The air transport community increasingly relies on the Internet to transmit business messages, yet the risk that a message will be altered when passed between servers ranks high among the top security challenges faced by the Internet's domain name system.

This is one of the conclusions made in a pre-publication issue of  Signposts in Cyberspace , a new study from the US-based National Academies Press1. The same study recommends that the Internet community focuses on implementing DNSSec.

RFID (radio frequency identification devices) technology can bring substantial benefits to the Air Transport Community in the form of cost reductions, improvements in productivity, customer services and safety, but also as a means to generate new revenues. As an emerging technology there are still many barriers to community-wide adoption, one of them being the risk associated with the deployment of RFID infrastructure and development of applications. This is a risk that can be substantially reduced through the introduction of a shared infrastructure and service.

Following recommendations from the Dot Aero Council (DAC), SITA has introduced a new .aero policy reserving domain names relating to states, provinces and geographical areas, effectively removing these as registration options. The names join the existing list of reserved country names.

Many of the broadly spread governance issues that have been discussed during the past couple of years have been addressed within this community environment.

On 17 March 2002, .aero the first top level Internet domain to be sponsored and introduced by a specific community sector, opened its doors for business..

Mark your agenda with the dates of these upcomming industry events.

Airline IT Summit 2006:  Thursday 22 June, Brussels, Belgium

Business simplification is a way for all airlines to transform their organizations – reducing their cost base and gaining efficiencies. Now carriers also need to increase their efforts to differentiate their service to become more competitive – integrated information and communication technology (ICT) solutions are key.

The .aero team took on a new hospitality role in early May, when they hosted the Internet café at the sixth Annual European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition in Geneva – the only major European event focused solely on business aviation.

Jointly organized by the US-based National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) and the European Business Aviation Association (EBAA), this was the strongest event in the show's six-year history, with almost 10,000 attendees, up 27 percent on last year.

This report examines alternative root server systems and alternative TLD name system administrators generically, i.e. according to the characteristics SSAC associates with a class of operator rather than by the characteristics of individual operators.

By elevating our examination to this level, we can focus on the common characteristics of each class of operator, and perhaps more accurately assess whether TLD name system administration and root name service operation of a given class create security and stability issues.