The architecture of today's Internet was mainly designed together with the TCP and IP protocols in the 1970s and early 1980s. During the last years, researchers and funding organisations in America, Europa, Asia have started to work on different alternative architectures for the Internet. Some consider an evolutionnary approach where the Internet architecture would be incrementally modified in a backward compatible manner while other consider that a completely new architecture should be developped to take into account the requirements of today's and tomorrow's Internet.

Ethernet is now the default fixed Local Area Network technology. Ethernet LANs are found in all entreprise environments and in more and more home networks. Ethernet was designed in the 1970s when security was not a concern. Since then, Ethernet has evolved with the introduction of hubs and switches. Many network administrators are aware that hubs are a security concern since they broadcast Ethernet frames and some of them assume that switches or more secure.

All network engineers who are working with the interdomain routing protocol used on the Interned named BGP know that BGP is not 100% secure and that misconfigurations or attacks could cause problems on the Internet. The key problem is that BGP does not have mechanisms to verify the validity of a received route advertisement. From time to time, misconfigurations happen and are discussed on operators mailing lists such as nanog. Yesterday, youtube was affected by such a misconfiguration.

The NSF has issued a report listing the 14 engineering challenges that need to be solved to ensure progress of the world. See http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9221.aspx

The US National Academy of Engineering also published an interesting web site with the great achievements of the 20th centruy. http://www.greatachievements.org/

Communications of the ACM is the magazine sent to all members of the Association for Computing Machinery the worlwide association of computing scientists. During the last years, the magazine has been focussing on the management of information systems and was less interesting for the average computer scientist. This is changing as ACM is updating Communications of the ACM starting in 2008 with a redesigned magazine that will contain detailed breakthrough research papers.

The Internet community is seeing both a growth in the allocation of IPv4 addresses and also the end of the IPv4 addressing space. According to the latests predictions, the IPv4 addressing space will be exhausted in 2011-2012. Instead of focussing on the development of IPv6, ARIN is considering to allow owners of IPv4 addresses to sell them to anyone instead of giving them back for free to ARIN when they are not used anymore.