Chairman's Message

The SIGCOMM '93 Symposium

Now that the paper submission deadline has passed, the program committee for the SIGCOMM '93 Sympo- sium is hard at work reviewing more than 120 submissions to select approximately 25 papers for the confer- ence program. This year's conference promises to maintain the very high standard that has made the annual SIGCOMM Symposium the premier technical conference in the field of data communication and network- ing.

The 1993 SIGCOMM Symposium will take place at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco during the week of September 13-17. Tutorials will be offered on the first two days of the week; the conference program will begin on Wednesday. The advance program will appear shortly after you receive this issue of CCR. I hope to see many of you there!

CCR Guest Columns

The past winners of the annual SIGCOMM Award have generously agreed to contribute a series of brief commentaries on the data communication and networking topics that they consider to be currently the most interesting and important. These guest columns will begin with the next issue of CCR (July 1993).

Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

I've just returned from the Third Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, which was held in Burl- ingame, CA on March 9-12 under the joint sponsorship of SIGCOMM and two other ACM SIGs (on Com- puters and Society (CAS) and Security, Audit, and Control (SAC)). It was one of the most interesting and challenging conferences I've ever attended, and I encourage CCR readers to take a look at the conference proceedings, which are available now from ACM. Portions of the conference (all of which was recorded) will be broadcast by National Public Radio. Next year's CFP will be held in Chicago during the week of March 22, 1994; for more information, send a note to the general chairman, Professor George Trubow, at 7gtrubow@jmls.edu.

Internet Talk Radio at SIGCOMM '93

Some of you will have seen the front-page article in the New York Times on Thursday, March 4, describing a new enterprise called "Internet Talk Radio" ("Turning the Desktop PC into a Talk Radio Medium"). Internet Talk Radio will create professionally produced radio programs that show up on the Internet as audio files, which can then be distributed and played by groups or individuals using a variety of techniques (in- cluding multicasting and anonymous-FTP). A typical 30 minute program will occupy about 15 megabytes of disk space. Plans are in the works for Internet Talk Radio to record portions of the SIGCOMM '93 Sym- posium, including the SIGCOMM Award winner's keynote address. For more information about Internet Talk Radio, send a note to info@radio.com.

Electronic Publishing

SIGGRAPH plans to publish a "non-print" special issue of its newsletter Computer Graphics in May 1993, which will be available by electronic mail or anonymous-FTP from Internet host siggraph.org. The contents of the issue will be available in several formats, including ASCII text, RTF (Microsoft's Rich Text Format), and PostScript, with accompanying graphics in TIFF and possibly other formats (the graphics may be con- verted to ASCII for electronic mail access). The expected publication date is May 1, after which anonymous-FTP to siggraph.org should find the files /publications/May_93_online/README and /publica- tions/May_93_online/contents; alternatively, an electronic mail message sent to archive- server@siggraph.org with the subject "send May_93_online index" will return instructions on how to obtain the files through e-mail. Since SIGCOMM is also interested in electronic publication, I would appreciate feedback from members on the success of this experiment; send comments to sigcomm@bbn.com.

SIG Business Meetings at CSC '93

The annual SIG business meetings held during ACM's Computer Science Conference in Indianapolis in February produced two results that are particularly significant for SIGCOMM. A Presidential Commission established after last year's meetings made two recommendations that were accepted by the SIG Chairs and the SIG Board. The first will change the way in which SIGs are charged for the services and support pro- vided by ACM headquarters; the new "allocation" scheme will benefit SIGCOMM, which will be subject to a much lower assessment in the future than it has paid for the past few years (see the Secretary/Treasurer's report in this issue of CCR). The second will create several new types of "Special Interest Group" with char- acteristics and viability criteria that are different from those of traditional SIGs (such as SIGCOMM). One of the new SIG types is a "conference" SIG, for which the associated conference is the only criterion of viabil- ity (the SIG is not required or expected to have members, dues, or a newsletter). The creation of new SIG types is expected to provide much greater flexibility in organizing activities within ACM, all of which previ- ously had to fit the same standard "SIG" mold.

Proposed New SIG on Multimedia

The organizers of the new Multimedia '93 conference (which will be held in conjunction with the SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim, CA, during the week of August 2-6) have been working with a "multi- media steering committee" consisting of representatives from the six sponsoring SIGs (CHI, COMM, GRAPH, IR, LINK, and OIS) to determine whether or not to create a new SIG for multimedia. Following discussions at CSC '93 last month, it looks as though a new "conference SIG" (see the report of the SIG business meetings at CSC '93, above) called SIGMULTI will be formed to oversee an annual Multimedia conference and to serve as the focal point within ACM for researchers and others interested in the multidis- ciplinary field of multimedia. Questions about the Multimedia conference should be sent to con- trib.multimedia93@siggraph.org; about the proposed SIGMULTI, to the steering committee at mmsc@fox.cs.vt.edu.

Standards Status

This issue of CCR contains the semi-annual "Status of OSI (and related) Standards" listing. Beginning with the next issue of CCR (July), we will alternate the current "Status" list with summary reports of other standards-development activities, including those of the Internet and the IEEE. Suggestions for information that would be useful to include in these reports should be sent to sigcomm@bbn.com.

ACM Network Services Information

"ACM-NS Info Flash" is an electronic bulletin announcing information services available from ACM Net- work Services. New issues of Info Flash will be released as services become available. All issues will be available electronically from acm.org via the standard ACM-NS tools: anonymous ftp, Gopher and Mail- serv.

To subscribe to ACM-NS Info Flash, send email to info_flashrequest@acm.org with SUBSCRIBE INFO_FLASH as the text of the message (the subject field will be ignored). News items to be announced in Info Flash or comments about Info Flash may be mailed to info_flash@acm.org.

Transactions on Networking

The first issue of the new bi-monthly IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking was published on schedule in February; the table of contents appears elsewhere in this issue of CCR. A one-year subscription (6 issues) to ToN is available to individuals for only $22. To start a subscription, or to get more information about the Transactions, send an electronic mail message to "acmhelp@acmvm" (Bitnet) or "acmhelp%acmvm.bitnet = @cunyvm.cuny.edu" (Internet), or call the ACM Member Services department at +1 212 626 0500 (fax +1 212 944 1318).

Internet Society Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security

On February 11-12, 1993, the Privacy and Security Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force hosted a workshop on Network and Distributed System Security in San Diego. The response to the work- shop was outstanding; the organizers had expected about 50 people to participate, but ended up with more than 160. The success of this workshop has led to a proposal for the Internet Society to sponsor an annual Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security, the first of which will be held at the Catamaran Hotel in San Diego on February 3-4, 1994. The Symposium will bring together people who are building software and hardware to provide network or distributed system security services; it is intended for those who are interested in the practical aspects of security, rather than theory. The deadline for the submission of papers and panel/session proposals is August 16; they may be sent by electronic mail to the program chair- men (Robert Shirey and Russ Housley) at 1994symposium@smiley.mitre.org. For more information, includ- ing a copy of the official call for papers, contact the general chairman, Dan Nessett, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (nessett@llnl.gov).
Lyman Chapin.

Secretary/Treasurer's Report

Financial Summary

SIGCOMM is in a healthy financial situation, especially compared to some of the other ACM Special Inter- est Groups. We have a fund balance over $210,000 and have maintained a small net surplus even in these "economic hard times". All SIGs have been asked by ACM ( since Fiscal Year 92 ) to produce budgets with a net surplus and to finance any special projects out of the revenues generated in that year, without using funds in the fund balance. I have written conservative budgets, with negative forecasts of revenue and high forecasts of expense for special projects.

Membership Summary

Membership in ACM SIGCOMM has been dropping a small amount every month over the last year. We can be encouraged that the loss is at a rate consistent with the other SIGs. However, that is not sufficient. The executive committee is paying close attention to feedback from members. For example see the Survey Re- sults described elsewhere in this issue. In fact two new programs announced in the Chairman's Message in this issue are a direct result of your feedback in the Survey. Other ideas and suggestions are still in the dis- cussion phase. Please send any additional feedback to sigcomm@bbn.com.

One very important source of new members is you: if you have a colleague or student down the hall who would benefit from a SIGCOMM membership, please refer them to the membership form in the back of this issue.

The following membership numbers are totals for the month of June, which is the end of ACM's fiscal year:

	June 1991	5108 ( total = voting/assoc + student + non-ACM + subscribers )
	June 1992	4916 ( FY92 actuals )
	June 1993 	4650 ( FY 93 projected, from January 93 actuals )
	June 1994	4450 ( from the conservative FY94 budget )

Annual Allocation Charges from Headquarters

ACM Headquarters provides each SIG with a number of services, ranging from corporate services ( all ACM subunits share the costs of the ACM corporation ) to SIG specific services ( publications assistance, financial assistance, plus the guidance of our SIGCOMM Program Director, Pat McCarren ).

In the last two years as Secretary/Treasurer I have seen the algorithm for allocation of Headquarters Support change twice. Originally, charges to the SIGs were built into different services, and thus spread across many different expense categories. Then, for FY92 and FY93 the SIGs were charged based on an allocation for- mula of usage of ACM services: for example page counts, number of conferences supported, and amount of time required from SIG Services were all included. This latest algorithm is unique in that SIGs are charged only on revenues received.

The new algorithm was proposed by the Presidential Commission on SIGs, chaired by John White, the pre- vious ACM president. And it was approved by the SIG chairs on February 16, 1993 at the SIG Business Meeting. Thus, for FY94 SIGCOMM will be charged an allocation expense calculated at 20% of our mem- bership and publications revenue plus 9% of our conference revenue. To give you a sense of how these strategies differ, our allocation expense with the new scheme saves SIGCOMM $22,962.

Financial Comparison ( in $ thousand )

				(draft)
		FY92 Actuals	FY93 Projected	FY94 Budget
				(conservative)

REVENUE 
	Dues	 $100.2	 $98.0	 $92.4
	Subscribers	14.5	 12.0	 11.1
	Extra Pubs	9.3	13.0	 17.9
	Interest	12.1	15.0	 12.8
	Conference Net 	13.3	31.0	 0.0

EXPENSES
	Publications	 80.0	 81.0	 72.9
	ACM Allocation 	45.6	51.1	 38.4
	Travel/admin	 11.0	 8.0	 11.0
	Special Projects 	5.1	 19.0	 8.9
	Miscellaneous	3.1	 3.4	 3.0

NET 	4.6	 6.5	 0.0

Fund Balance as of 6/30	$216.4	 $222.9	 $222.9
Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan