December 9, 2014 archive
Dec 09
TDYR 193 – The Directory Problem: The Challenge for Wire, Talko and All Other Skype-Killers
Dec 09
Catching Up With Mitel …
Heck, I didn't even realize they had a new logo! :-)
But indeed they do (apparently back in 2013 in October 2014 (see comments))... and Blair's great look at the world of Unified Communications mentions that and a good bit more. I was aware of the acquisition of Aastra, but did not realize that PrairieFyre had finally been folded into Mitel (it had always seemed to be a likely acquisition candidate as its products worked primarily with Mitel's systems).
With my focus changing a bit, and most of my interest here on Disruptive Telephony focused around WebRTC and some of the newer disruptions to Internet communications, the last time I really mentioned Mitel was back in April with the passing of Simon Gwatkin. My posts about Mitel prior to that go back to 2011 and before.
In looking at Mitel's web site, their rebranding is clear in so many ways. From the nice clean website to the "Mi<whatever>" product naming... there's obvious a great amount of work that's gone on.
Congratulations to the Mitel team, too, on being named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UC. Having worked with Gartner analysts in the past on these reports (as a vendor representative), I know what a huge amount of effort goes in to making your case for why your company should be positioned highly - and I also know how powerfully these reports can help in enterprise sales. I read the UC Magic Quadrant report, too, and Gartner had very nice words about Mitel.
While I no longer really focus on the IP-PBX and the "enterprise" side of UC, it's great to see this evolution of Mitel. I still know many excellent people who work there and certainly during my time there (2001-2007) the R&D teams were (and presumably still are) some of the best in the industry.
Congrats to all involved at Mitel!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- following me on Twitter;
- adding me to a circle on Google+;
- following me on Ello;
- following me on App.net;
- subscribing to my email newsletter; or
- subscribing to the RSS feed
Dec 09
DNS Security Advisories Out Today For BIND, PowerDNS and Unbound – Time To Upgrade!
While this has nothing to do specifically with the topic of DNSSEC that we cover here on Deploy360, there is important news in the broader world of “DNS security”. The vendors of three of the major DNS recursive resolvers today released security advisories about a particularly nasty bug where the resolver can be tricked into trying to follow essentially an infinite loop and wind up exhausting all resources and potentially shutting down. The advisories from BIND, PowerDNS and Unbound are found at these links:
- BIND: CVE-2014-8500: A Defect in Delegation Handling Can Be Exploited to Crash BIND
- PowerDNS: Security Advisory 2014-02: PowerDNS Recursor 3.6.1 and earlier can be made to provide bad service
- Unbound: Unbound security advisory
The advisories from both PowerDNS and Unbound indicate that this bug would be difficult for an attacker to exploit unless they were within the user base of the recursive resolver. The BIND advisory is more open-ended and indicates the bug could be executed remotely.
In all cases the easiest solution is to upgrade to the newest versions:
While there are apparently no known exploits of the bug in the wild yet, that will now only be a matter of time. It would be best to upgrade your recursive resolvers as soon as possible.
P.S. While you are in there updating your DNS resolver, if you are using BIND or Unbound, why not enable DNSSEC validation? It’s a simple change in the configuration file, as shown in this SURFnet white paper.
Dec 09
That moment when your computer makes a notification sound… but you can’t identify it, nor know which browser tab or app made the sound!
That moment when your computer makes a notification sound… but you can’t identify it, nor know which browser tab or app made the sound!
