February 20, 2012 archive

Feb 20

Inspiring Video: LeVar Burton’s TOC Keynote On The Power Of Stories and Storytelling

One of the highlights of attending O'Reilly's TOCCON last week in New York turned out to be a short but incredibly inspiring keynote presentation by LeVar Burton, who some of us may forever know as "Geordi LaForge" from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and others may know from his 25 years with "Reading Rainbow" or as Kunte Kinte way back in days of "ROOTS". As he is of course a professional actor, his delivery was wonderful to listen to, but even more I enjoyed what he had to say about the power of stories and storytelling. Some key quotes to me:
I am a firm believer in the link between that which we imagine and that which we create.

The stories that we tell each other, and have told each other, throughout the history of the development of civilization, are integrally important, are inextricably linked, to how we continue to invent the world in which we live.

That, upon which we focus our attention, is what we manifest in the third dimension.

The stories that we tell each other inform us about who we are, why we're here and where we're going.

You come here to use your imaginations in the service of storytelling.

He spoke, too, about the transition we are in now with publishing and the road ahead.

It was a very inspiring presentation and a great way to start the day... enjoy!

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Feb 20

Fedora Project Requesting Testers of DNSSEC-Trigger

FedoraProjectWant to help out a Linux project with DNSSEC? In a recent message to the Fedora Project developers list, Paul Wouters from Red Hat asked for people to help test the recent addition of DNSSEC-Trigger to the “rawhide” distribution of Fedora. As he says in the email:

In our efforts to push DNSSEC to the enduser, we have packaged our
initial DNSSEC reconfiguration utility.

Basically, this makes it possible to use DNSSEC on your laptop, while
moving between networks of which some are “friendly” man in the middle
attacks on DNS via hotspots and sign-ons. Some steps are still awaiting
further network-manager integration. We hope to be able to hide almost
everything from the user, but the network manager integration is not yet
complete. But we would really like get more feedback on how well it
works in various alien and broken networks out there (especially wifi
and 3G/LTE).

First, it’s awesome to see DNSSEC-Trigger get added into a Linux distribution. Kudos to Paul and the Fedora Project team for taking that step.

Second, if you are a Fedora user, or would like to help out with this effort to promote DNSSEC usage, please do read Paul’s email message and see if you can help out with the testing.

Note that while Paul mentions the Firefox add-on to support DNSSEC there is also a similar extension to add DNSSEC support to Google Chrome.

It’s great, too, to see what they have planned for future work on Fedora:

Planned for the near future:
- Less user interaction, more network manager integration
- automatic hot spot detection
- network manager vpn plugin support for DNS forward-zone
- phasing out the applet in favour of native network-manager support
- validate TLS certificates via DNSSEC (IETF DANE support)

And I did very much enjoy how Paul ended the message:

That’s it, go break your DNS and let us know how it went!

Again, it’s excellent to see this effort and I look forward to hearing how the testing goes and seeing this further expansion of DNSSEC capabilities in Fedora.

P.S. And yes, I’m thinking about where I might have a spare box where I could install Fedora specifically to play with this…

Feb 20

Network World Reports on IPv6 Week and World IPv6 Launch – Encourages Participation

NetworkWorldOver on Network World in their “Core Networking and Security” area, Scott Hogg recently published a great piece about IPv6 Week and World IPv6 week. He starts out talking about last year’s World IPv6 Day and then describes the IPv6 Week effort focused in Latin America. His conclusion? (my emphasis added)

This event ends today and it appears that it had similar results to World IPv6 Day. No significant problems were encountered and many organizations learned a lot about IPv6 through the process of preparing for and participating in IPv6 Week. You can track their Tweets about the event by looking for #ipv6week and #semanaIPv6.

He then provides an excellent introduction to the upcoming World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, talking about how organizations of all types as well as individuals can get involved with the effort and start using IPv6.

I enjoyed the way he ended the piece:

Regardless, even if you have not yet deployed IPv6, you should be cognizant that there are others on the Internet who are starting to use IPv6 and they prefer to communicate with you over IPv6. At the very least, you should be aware of these IPv6 events and the subtle impacts they may have on your organization. However, for the vast majority of users these events will be “non-events” and show the world that IPv6 is not something to be afraid of.

I encourage you to expand your skill-set and learn more about IPv6 and try to get your organization to a point where they can actively participate in these events. You will learn something cool and new and help your organization take steps toward the eventual adoption of IPv6.

Thanks, Scott, for encouraging that activity! And please do note that we’ve provided lots of information on this site about how to get started with IPv6 and welcome any suggestions about how we can provide even more assistance!