Internet intermediaries are the key to freedom of expression and access to culture, they are the mediators of public discourse, and their platforms serve as a space for participation and the circulation of information. However, as a result of the legislation of their countries of origin, they have developed strict policies for managing intellectual property online. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the digital copyright standard and therefore has an impact on user rights. FVL seeks to defend freedom of expression and the rights of users of online platforms operating in Latin America by developing a solid and articulated protection of public discourse, which is currently mediated by social media companies that implement the notice and takedown system under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This goal will be achieved through the identification and promotion of the use of copyright flexibilities in the region, the training of key sectors in the use of copyright regulations in favor of access and freedom of expression, and the promotion of public-private dialogue to strengthen access policies and legislative reforms that will allow expanding the range of copyright flexibilities in defense of Internet users.

The Sulá Batsú cooperative and the Network of Cabécar Women in Alto Pacuare are developing a digital application that will generate, in Costa Rica, conditions to counteract the risks of indigenous knowledge extractivism with the penetration of connectivity into their territories. This project seeks to strengthen indigenous women through their appropriation of knowledge on how the Internet works and “how their knowledge travels” along the network, as well as the risks of extracting knowledge; to generate local and national spaces where indigenous women can present their concerns, proposals and plans of action before networks of local stakeholders; to build a network of national stakeholders that support the process of awareness-building, advocacy and research on the problems of indigenous knowledge extractivism in Costa Rica, and, finally, to generate a course of action to develop the (normative, legislative, procedural, etc.) conditions needed to protect indigenous knowledge in Costa Rica. The project anticipates the creation of training materials showing how to use the Internet; an assessment of the benefits and disadvantages of the Internet for indigenous knowledge in Cabécar; the training of women from Alto Pacuare on the use of the Internet; a trip to Oaxaca by an indigenous leader and designer of materials for an exchange with TIC-AC; the creation of an action plan in response to the concern for the extraction of knowledge; a meeting with indigenous women from other territories to enrich the action plan as well as a national meeting with multiple stakeholders led by the women of Cabécares, and the development of an awareness and advocacy campaign.

The purpose of this project is to build a Content Management System (CMS) with native accessibility for both generating and consuming content and which also allows content producers with disabilities to use the tool with complete independence. The project will be developed in six stages: a survey on website accessibility guidelines, a study of strategies for taking into account accessibility resources, implementation of accessibility guidelines, integration of the platform with various components, development of the CMS prototype, and validation and enhancement testing. The project will use as a reference existing website content accessibility guidelines, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0, as well as eMAG3.0, developed and recommended by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG), member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which includes recommendations for making websites more accessible. Developing this code will involve the following language and frameworks: PHP, JQuery, HTML 5, CSS, BootsTrap, and JavaScript. The development of the In@Web prototype will provide a way to generate accessible digital content in an accessible manner, with a friendly user interface and allowing the construction of accessible websites for users with no experience in the development of algorithms, whether they have a disability or not.

Many instances of abuse that used to occur offline have been transferred to online spaces or intensified by the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). Particularly, women, girls, and the LGBTQ+ community are disproportionately affected by severe forms of online abuse including revenge porn and cyber-stalking. This problem is exacerbated in small closely-knit communities like the Caribbean where it is difficult to recover from or avoid abusers. Unfortunately, the affordances and barriers to online safety are severely understudied in the Caribbean. The aim of this project is to empower Caribbean citizens by understanding perceived threats to their personal data and barriers to having control by collecting and analyzing empirical data to assess how the use of ICTs contribute to or hinder users’ online safety and recommending technological and educational interventions that could reduce the prevalence of safety threats. The methodology employed for this study will include two main elements: the deployment of a large-scale survey, and an online behavioral study to gather direct input from Caribbean citizens. In addition to publications in academic venues, dissemination activities will include a publicly available website with a dashboard that highlights the insights learned about the needs of vulnerable groups and using research insights to develop an educational awareness campaign.

“La Clika, Libres en Línea” is an interactive transmedia campaign created in Mexico by Luchadoras and La Sandia Digital, two organizations that seek to raise awareness among young women and provide them with tools to avoid the dissemination of intimate images without their consent. By creating a campaign that allows generating collective and participative reflection processes and actions with young women so that they will to be able to identify and name different forms of online violence and share information, experiences and resources, Luchadoras and Sandia Digital have created a digital campaign for young women to have information and tools to identify and act against online violence. In 2017, a collective conversation was held with survivors of digital violence in Mexico for the purpose of documenting their experiences and having an impact on the issue. A Theory of Exchange was then developed, with three specific goals: contributing to the recognition of violence, combating the blaming of women, and offering tools for action. In addition, creative work involved a story, a script and graphic materials approaching the topic in a friendly way and which included a consultation with women aged 18 to 25 by means of two focus groups, a study of the mechanisms available for reporting intimate images shared on various platforms without consent, and the creation of Self-Defense Guides. La Clika was launched in 2019 and then began a period of dissemination with media presence to help include the topic on the public agenda, collective conversations and workshops with young people in different Mexican states, as well as building alliances with schools and girls’ clubs to raise awareness on the topic. A protocol for accompanying cases that are reported has also been designed to channel any requests that are received.

The project will expand the congestion algorithm for latency optimization developed by Universidad de Palermo so that it can be executed from both the side receiving and the side sending the data. The algorithm currently works from the side receiving the data and optimizes the reception window to reach available network capacity without causing packet flooding at the bottleneck location on a network path, thus improving the latency of all the connections that share the bottleneck. The expansion will seek to develop a version of the congestion algorithm that can be executed from the side sending the data. This will optimize the “outgoing” traffic of the servers originating the data. The algorithm will also be incorporated to a standard Linux distribution. The funds provided by FRIDA will be used to train and incorporate additional researchers to the team currently working at the research center of Universidad de Palermo’s School of Engineering so as to increase its capacity for exploring alternatives and developing specific solutions to meet the goals above.

This is a joint initiative by CEDIA and The Shadowserver Foundation that will deploy a large-scale honeypot sensor network in Latin America and the Caribbean, building upon the technology developed by Shadowserver for automating honeypot deployments and CEDIA’s CSIRT expertise. The network will enable a unique view of IoT threats in the region and, together with a communications campaign, it will lead to a reduction in infected devices. The data produced will be shared with 21 national CSIRTs and 235 network owners in the region, as well as with a total 109 national CSIRTs and 5,000+ network owners worldwide via Shadowserver’s daily remediation feeds. The project will utilize existing open source IoT related honeypots and deploy them on a large scale using Shadowserver’s framework. In addition, CEDIA will lead a communications campaign including recommendations on how to identify and remediate these types of threats and target the most affected ISPs with one-on-one follow-up. The project will rely on a combination of paid VPS services and donated nodes from third parties. At least 50 sensors will be placed in 15 countries.

NIC.ar seeks to develop a software solution that allows the constant, automatic and periodic monitoring of all the domains registered with a NIC, in order to observe their compliance with the various standards defined at the global and regional level and with the best practices defined within the domain ecosystem, such as the use of DNSSEC, SSL, number of delegations, responsive design, and accessibility. The goals of this tool are to identify the features, strengths and weaknesses of registered domain names, to optimize the use of resources within an organization, and to design actions to meet the needs of its users. The solution will be developed in such a way that it can be easily integrated with the existing infrastructure of each entity that wishes to use it, and it will quickly generate an analytics dashboard that will allow accessing information that has already been processed considering the results obtained by monitoring the data. Four modules will be developed: a module responsible for collecting information on the use of the SSL certificate, the certificate’s level of security, the use of DNSSEC, the number of delegations, support for responsive design, the use of CDN, accessibility and use of DKIM and SPF records; a data warehouse module for storing the data collected by the survey module; an analytics dashboard that allows specific queries; and a data collector manager for defining the parameters of the information to be collected.

The aim of the project is to analyze the deployment of AS-Path Prepending on the Internet and to understand its implications for Internet routing security by providing knowledge that allows network operators to assess the tradeoffs of using AS-Path Prepending for unbound traffic engineering. This project is the first one that seeks to understand the impacts of the use of AS-Path Prepending on the security of the Internet routing ecosystem using actual Internet data. The mains goals include characterizing ASPP in terms of deployment, policies and, effectiveness as an ITE tool; identifying prefixes/autonomous systems potentially at risk due to the use of ASPP; fostering the security of the Internet routing ecosystem by reducing the number of unnecessary prepends that exist on the Internet today; reporting results to the network community periodically; providing a platform for data analysis; and presenting and discussing findings at NOG meetings.

The goal of OpenNetAudit is to develop an application for network security auditing that allows users to check configuration and software objects following security best practices. The software will be composed of the most modern libraries, such as Napalm, Nornir, Netmiko, supporting standard formats such as yaml and json, to interact with network devices in an abstract manner. This is an open and broad solution to audit network security. OpenNetAudit will enable network admins and security analysts to audit their network devices, receive feedback of well-known security best practices, and create custom rules to check specific aspects of their networks. The OpenNetAudit software is being developed to be used at the RNP network (Brazilian NREN) to audit its networking devices. RNP has developed a MVP; FRIDA funding will be used to add more fields to the system database and implement a hierarchy of objects (users, groups and sites); add filters to perform customized audits, enabling users to perform audits in subgroups; develop robust reports and a vulnerability tracking tool; add more vendors (Cisco, Huawei, etc.) to the devices supported by the system; add custom rules for auditing; and write up related software documentation.