19 July 2017 - The AFRINIC Board of Directors intends to establish an Appeal Committee to give effect to the requirements in section 3.5 of the Consolidated Policy Manual (that is, the Conflict resolution portion of the Policy Development Process). The Appeal Committee Terms of Reference (version 1) is published at <https://afrinic.net/en/community/working-groups/policy-appeal>.

The Board calls for comments on the Terms of Reference for a 30 day period, ending on 19 August 2017. Comments may be sent to the RPD mailing list <rpd at afrinic.net>.

The Board intends to appoint an interim Appeal Committee without delay, to cater for the possibility that an appeal might be filed before the comments on the Terms of reference can be taken into account. We seek the cooperation of the community in this regard.

Sunday Folayan

Chair of the AFRINIC Board of Directors

2 August 2017 - AFRINIC is offering fellowships for the AFRINIC-27 meeting to be held in Lagos, Nigeria, from 27 November to 2 December 2017.

The fellowship is reserved for individuals representing small organisations, universities, and media who are actively involved in Internet operations and development or ICT policies in their countries.

The fellow is expected to positively and actively contribute to IP address management awareness in the AFRINIC service region.

To qualify for the fellowship, you:

1) Must be a resident of an African nation

2) Don't need to be an AFRINIC member

3) Are involved in the Internet community.

4) Are willing to report on how this fellowship has benefited you/your Organisation/country within an agreed time frame. 

Upon selection, AFRINIC will notify the selected fellows directly and allow them seven (7) days to accept or reject the offer.

A public announcement of the fellowship awardees will be made after the acceptance by the selected candidates.

Please find hereafter the schedule for the fellowship process:

Close of applications:  25 August 2017 

Notification to selected fellows: 11 September 2017

Deadline for acceptance by awarded fellow: 20 September 2017

Final announcement and publication of the fellowship list: 26 September 2017

The fellowship includes:

1. Full assistance with round-trip airfare to the meeting venue

2. Hotel accommodation for the AFRINIC event from the day before the beginning to the last day of the event

If you think you meet the criteria above, please fill in the fellowship application form at https://registration.afrinic.net/board2017/afrinic-27-fellowship and submit it with requested information before 25 August 2017, 00:00 UTC.

Good luck and we look forward to receiving your applications!

4 August 2017 - The application period for the FIRE Africa Grants and Awards ended on 2nd August 2017 having run for a whole month.

The FIRE Award consists of a USD 3,000 cash prize plus full travel and accommodation for one representative of each project to attend the awards ceremony, and participate in sessions which will be held in Switzerland during the 2017 Internet Governance Forum.

We received a total of 56 Award applications distributed as follows per category:

1. Internet Development: 4 applications 
2. Internet for Social Inclusion: 5 applications.
3. ICT for Development: 47

The Award applications came from 18 countries namely Kenya (10) Benin (1), Nigeria (10), Ivory Coast (4), Tanzania (2), Ghana (1), DRC (6), Cameroon (8), South Africa (2), Mauritius (2), Mali(1), Togo (1),  Uganda (3), Rwanda(1), Botswana (1), Egypt (1), Sierra Leon(1) ,Malawi (1)

The 2017 Awards Criteria is available at http://fireafrica.org/awards.

The FIRE Grant consists of a USD 12,500 grant and a $10,000 Google grant to implement a project of choice within a period of one year.  

We received a total of 190 Grant applications distributed as follows per category:

1. Technical Innovation: 21 applications 
2. Community Development: 84 applications.
3. Governance Enhancement: 5 applications
4. Education: 79 applications

The Grant applications came from 34 countries namely Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uganda, Tunisia, Togo, The Gambia, Tanzania, Sudan, South Africa, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Morocco, Mauritius, Mali, Malawi, Madagascar, Libya, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Ghana, Ethiopia, Djibouti, DRC, Chad, Central Africa Republic, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Burundi, Botswana, Benin,.

Grants criteria is available at http://fireafrica.org/grant  

The next steps will involve our Jurors analysing the Award and grants applications, and announcing the winners.

August 4 2017 - We would like to inform you that, as from today Friday 4 August, AFRINIC shall report on IT related incidents and maintenance activities at https://status.afrinic.net/

This new service will allow the status page to remain accessible even when other AFRINIC services are not working.  It also makes it easier for us to keep you updated.

You may wish to sign up to receive such notifications by email or on slack at: https://status.afrinic.net/

Status messages will continue to be sent to our existing twitter account @AFRINIC_IT, and our existing mailing list This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

You may also sign up for notifications via the “Get Updates” button at the top of the new status page.

Past incidents will continue to be archived at https://afrinic.net/incidents/archive

7 August 2017 - We invite all individuals wishing to make presentations during AFRINIC-27, which will be held from 27 November to 2 December 2017 to submit abstracts. The meeting website is now up at https://meeting.afrinic.net/afrinic-27/.

To enrich the discussions and share knowledge with the technical community at AFRINIC-27, we are seeking presentations of a wide range of issues, broadly related to growth, access and development of Internet in Africa. Please read the event concept note at http://bit.ly/2uylwiv.

We are specifically interested in presentations focusing on the following areas:

· The Internet and Economic Development

· Internet Governance

· Business Practices and Technology

· E-governance

· Cyber Security

· Core Internet Infrastructure

· Access, Utility and Development

· Internet Number Resources Management

· Internet Measurements

· Higher Education in the Age of Technology

· Cloud Computing

· Open Data/Big Data

· Technology and Content Production

· Relations between Mobile Operators and the Internet Community

· Mobile Applications

· IPv6

· Peering and Interconnection

· DNS

· RPKI

· IXPs

Your contribution can be in the form of a presentation during a session, a tutorial, or a live technical demonstration.

Kindly read all information carefully before submitting your proposal.

Speakers’ Guidelines

· Presentations should be 15 -30 minutes in length, with approximately 10-15 minutes for Q&A at the end of each presentation.

· The maximum time allotted per presentation will not exceed 45 minutes.

· The presenter(s) will be required to upload their final presentation in PDF format, no later than five (5) days prior to the presentation date.

· Presenters are responsible for producing any handouts if required. There are usually approximately 200 delegates in each session.

Presentations with marketing and/or commercial content will not be considered.

How to submit a Presentation Proposal

1. Please register/login on the AFRINIC-27 website at: https://meeting.afrinic.net/afrinic-27/?option=com_afmeeting&view=login

2. Fill in the online form with the requested information.

3. In the Speakers section, provide your abstract, your biography and slides if available and you are done!

Important dates to note

· Deadline for submitting an application - 22 September 2017

· Notification of acceptance of application - 6 October 2017

· Submission of draft presentation - 20 October 2017

· Submission of final presentation - 20 November 2017

31 August 2017 - We are pleased to announce the upcoming release of WHOIS version 2.3.

The deployment of this new version is scheduled for overnight, on 31 August 2017 and available as from 1 September. 2017.

Details are available at status.afrinic.net

This release will include:

• Introduction of bcrypt as the default password hash
• Auto-generation of maintainer object for person and role objects
• Abuse contacts
• Other security updates

The new version provides for additional security by using bcrypt as default password hashing method. Crypt and MD5 will be deprecated. It will therefore not be possible to create or update password hashes using these methods. However authenticating with existing passwords using the older methods will continue to be supported. 

Person and role objects do not require a maintainer to be created. Thus, they could be left unprotected in the whois database. After this release a maintainer will be automatically created to protect any new person or role object that would have otherwise been unprotected. The details of the maintainer will be sent by email to the owner of the object. All the existing unprotected person and role objects will be updated and details of the generated maintainers will be sent by emails to the respective owners. 

Abuse contacts will be displayed when querying a resource if they have been specified in the corresponding irt object.

We have made updates to some dependencies and libraries for security improvements.All WHOIS related tools on the web site will be upgraded at the same time, including the WHOIS crypt tool for password hashing. If you have any unprotected person or role objects in the database, you will receive an email with the details of the generated maintainer. As part of this planned maintenance, WHOIS updates will be unavailable for a short period of time. For the detail schedule please refer to status.afrinic.net

WHOIS queries will remain available throughout.