February 2012 archive

Feb 22

LACNIC Report On Success of IPv6 Week

LACNIC LogoHow did IPv6 Week (Feb 6-12) turn out in Latin America and the Caribbean?

The folks over at LACNIC recently posted a note indicating that over 200 websites participated in the IPv6 Week activities.  LACNIC also organized two webinars and presented at the Campus Party Brasil event that week.  They still have an IPv6 Week contest going on through March 1 that will see someone taking home a new iPad 2 and someone attending the next LACNIC event.

As we get ever closer to World IPv6 Launch, it’s great to see activities like this going on and we definitely congratulate LACNIC and all the associated groups and organizations for their successful event!

Feb 22

CIRA / .CA Launches DNSSEC Info Center and Draft DNSSEC Practice Statement

CIRAlogoDNSSEC is coming soon to the .CA domain! The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) recently announced a draft of their “DNSSEC Practice Statement” (DPS) that provides details around how they will be deploying and managing DNSSEC for the .CA domain. They are seeking comment on the DPS – and are also launching a “DNSSEC Knowledge Center” at:

http://cira.ca/knowledge-centre/technology/dnssec

The draft DPS is available on that site as is a useful DNSSEC FAQ.

All of this is in preparation for CIRA’s plans to sign the .CA zone in 2012 and to start signing .CA second-level domains in 2013.

It’s great to see this step from CIRA and we encourage all those interested to take a look at their DPS and send in any comments you may have.

If you are interested in learning more about CIRA’s activities, Jacques Latour spoke at our Toronto ION event in November and we published the video where he spoke about what CIRA is doing with both IPv6 and DNSSEC:

Feb 22

World IPv6 Launch

06/06/2012
00:00 -00:00 World IPv6 Launch
,

Feb 22

Storify Rolls Out New iPad App That Makes It Super Easy To Curate Twitter, Facebook

StorifylogoWhile I've not yet personally used Storify to a great degree, I've been watching what friends have been doing with it and been intrigued by the possibilities. Beyond the "collecting a twitter stream into a story" usage that people commonly discuss - and that is incredibly useful, I've been watching what, for instance, Shel Holtz has been doing to curate websites into ongoing collections. For example, his "Every company is a media company" or his "collection of social media policies".

I may, though, start using Storify a bit more now that they've rolled out an iPad application. Given that the Storify app is free in the iOS App Store, I downloaded it and started playing with it this morning. It's a wonderful example of how the touch interface of a tablet can be such a joy to work with. It's so very simple and natural to drag and drop tweets, photos, etc. to create new stories. Definitely something I'm going to look at using more when I have stories or topics I want to curate into a larger "story" for publishing out to the web.

If you have an iPad, you can download the Storify app and try it out yourself... and if you don't, you can watch the video that shows how it works:

Very cool to see how application designers are continuing to evolve our user interfaces... looking forward to seeing how this all continues...

Feb 21

Internet2 DNSSEC Special Interest Group (SIG) Provides Forum for Research/Education Community

Internet2DNSSECSIGAre you are member of the research or education community interested in connecting with others who are implementing DNSSEC? Or are you interested in monitoring what is happening within the research/education world with regard to DNSSEC? If so, the Internet2 Consortium has a Special Interest Group (SIG) focused on DNSSEC. The SIG has a website with a great amount of information at:

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/DNSSEC/Internet2+DNSSEC+SIG

As noted there:

This SIG (Special Interest Group) is intended as a collaborative forum for the research and education community, to share information and support each other in deploying DNSSEC – the Domain Name System Security Extension.

The SIG primarily communicates through a mailing list and instructions to subscribe are provided at the top of the group’s web page. The SIG also has monthly conference calls where they provide updates on recent and upcoming activities and initiatives.

If you are within the research or education community and interested in DNSSEC, this group is definitely a great place to connect with peers and collaborate. We definitely encourage you all to check it out and join the work.

Feb 21

O’Reilly Offers Free Ebook: "Publishing with iBooks Author"

PublishingwithiBooksAuthorIn an interesting move, O'Reilly Media has made their brand new ebook, "Publishing with iBooks Author", available for free download (assuming you have a free account set up with O'Reilly). As is standard with O'Reilly now, the ebook is DRM-free and available as EPUB, Mobi (Kindle) or PDF.

Now, I personally have serious issues with iBooks Author with regard to its deviation from the EPUB standard and the legal lock-in that restricts sales to Apple's iBookstore. It also annoys me that books created with the tool will only work on the iPad, even while I understand Apple's strategy.

Having said all that, I've played with iBooks Author and it is a great tool for creating ebooks. Apple has raised the bar on ease-of-use for ebook creation tools and that is definitely a good thing. As my attendance at O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference last week in New York certainly showed to me, we need tools that are easier-to-use for even more people to be able to create ebooks.

My sincere hope is that creators of other ebook authoring tools will take a serious look at what Apple has done with iBooks Author and figure out how to deliver a similar (or better) user experience where the final output can also work on other ebook platforms. The tool vendor who can do that will certainly receive a lot of interest judging from the conversations I've had with people both at TOCCON last week and also in numerous other venues.

So to that end, I commend O'Reilly on releasing this new ebook for free and I do hope people will download it and understand just what Apple has done to make ebook creation so easy... and then use that knowledge to build even better tools!

P.S. In full disclosure, O'Reilly is the publisher of my most recent ebook, but that has nothing to do with why I am writing about them here. (And it was written entirely in DocBook XML, because that's just the kind of author I am... )

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Feb 21

RIPE Labs Reports on IPv4 Address Depletion Per Region

IPv4AddressSpaceGrowthWhich regions of the world are depleting their IPv4 addresses the quickest? Our friends over at RIPE Labs published some interesting statistics earlier this month about the growth in IPv4 address allocation per region. The article’s goal is:

With the depletion of the IPv4 free pool in the APNIC region and the imminent IPv4 free pool run out in the RIPE NCC’s service region, it is interesting to look at IPv4 allocation rates per country to see where free pool run out has and will have the most consequences, in terms of curtailing growth of IPv4 address usage. In this article, we try to visualise where “the pressure is on” the most.

To perhaps no surprise, the Asia-Pacific and Latin/South American regions experienced the greatest demand for IPv4 address allocations although in the case of the AP region the “free pool” of IPv4 addresses is now exhausted.

The brief report by Emile Aben provides some very interesting data and useful summaries of the state of IPv4 address usage around the world. Definitely worth a read for those looking to understand where we are with IPv4 address exhaustion.

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!

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

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!