The internet has been recently flooded with websites trying to create various statistical information regarding the new coronavirus. Just within the Czech register, there are several. If you are on of the people who like to follow latest “coronavirus” numbers or if you use them in your work, you can face multiple obstacles. Some of the statistics give you the data you need, but they are outdated and are not regurlarly refreshed. In case of dynamic visualizations, you are limited by fixed boundaries. If you are not satisfied with that, you can try a newly created tool for generating dynamic visualizations from the CZ.NIC Association that offers a broad set of features and settings. You can for example choose any country/region and a formula for your desired curve, copy URL and of course refresh the data simply by pressing F5. Everything you can find on the web page https://covid-19.nic.cz/.
“Critical” opkg CVE and Turris
You might have heard on some news sites about “critical” vulnerability in OpenWrt. You might be worried about how it affects is your Turris. That is the reason for quotes around the word critical. TLDR not applicable against Turris
NIX.CZ DNS hosting and .gt ccTLD
Recently, two entities have asked us to help them host their DNS zones and in both cases, we were happy to oblige. One of them was the Czech neutral peering node NIX.CZ, with which we often share technical know-how and help each other when it makes sense. The other one was the domain register of Guatemala operating the .gt ccTLD, which we humored as part of our long-term support of developing registers, like we have done the case with the registers of Angola, Malawi, Tanzania or North Macedonia.
Protecting your servers with Turris Sentinel
Little bit of history
Apart from operating .CZ top level domain, CZ.NIC does a lot of other interesting things contributing to the common good. Part of it is running Czech national CSIRT team, doing security research and raising awareness about potential security issues. As part of our security research, we started wondering a long time ago how much are the average Joes and Janes attacked, by who and how. People that are just connected to the internet, run no public service and are just consumers. If only there was some kind of probe that would allow us to see what is going on there…
Fun we had at AT&T hackathon
At the end of November last year awesome crew from AT&T organized a hackathon about various aspects of smart technology. They have a long tradition in organizing those and they are really good at it. We spoke at various conferences with them and they asked us whether we would be interested in joining as we have interesting hardware to lend contestants and also developers skilled in various areas that could help the attendees to overcome various issues. We jumped on board right a way!
Epic DNS Benchmarking
DNS is one of the critical services necessary for proper operation of the Internet. Also it is often a target of various cyber attacks. Considering this fact, operators of authoritative DNS servers require robust solutions offering enough performance for regular DNS traffic and resisting possible attacks against this service. That is the reason why we focus, besides other aspects, on the performance during development of our authoritative DNS server Knot DNS. Benchmarking is an inseparable part of the project and we have been exploring various ways of further performance growth. Recently we had a great opportunity to play with the epic 128-thread processor AMD EPYC 7702P. In this blog post I will share some results from its benchmarking.
The favorite book ON-LINE ZOO is already available in the listening version
Within the project Safely on the Net, the first audiobook of the CZ.NIC Edition was created. The model for the audiobook became a popular children’s book ON-LINE ZOO.
The new series #martyisdead shows the harsh face of the Internet
What has led the fifteen-year-old good boy Martin, “Marty”, to filming himself with his phone in situations that give you chills? Did he have to die for his parents to find out about the anxious feelings and horrific moments he had experienced before his death? Was he really a pathological freak or a victim of systematic blackmailing?
When less (technology) means more
Last month, at the invitation of my colleagues from the Polish Safer Internet Center, I attended the conference “Keeping Children and Young People Safe Online”. One of the main themes of this event was how the digital world, together with IoT (Internet of Things) affects our lives. I have heard many interesting contributions and discussions, which made me think about the topic again, summarize the findings and add my personal insights and recommendations.
Digital Footprint: on-line course for children in the Czech Republic
In September this year, the Czech Safer Internet Centre (CZ.NIC), in cooperation with the National Cyber and Information Security Authority, presented an online course called Digital Footprint, intended primarily for children aged 10-13. This interactive game focuses on Internet privacy and associated socio-pathological phenomena such as personal data abuse, sexting, digital privacy or cyberbullying.