October 30, 2013 – Dan York Media

Oct 30

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

By Dan York in IETF, IETF88, Routing

Next 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.

sidr (Secure Inter-Domain Routing) WG
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/88/agenda/sidr/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/sidr/charter/
(5 November 2013, 0900-1130)

grow (Global Routing Operations) WG
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/88/agenda/grow/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/grow/charter/
(5 November 2013, 1300-1400)

opsec (Operational Security) WG
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/88/agenda/tcpm/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/tcpm/charter/
(6 November 2013, 1550-1650)

idr (Inter-Domain Routing Working Group) WG
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/88/agenda/idr/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/idr/charter/
(8 November 2013, 0900-1100)

Oct 30

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

By Dan York in Google+

Finally! 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

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?

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

following me on Twitter;
adding me to a circle on Google+;
following me on App.net;
subscribing to my email newsletter; or
subscribing to the RSS feed.

Oct 30

Linphone On iOS Now Supports The Opus Codec

By Dan York in Audio, Wireless

When 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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