The CZ.NIC Association used the Safer Internet Day to introduce its new project, aimed at children´s safety online. The CZ.NIC Association acts as a coordinator of the project that started on 1 January 2019, another partner is the Safety Line, ensuring the operation of a helpline. CZ.NIC will continue operating the Czech national hot-line STOPonline.cz, which received a record number of reports last year.
2018 At STOPonline.cz In Numbers
Last year brought a record number of incidents to STOPonline.cz. While in 2017 the line received 1,397 reports, in 2018 there was already 2,445 of them, that is 75% more.
The Czech Republic has taken the first step towards using electronic IDs abroad
Less than half a year since the launch of new electronic national ID cards, the Czech Ministry of the Interior provided their detailed description to other Member States and initiated the process leading to their mutual recognition abroad under eIDAS.
Data from routers map connection speed
One of the less known advantages of the Turris router is the possibility to verify quality of Internet connection, the so-called QoS (Quality of Service), i.e. especially to measure the download and upload speed, IPv6 support, DNSSEC and parameters connected with net neutrality. Such a measuring may serve to analyse the use of the line and to evaluate whether paying a high speed fee is unnecessary. The experience of the Turris router users shows that the majority of their time online is spent in the slowest zone (0-250 kbps). Moreover, even when the majority of data is transferred in higher speed, fast operation may have only a tiny representation from the time´s point of view. Especially those who do not spend a lot of time watching videos pay extra for high speed connection for a relatively short time of use, mainly for the moments it takes to load a page or download and send an e-mail.
Beware of encouraging pupils to use social networks and messengers
Many a teacher is trying to find out the best tool for communicating with pupils. Nowadays when most children are given a mobile phone in lower primary, the logical choice would be social networks and various messengers, be it Facebook, WhatsApp or Viber.
Household routers face more than 250 attacks daily
Vulnerability of SOHO routers becomes a topic of analyses by various security organizations almost every week. The 2017 Symantec report shows a year-on-year increase in the number of attacks on IoT devices by 600%. The most vulnerable are unsecured routers, which often make it possible to gain easy access to each connected device. The April’s alert from the official US-CERT also tells us of the growing number of these attacks and their severity.
Almost 4 million new gTLDs disappeared in 2017
Last year was not a good year for new generic domain names (new gTLDs). While a number of domain names became available for registration, the total number of new domain names decreased for the first time in its history. While there were 27,710,468 domain names registered at the beginning of the year 2018, only 23,823,948 saw the end of the year. Domain holders in the Czech Republic had a total of 23,245 new gTLDs registered, i.e. less than 0.1 %.
For our children to continue using the Internet
The time before the GDPR enters into force is relentlessly ticking away. Do not worry, in this post I am neither going to paint scary pictures of what companies will have to face, nor make a list of what you should forget about when this law is enacted; I will “just” focus on the processing of personal data of children, namely the Article 8 that regulates the conditions for granting consent with processing of the child’s personal data in connection with information society services.
Pexeso: cyber education through play without a computer
Today’s children often learn to play a video on a tablet before they utter their first sentence, and game applications are often more popular among our little ones than toy blocks. When the parents find out that a cute hat for a virtual doll has deprived their account of an amount exceeding the price of some real fashion accessory, they start taking an interest in the security settings and in what their kids do on the computer.
IETF 99 in numbers
Last week, thanks to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) conference, Prague became the center of the Internet community. It was for the fourth time that the Czech Republic was given the honor to host this important meeting where RFC (Request for Comments) standards are created: Prague hosted it in March 2007 (68th IETF), 2011 (80th IETF) and July 2015 (93th IETF), with our Association having taken part in organizing the last three meetings.