Harald Tveit Alvestrand

Last updated
Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Alvestrand-20071102.jpg
Born (1959-06-29) 29 June 1959 (age 62)
Occupation computer scientist
Known for i18n, IETF, and Linux work
Notable work
RFC 2277 (BCP 18)
Children3
Website www.alvestrand.no

Harald Tveit Alvestrand (born 29 June 1959) is a Norwegian computer scientist. He was chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) from 2001 until 2005, succeeding Fred Baker. Within the IETF, Alvestrand was earlier the chair of the Areas for Applications from 1995 until 1997, and of Operations and Management in 1998.

Contents

Biography

Alvestrand was born in Namsos, Norway, received his education from Bergen Cathedral School and the Norwegian Institute of Technology, and has worked for Norsk Data, UNINETT, EDB Maxware, Cisco Systems, and Google.

He is an author of several important Request for Comments (RFCs), many in the general area of Internationalization and localization, [1] most notable the documents required for interoperability between SMTP and X.400. Since the start of the use of OIDs he has run a front end [2] to the hierarchy of assignments according to X.208. [3]

At the end of 2007 Alvestrand was selected for the ICANN Board, [4] where he remained until December 2010. In 2001 he became a member of the Unicode Board of Directors. [5] He was a co-chair of the IETF EAI and USEFOR WGs. [6] [7]

Harald Alvestrand was the executive director of the Linux Counter organization. [8] He was a member of the Norid Board, [9] and the RFC Independent Submissions Editorial Board. [10] As of 2008 he lived in Trondheim, Norway, and has been working for Google since 2006. [11] [12]

Publications

Best Current Practices

Other important RFCs

Related Research Articles

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the hierarchical and decentralized naming system used to identify computers, services, and other resources reachable through the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The resource records contained in the DNS associate domain names with other forms of information. These are most commonly used to map human-friendly domain names to the numerical IP addresses computers need to locate services and devices using the underlying network protocols, but have been extended over time to perform many other functions as well. The Domain Name System has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since 1985.

A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series, from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or groups of engineers and computer scientists in the form of a memorandum describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. It is submitted either for peer review or to convey new concepts, information, or, occasionally, engineering humor.

A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last non empty label of a fully qualified domain name. For example, in the domain name www.example.com., the top-level domain is com. Responsibility for management of most top-level domains is delegated to specific organizations by the ICANN an Internet multi-stakeholder community, which operates the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and is in charge of maintaining the DNS root zone.

UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from UnicodeTransformation Format – 8-bit.

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Department of ICANN, a nonprofit private American corporation

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet Protocol-related symbols and Internet numbers.

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is "a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and an advisory body of the Internet Society (ISOC). Its responsibilities include architectural oversight of IETF activities, Internet Standards Process oversight and appeal, and the appointment of the Request for Comments (RFC) Editor. The IAB is also responsible for the management of the IETF protocol parameter registries."

An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to addr-spec in RFC 5322, not to address or mailbox; i.e., a raw address without a display-name.

In computing, a locale is a set of parameters that defines the user's language, region and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least a language code and a country/region code.

Internationalized domain name

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a non-latin script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics or ligatures, such as French. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multibyte Unicode. Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System (DNS) as ASCII strings using Punycode transcription.

The Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) is an internet protocol standard which builds on the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) protocol by greatly expanding the set of permitted characters. It was defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2005 in RFC 3987. While URIs are limited to a subset of the US-ASCII character set, IRIs may additionally contain most characters from the Universal Character Set, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic characters.

ISO 639-3:2007, Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages, is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for identifying languages. The standard was published by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on 1 February 2007.

Fred Baker (IETF chair) American engineer

Frederick J. Baker, better known as Fred Baker, is an American engineer, specializing in developing computer network protocols for the Internet.

WHOIS is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block or an autonomous system, but is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format. The current iteration of the WHOIS protocol was drafted by the Internet Society, and is documented in RFC 3912.

An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Best Current Practice (BCP) 47; the subtags are maintained by the IANA Language Subtag Registry.

Cary Karp, a retired museum curator based in Sweden, has been instrumental in developing online facilities for museums in the context of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). In particular, he was central in promoting and establishing the .museum top-level domain as President of the international Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma). He has also been a principal contributor to establishment of standards for registration of internationalized domain names.

Einar A. Stefferud (Stef) was a computer researcher and entrepreneur, who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly in the areas of IETF RFCs and standards, secure online payment systems, DNS, and secure email. Stefferud was one of the original designers of the MIME protocol for sending multimedia Internet electronic mail.

Mark Edward Davis is an American specialist in the internationalization and localization of software and the co-founder and president of the Unicode Consortium.

International email arises from the combined provision of internationalized domain names (IDN) and email address internationalization (EAI). The result is email that contains international characters, encoded as UTF-8, in the email header and in supporting mail transfer protocols. The most significant aspect of this is the allowance of email addresses in most of the world's writing systems, at both interface and transport levels.

John Klensin

John C. Klensin is a political scientist and computer science professional who is active in Internet-related issues.

Barry Leiba American computer scientist and software researcher

Barry Leiba is a computer scientist and software researcher. He retired from IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York in February 2009, and now works for FutureWei Technologies as a Director of Internet Standards. His work has focused for many years on electronic mail and anti-spam technology, on mobile computing and the Internet of things, and on Internet standards.

References

  1. Jari Arkko. "RFCs and current IETF activities by Harald T. Alvestrand" . Retrieved 2008-06-14.
  2. "OID assignments from the top node". www.alvestrand.no.
  3. "ISO/IEC 8824:1990". ISO.
  4. "Biographical Data on Harald Tveit Alvestrand". ICANN. 2008. Archived from the original on February 10, 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-14.
  5. "Unicode Directors, Officers, and Staff". Unicode Consortium. 2008. Retrieved 2006-06-14.
  6. "Email Address Internationalization". IETF WG. 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-14.
  7. "Usenet Article Standard Update". IETF WG. 2007. Retrieved 2008-06-14.
  8. "Linux Counter Organization: Board". 2003. Archived from the original on 2008-05-09.
  9. "About Norid". Norid. 2008. Archived from the original on 2015-07-13.
  10. "Independent Submissions Editorial Board". RFC Editor . 2011. Retrieved 2011-07-25.
  11. "Alvestrand Data" . Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  12. "Harald Tveit Alvestrand profile". LinkedIn. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
Preceded by IETF Chair
20012005
Succeeded by