Mar 14
Just a reminder that as we mentioned on Monday, the DNSSEC Workshop happening today at ICANN 43 in Costa Rica will be streamed live.
The event takes place today from 8:30am to 1:45pm in San José, Costa Rica (UTC-6, i.e. US Mountain time – visit timeanddate.com to find out how this compares to the time where you are).
Please see the DNSSEC Workshop web page for the agenda and links to listen to and view the presentations.
Mar 13
In an interesting post on Radio World titled “Should I Be Concerned About IPv6?” Wayne Pecana explains why radio broadcasters should be thinking about IPv6. After explaining the basics of IPv4 address exhaustion, he points out that many of the consumers of online content may increasingly come from IPv6-only networks, particularly coming out of the Asia-Pacific region. However, his key point for broadcasters is this one (my emphasis added):
Technical solutions exist to accommodate the mixed world of IPv6-only consumers and IPv4-only content. Industry solutions include IPv6-IPv4 Network Address Translation (NAT) and, in many practical implementations, double NAT processes occur through solutions such as Carrier-Grade Nat (CGN).
For some types of Internet content, such as basic Web page content, these solutions are viable. However, a major drawback of any solution is the detriment to Quality of Service (QoS) factors that affect real-time media content, such as streaming audio and video content provided by the broadcaster or similar audio and/or video content providers.
This is an incredibly critical point. With media and communications that needs to be viewed or listened to in “real-time,” you want to reduce as much as possible any kind of network delays or latency so that the user has the best possible viewing or listening experience. By their very nature, large-scale NAT (LSN) / carrier-grade NAT (CGN) solutions introduce an extra layer of translation and in so doing introduce added latency.
Wayne Pecana goes on to explain how broadcasters should look at IPv6-enabling their content servers so that they are natively accessible over IPv6. He recommends:
Enable your “outward-facing” network services in an IPv4-IPv6 “dual-stack” mode, which allows your content to be delivered in a native format to both IPv4 and IPv6 “eyeballs and ears,” and lets you provide the best possible listening or viewing experience for your content consumers.
It’s excellent advice and we’re glad to see this kind of message going out to broadcasters. Pecana also encourages broadcasters to consider attending an “IPv6 for Broadcasters” webinar that is scheduled for July 11, 2012.
P.S. We’d also encourage broadcasters to look at our general IPv6 resources and our IPv6 information for content providers.
Mar 12
Want to learn more about the current state of DNSSEC deployment? Want to hear case studies of organizations who have deployed DNSSEC? Want to learn how DNSSEC can be used to protect your organization’s online reputation?
This Wednesday, March 14, 2012, from 8:30am to 1:45pm (UTC-6, i.e. US Mountain time), there will be a DNSSEC Workshop as part of the ICANN 43 meeting taking place in Costa Rica. The good news is that…
THE EVENT WILL BE STREAMED LIVE
You can just go to http://costarica43.icann.org/node/29659 and click on the appropriate link to listen and view the session.
I (Dan York) will be one of the early presenters outlining some of the areas with DNSSEC that we’ve found in the development of this Deploy360 site where we see opportunities for simplifying the user experience and accelerating DNSSEC deployment. I’ll be talking about the end-user experience for domain name holders, the experience at domain name registrars and several infrastructure issues. I’m very much looking forward to giving the presentation and to participating in the ensuing discussion.
The agenda for the full workshop is a great collection of people involved with the actual deployment of DNSSEC. I’ll be intrigued to listen, learn and interact with the participants and am looking forward to having some new content to add to this site.
If you are going to be there at the session in Costa Rica, I look forward to meeting you. If you are not going to be in Costa Rica but are interested in the topic, I do hope you will tune in to the live coverage. Given that past ICANN DNSSEC workshops have been recorded for later viewing, I expect this session will be as well.
Mar 09
So what is the most “fun” IPv6 address you’ve seen?
Fun? IPv6 address?
Well, yes… now that you have the letters “a – f” in addition to the numbers, you can add a bit of creativity to your addresses. As was recently pointed out on Twitter, the folks at Facebook had some fun with the IPv6 address for “www.v6.facebook.com” being:
2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3
Obviously a “k” would have been better, but “face:b00c” is rather cool! There are also any number of other possibilities. Consider some of these:
:feed:f00d:
:bad:f00d:
:bad:beef:
:bad:d00d:
:f00d:cafe:
:bad:fa11:
Obviously you don’t have to limit yourself to just two blocks of the IPv6 address. For instance, here’s the perfect IPv6 address for a cattle rancher’s server:
2001:db8:beef:beef:beef:beef:beef:1
Have you seen any creative IPv6 addresses out there in the wild? What is the most creative use of “a-f” plus the numbers that you can come up with? Have you seen anyone else add some branding into their IPv6 addresses?
Just think of the possibilities!
P.S. If you’re looking to get started with IPv6, have you checked out our IPv6 resources?
Mar 09
I swear I could probably count every hair in Jim's mustache!
The video quality was truly amazing (and if you click on the image above, you'll get a slightly bigger version - I was not viewing it in full-screen when I made the capture). Looking at the technical specs for the call, Jim was sending 1280x720 using the H264 codec. I was apparently also sending that level of quality over to Jim (although using the VP80 codec).
The audio quality was also excellent and we had a great call. Obviously, Jim's upgraded Internet connection worked perfectly fine! ;-)
Kudos to Skype for making this amazing quality of video calling available - for free - to all of us!
For those curious, here is the detailed technical info for our call:
P.S. If you weren't aware that you can get this kind of info, you need to first enable it on the Advanced panel of the Skype for Mac Preferences. Then you can choose "Technical Call Info" from the Window menu (or just press Cmd+5).
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Mar 08
If you can get to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on Thursday and Friday, May 10-11, 2012, there looks to be a fantastic set of sessions going on at the 2012 IPv6 Kongress. More information is available at:
The packed agenda includes a wide range of sessions including deep tutorials, best practices, security topics, networking, routing and more. I see a number of prominent names from within the IPv6 community and also some involvement from the Internet Society’s German chapter. World IPv6 Launch will be very close – and this will be a great time to learn more before the big day! I’ll note that “early bird” registration is still available right now.
Mar 08
Calling people using your browser - but without a Flash or Java plugin? That's been the mission of the WebRTC initiative for some time now with efforts underway in both the IETF and the W3C to standardize the work so that it can be broadly implemented.
I was very pleased to see the team at Voxeo Labs announce that the Phono SDK can now support WebRTC with the developer build of the Google Chrome browser. They outlined their work in a blog post and produced a video demonstrating the technology and also received a very nice writeup on TheNextWeb:
This is very cool as it has the potential once WebRTC is baked into more browsers to provide us with a very solid browser-based platform for building and deploying real-time communication apps. Kudos to the Voxeo Labs team for what they've done so far!
P.S. Some interesting comments about this topic over on Hacker News...
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Mar 07
On the one hand, Amazon continues to be the largest channel for my own books, which are admittedly in some rather niche areas that would not be found in typical bookstores. As one who has long considered self-publishing for some of my even more niche ideas, I have celebrated the tools and services that Amazon has brought to the table such as CreateSpace and their Kindle Direct program. Amazon's leadership in the ebook space has really helped create an entirely new way of reading.
The publishing industry is being incredibly disrupted by Amazon and in many ways that's a good thing for authors and ultimately for readers.
BUT...
... on the other hand, the part of me that advocates for open networks strongly detests the "lock-in" of Amazon's proprietary ebook format (Mobi) and their distribution network. Even more, I've been very concerned lately by the extent to which they've been using their massive distribution control in their contract negotiations. Here's a view on one of the latest skirmishes:
Now, this is perhaps to be expected... Amazon needs the absolute lowest costs possible for their commodity model to work. If you want to sell your books through their service, you have to come to terms with Amazon.
Still, it's troubling. As more and more bookstores close... as people increasingly move to using ereaders... we are increasingly getting to the point where Amazon really is the choice to buy books, particularly when they make it so incredibly easy to do so.
The great danger here lies in having that near-monopoly on our ability to purchase books. How else will they wield that power to extract concessions from others in the publishing chain? Will that be good or bad for authors and for readers?
O'Reilly's Joe Wikert had a good post out recently:
While he obviously comes at it from the publisher's perspective, it's definitely worth thinking about.
How can we as consumers encourage the existence of multiple ecosystems of book/ebook distribution so that we can have a choice?
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