October 2013 archive

Oct 31

7 Of The Many Sessions About IPv6 Next Week At IETF 88

IETF LogoThe great news for IPv6 advocates about IETF 88 in Vancouver next week is that IPv6 is everywhere! All throughout the IETF 88 agenda you can find IPv6 in various different groups.  IPv6 is definitely “the new normal” and that shows!

Our colleague Phil Roberts posted today “Rough Guide to IETF 88: All About IPv6” where  he highlights the major working groups that are tackling IPv6 topics.  There is a great amount of activity going on and Phil’s post gives a good sense of the range of work.  You can expect to find our Deploy360 team in pretty much all of these working groups monitoring what’s going on and contributing where appropriate.

To Phil’s excellent list of Working Group sessions related to IPv6 I’d add only one more that is important from a deployment/operationalization point of view.  The OPSEC Working Group has two drafts on its agenda that are both focused on IPv6 security.  With that, here is a list of some of the major groups doing IPv6 work next week… as I mentioned, you wind up finding IPv6 across all the many different groups, but here are some of the major ones.

NOTE: If you are not going to be in Vancouver next week, there are multiple ways that you can participate remotely in these working groups, including audio streams and Jabber chat rooms.

Oct 31

Bruce Schneier to Speak About Internet Surveillance at IETF 88 Technical Plenary Next Week (Featured Blog)

How do we harden the Internet against the kinds of pervasive monitoring and surveillance that has been in recent news? While full solutions may require political and legal actions, are there technical improvements that can be made to underlying Internet infrastructure? As discussed by IETF Chair Jari Arkko in a recent post on the IETF blog, "Plenary on Internet Hardening", the Technical Plenary at next weeks IETF 88 meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada, will focus on this incredibly critical issue. More...

Oct 31

Bruce Schneier To Speak About Internet Surveillance At IETF 88 Technical Plenary Next Week (Featured Blog)

More...

Oct 31

TDYR #045 – Hardening The Internet Against Surveillance – IETF 88 Technical Plenary Next Week

What can be done to harden the Internet against large-scale surveillance and pervasive monitoring? That will be the topic of the Technical Plenary next Wednesday, Nov 6, at the IETF 88 meeting in Vancouver. In this episode I talk about the upcoming event and why this is so important. Some relevant links: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20131031_bruce_schneier_to_speak_about_internet_surveillance_at_ietf_88/ http://www.ietf.org/blog/2013/10/plenary-on-internet-hardening/ http://www.ietf.org/live/ https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/perpass

Oct 31

Video Interview: Why Use Knot DNS For DNS And DNSSEC?

Knot DNSWhat is the “Knot DNS” server all about and why would you want to use it versus one of the other DNS servers supporting DNSSEC?  At the recent ENOG 6 event in Kiev, Ukraine, I had a chance to speak with Jaromir Talir from CZ.NIC Labs and the resulting video interview can be found below. If you are interested in checking out the software, you can visit:

http://www.knot-dns.cz/

The software is available pre-packaged for several versions of Linux as well as in source-code form.

Here is my interview with Jaromir (and I apologize to Jaromir for repeatedly calling his organization by its domain “nic.cz” instead of by the organization’s name of “cz.nic”):

Prior to this interview, Jaromir had spoken on stage at ENOG 6 in more detail about Knot DNS. His ENOG 6 slides about Knot DNS are online and a video recording of his presentation is available:

It’s great to see a new entrant into the field of DNS name servers.  While the existing servers are very rock solid, it’s always great to see new people coming in with new ideas and new tools.  As Jaromir says in the interview, having diversity among your servers can be a good practice.  I’d encourage you to go check out Knot DNS and let Jaromir and the CZ.NIC team know what you think of it!

Oct 31

Knot DNS

Knot DNSKnot DNS is an authoritative DNS name server that can be used to serve out zone records and includes support for DNSSEC and DANE.  One of the key design goals is to provide simple DNSSEC support for dynamic DNS.  Knot DNS is developed by the team at CZ.NIC and can be found at:

https://www.knot-dns.cz/

It is available pre-packaged for several versions of Linux and also as source code as a release or directly from a git repository.

Knot DNS is highly scalable and used by CZ.NIC for the operation of the .CZ TLD. It was developed with the target audience of network operators and DNS operators in mind but can be used by anyone needing to serve out DNS records.

For an overview of Knot DNS, you can view this short video interview with Jaromir Talir of CZ.NIC:

Prior to this interview, Jaromir had spoken on stage at ENOG 6 in Kiev, Ukrain, in more detail about Knot DNS. His ENOG 6 slides about Knot DNS are online and a video recording of his presentation is available:

Oct 30

4 Sessions About Routing Resiliency/Security At IETF 88 Next Week

IETF LogoNext week at IETF 88 in Vancouver the topic of routing resiliency/security will be covered in a variety of different working groups.  Our colleague Andrei Robachevsky outlined what will be covered in a post on the “Internet Technology Matters (ITM)” blog: Rough Guide to IETF 88: Routing Resilience.   We’re looking forward to those sessions and you can expect to find me in most of them.  My particular interest is in what is happening within SIDR right now, but in truth all of them should be interesting.

I’d strongly suggest reading Andrei’s post to understand what’s going to be going on with routing.  Here are the relevant working groups and times.

NOTE: If you are not going to be in Vancouver next week, there are multiple ways that you can participate remotely in these working groups, including audio streams and Jabber chat rooms.

Oct 30

Finally! Google+ Starts Rolling Out Custom URLs To Regular Users

Dan York About Google 2Finally! We can now get "custom URLs" for our Google+ accounts! As of this morning you can now find me at the nice and easy URL of:
https://plus.google.com/+DanYork/
One of the supreme annoyances of using Google+ has been the horribly ugly long URLs you have had to use for your profile. You couldn't give people an easy URL to find you on the service and there was no way that normal people would realistically remember the long numbers. Google rolled out "custom URL" support for some brands and celebrities earlier but all of us "regular users" were left with the ugly URLs.

That changed yesterday and was noted with a post on Google+, "Expanding the availability of custom URLs". Tipped off to the change by Neville Hobson's post on G+, I went into my Google+ profile and nicely found this message waiting for me at the top of the page

Google custom url 2

I was delighted to see that "+DanYork" was being offered to me and so I clicked the "Get URL" button to see this screen:

Google get custom url 2

One more click brought me to a confirmation screen nothing that I can't change the URL or transfer it to anyone else:

Google custom url confirm 2

And that was it! My Google+ profile now is at https://plus.google.com/+DanYork/.

Very cool to see and this will definitely make it so much easier to refer people to my profile on the service (and therefore will make it much easier for people to find me and use Google+).

Now, what I really want is this kind of custom URL for my Google+ Pages, and I'm seeing from comments on G+ that some people have this for their pages already. The post from Google says the criteria for custom URLs will be:

If your profile meets the following criteria, you’ll now be able to claim a custom URL:
- Has a profile photo, and
- Has at least 10 followers, and
- Has an account that's at least 30 days old

Meanwhile, any brand or business that has a linked website or is a verified local business can claim a custom URL for their Google+ page.

I do have linked websites for some of my Google+ Pages ... but I'm not yet seeing the option to get a custom URL. As Google indicates, this feature is being rolled out this week, so hopefully I'll see it soon.

I've been using Google+ a great amount these days, and so I'm thrilled to see this new feature that will make it much easier to find people and to refer people to my profile and content.

What about you? Have you been offered a custom URL on Google+ yet? Have you claimed it?

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Oct 30

Linphone On iOS Now Supports The Opus Codec

Linphone opus 2When updating my iPhone this week, I was extremely pleased to see the message in the attached screenshot that Linphone now supports the Opus audio codec. Somewhat strangely, I don't see any mention of this Opus support (or even the 2.1 release for iOS) on the Linphone news page or even on the Linphone features page, but the mention of a "Linphone Web" release does also mention Opus, so I'll assume this is real.

I've written before about why the Opus code is so incredibly important if we want to truly deliver a richer and better communications experience than we've had with the traditional PSTN and so it is great to see this support coming in to Linphone. Linphone is certainly not the first SIP softphone to support Opus - there are a number of others out there, including Jitsi and Counterpath's Bria (and X-Lite) - but it's definitely great to see another softphone added to the mix. Hopefully we'll also see this Opus support move to the desktop versions of Linphone (for Windows, OS X and Linux) as well.

Congrats to the Linphone team on making this happen!

P.S. Linphone also supports IPv6, ensuring that it will continue to work on all future networks.

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Oct 28

Video: Requirements for IPv6 in ICT Equipment — a tale of RIPE-554 (PLNOG 11)

What is the story behind the creation of the RIPE-554 document specifying IPv6 requirements for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) equipment? At the recent PLNOG 11 event (where we also ran our ION Krakow event), our own Jan Zorz and Sander Steffann spoke about how RIPE-554 came to be and what the next steps are: