April 2012 archive

Apr 09

Wow – Facebook Acquires Instagram!

InstagramWow... here's one that I don't think most (any?) of us saw coming - Facebook has acquired photo-sharing service Instagram!

It's interesting to note Mark Zuckerberg's focus on the continued separate growth of Instagram:

That's why we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

Time will tell how that will work out, but it will be intriguing to see what the acquisition enables on both sides. It will also be interesting to see the reaction of the Instagram user community...

Kara Swisher at AllThingsD and Emily Price at Mashable are both reporting that the acquisition price was $1 billion USD in cash and shares.

What do you think? Smart move for Facebook? Good or not so good for Instagram users?

UPDATE #1 - TechCrunch is reporting that Instagram received a $50 million investment with a $500 million valuation just last week. And the best response I've seen has to be this one by a woman named Tonya Hall on Facebook:

Remember this day. 551-day-old Instagram is worth $1 billion. 116-year-old New York Times Co. $967 million.

Crazy times, indeed!

UPDATE #2 - Interesting view from Om Malik - "Here is why Facebook bought Instagram"

UPDATE #3 - Some good answers to the Quora question about the Instagram acquisition

P.S. In full disclosure, I do have an Instagram account (danyork) but I have so far only ever posted one photo to it, preferring instead to still use Flickr, although that may change.

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

Apr 09

Ram Mohan on DNSSEC and ICANN’s Costa Rica Meeting

Given that I was one of the presenters at the recent DNSSEC workshop at ICANN 43 in Costa Rica, I was very pleased to see the Circle ID article on Friday, “Slowly Cracking the DNSSEC Code at ICANN 43” from Ram Mohan at Afilias. As he notes:

The half-day session held at ICANN 43 in Costa Rica last month was particularly interesting. What became clear is that the industry is quickly moving into the end-user adoption phase of global DNSSEC deployment.

That was certainly clear to me as well.  As Ram Mohan notes in his article, many of the participants in the event brought real case studies of where DNSSEC is being actually deployed and used in real situations.   It was a great event and I’m looking forward to pointing to more of the case studies and other information as they become available.

Apr 06

2 Months To World IPv6 Launch… Have You Signed Up?

There are just 2 months left until World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012 -

Have you signed up to join the launch?

Will your website be accessible over IPv6? Or if you are a service provider, will you be making IPv6 available to your customers?  If you will be able to participate, just head over to

www.worldipv6launch.org/form/

and sign up as a World IPv6 Launch participant.  Let the world know that you, too, are joining in to this massive event!

And if you are not yet planning to participate, how can we help you get started?

We’ve got tons of resources that can help:

We also have a steady stream of new Deploy360 blog posts related to IPv6 and posts related to World IPv6 Launch. You can also follow World IPv6 Launch activities directly in social media and interact with others who are launching IPv6:

Please join in … sign up as a participant… and please let us know how we can help you get started with IPv6!

Apr 03

CZ.NIC Labs Launchs DNSSEC Validator Extension for Internet Explorer

C Z dot NIC Labs logoThe news out today is that the great folks at CZ.NIC Labs have launched a DNSSEC validation extension for Internet Explorer similar to the Google Chrome DNSSEC extension and Mozilla Firefox DNSSEC Add-on they have previously released.  Details can be found at:

https://labs.nic.cz/page/1031/rozsireni-dnssec-validator-pro-internet-explorer/

(NOTE: To view the page in English you need to click on the “English” link up near the top center of the page.)

The CZ.NIC Labs team labels this a “technical preview” with a version number of “0.1″.  Judging from the warnings they provide the extension is still very early in the development cycle.

Still, for those interested in experimenting with a way to view the DNSSEC validation status of sites you are visiting, this new extension and toolbar provide a way to see this information directly inside of IE.

Apr 02

National Physical Laboratory


20:00 -20:00 National Physical Laboratory
,

Apr 02

Outstanding DNSSEC Workshop at FOSE Tomorrow

FoseWant to learn about the latest with DNSSEC and the US government? Want to listen to a veritable “Who’s Who” of the people involved with DNSSEC? Tomorrow at the FOSE Conference in Washington, DC, there is what looks to be an outstanding event titled:

MAKING DNSSEC THE TRUST INFRASTRUCTURE: WHERE DOMAIN NAME SECURITY IS HEADED

Going from 10:00am to 4:00pm US Eastern time, the event is described as:

Nearly 50 percent of U.S. Federal domains and a significant number of worldwide governmental, commercial, nonprofit and business domains are now secured with DNSSEC, the Domain Name System Security Extensions. Yet large-scale domain name attacks and vulnerabilities continue, not just to the DNS, but to other applications that rely on the DNS to store information. DNSSEC provides the means to protect application information stored in the DNS, in effect, making DNS a trust infrastructure that other applications can utilize.

In the quest to make DNSSEC a useful trust infrastructure for Internet applications, this session will look at the remaining challenges and emerging trends in U.S. Federal DNSSEC deployment; share new DNSSEC-aware applications; and conduct a wide-ranging discussion of the future of domain-name security with leading Federal and private-sector DNS experts.

The speaker list, though, is what is so amazing!

Not only the top people involved with DNSSEC implementation from throughout the US government, but also the very folks behind so many of the DNSSEC resources we’ve listed here on the site and the people we’ve written about in our DNSSEC-related blog posts. Speakers from organizations like CZNic Labs, NIST, NLNet Labs, Shinkuro and many more… from vendors such as Akamai, Comcast, GoDaddy, Afilias, Google, etc. Plus individuals who have been extremely involved with DNSSEC like Steve Crocker and even security researcher Dan Kaminsky!

All in all it looks to be a truly outstanding event!

The Deploy360 Programme will have a presence there in the form of Richard Jimmerson who heads up our overall project. If you are interested in meeting up with him at the event, please contact him at jimmerson@isoc.org.

THERE IS STILL TIME TO ATTEND! If you have registered for FOSE you can choose the DNSSEC workshop as one of your free educational sessions.

P.S. Alas, I’d love to be there myself and was hoping to get there… but I just returned this weekend from 11 days away for IETF and it turns out the travel won’t work for me this week. I’m very much looking forward to hearing from Richard how it goes…