and in the UK is healthy. The report demonstrates the extent of the uptake of the Internet in the UK. It reveals areas of potential future growth and gives pointers as to current trends in domain name registration and the changing nature of the UK registrar market.

It

The second meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) took place