I have assumed Kieren's position as chief blog-watcher for this session. As is patently obvious, there are problems with the quality of wireless Internet access in the main room (let alone the workshop rooms), but I have still been able for most of the time to monitor the Security chat forum on igf2006.info, as well as checking for new emails to questions_e@igf2006.info and comments@igf2006.info, and new blog posts.

Comments and questions received in this way have been fed into the forum by means of me raising my hand to attract the moderator's attention, and then reading out the essence of the interventions. On this occasion, I think it has been quite successful.

In response to Michael Nelson's question that I passed on about the importance of an open standards-based authentication framework, the moderator Ken Cukier asked the panel if the IGF has a role in putting forward appropriate standards ideas into the IETF process, as DARPA did in putting forward TCP/IP. Richard Simpson from the panel agreed that there needs to be an effective means for identify management online, but said that this was a role for the private sector.

Others such as Gus Hosein pointed out, I think correctly, that discussions within the IETF and such standards development fora tend to be technical and difficult to penetrate, so that while that Mike's idea was a good one, a better approach would be to agree upon general principles within the IGF to be implemented by other organisations - a suggestion which is entirely consistent with the IGF's mandate.

Ken himself turned the discussion back to open source, lauding the security of the Linux kernel, and asking if this is the most appropriate model for Internet security software development. However the panel didn't really run with this, Ilias Chantzos from Symantec referring to his company's internal research which revealed 47 new vulnerabilities in open source browsers as against 38 (he first said 32) in proprietary browsers over the same period. He didn't mention that these statistics had been discredited.