New Projects Funded

by Gale Berkowitz
<[email protected]>

Deputy Executive Director

The USENIX Association is pleased to announce the funding of two important projects that are relevant to the USENIX and SAGE communities: The Internet Software Consortium BINDv9 project, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legal work. Updates on each of these projects will be regularly featured in ;login: over the next several issues.

INTERNET SOFTWARE CONSORTIUM
USENIX is contributing $100,000 to the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) to complete its BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain system) version 9 enhancements. BIND is a crucial part of the Internet infrastructure, estimated to be used on between 85% and 99% of all domain name servers on the Internet and needs to remain freely available and open. The project, called, "Deep Space BIND" (later renamed BINDv9), includes the following major features:

— full DNSSEC support
— TSIG, TKEY, EDNS0, EDNS1, Notify,
 IXFR, Negative Caching, A6, DNAME,
 Bitstring Labels, and Rollover DNS protocol
 enhancements
— multi-processor scalability
— multi-thread safety

ISC anticipates that the public beta version will be available by February 1, and the Final Release by May 1. For more information about the ISC BIND project, see <http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/>.

ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
The USENIX Board of Directors approved funding for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the amount of $100,000. The mission of the EFF is to explore civil rights and civil responsibilities online. The funds are to be used to support the legal work in the Bernstein case. This federal legal battle has been going on since 1993 and seeks to protect the Constitutional right to publish encryption software. The case can affect many USENIX members directly and will directly affect the security and privacy of the general public's interactions across the Internet.

For more information, see: <http://www.eff.org/bernstein/>.