November 2013 archive
Nov 22
Nov 25th Deadline To Nominate Technical Community Reps for IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) (Featured Blog)
Would you (or someone you know) be interested in representing the "technical community" on the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)? If so, the deadline to nominate someone (including yourself) is Monday, November 25, 2013. Under-Secretary-General Wu Hongbo of UNDESA has issued a statement on the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) renewal process for 2014 with the stated aim of rotating one third of the MAG members. More...
Nov 21
TDYR #049 – In Houston, En Route Back To Boston
TDYR #049 - In Houston, En Route Back To Boston by Dan York
Nov 20
Watch Live TODAY The DNSSEC Deployment Workshop At ICANN 48
As mentioned previously, there is an excellent “DNSSEC Workshop” happening TODAY, November 20, 2013, at the ICANN 48 meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The agenda, slides, and links for remote participation can be found at:
Both and audio and video live stream will be available. The workshop begins today at 9:45 am local time in Argentina, which is 12:45 UTC and 7:45 am US Eastern.
UPDATE: THE WORKSHOP BEGINS AT *8:30am* LOCAL TIME. Or 11:30 UTC / 6:30am US Eastern.
This technical workshop at ICANN meetings continues to be one of the best gatherings of the DNSSEC community and the sessions here again look to be extremely useful and educational. Today’s sessions include:
- DNSSEC Deployment Statistics
- DNSSEC Activities in Latin America
- DNSSEC For The Enterprise
- Guidance For Registrars in Supporting DNSSEC
- DNSSEC Root Key Rollover
- Automated Update of DNSSEC Information
- Operational Realities of Running DNSSEC
- DNSSEC Innovation: DANE Tools and Ideas
The sessions will be recorded if you are unable to watch live, but in watching live you’ll also have a chance to ask questions.
We’re looking forward to a great session today and we’ll be discussing more of what happened there in this blog in the days and weeks ahead.
Nov 19
New Kamailio DNSSEC Module Enables Higher Security For SIP / VoIP
If you are using voice-over-IP (VoIP), and specifically the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), how do you know if you are really connecting to the correct SIP server when you make a connection? When you call someone, your SIP server needs to make a connection to the SIP server for the recipient – how is it sure it is reaching the correct server?
As I’ve talked about and written about in the past, one way to help with this is to use DNSSEC to validate that the information received by the SIP server from DNS is in fact accurate. While DNSSEC support in VoIP systems has been somewhat limited to date, the great Kamailio team has added a module that provides DNSSEC support. It will be included in the forthcoming Kamailio 4.1 release (whose development was recently frozen, so it should be available soon), but in the meantime it can be added to Kamailio installations using this tutorial:
The actual module itself can be found at:
This kind of support for DNSSEC within VoIP is great to see and will lead to more secure communications over IP in the future. Plus, getting this kind of DNSSEC support out there now will lay the groundwork for potentially using DANE in the future to secure the certificates used in VoIP communications.
Congrats to the Kamailio team and we look forward to learning more about people using this module in the future!
P.S. See our DNSSEC and DNSSEC Basics pages to learn more about how you can get started with DNSSEC.
Nov 18
DNSSEC Deployment Workshop On Wednesday At ICANN 48 – Live stream available
Interested in learning the current status of DNSSEC deployment? Want to hear case studies from people who have deployed DNSSEC? Would you like to know about some of the latest DNSSEC tools and services? And what the role is of the DANE protocol? All that and more will be discussed this Wednesday, November 20, 2013, at the “DNSSEC Workshop” at the ICANN 48 meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The agenda, slides, and links for remote participation can be found at:
Both and audio and video live stream will be available. The workshop begins at 9:45 am local time in Argentina, which is 12:45 UTC and 7:45 am US Eastern.
UPDATE: The workshop begins at 8:30am local time, which is 11:30am UTC and 6:30am US Eastern.
This technical workshop at ICANN meetings continues to be one of the best gatherings of the DNSSEC community and the sessions here again look to be extremely useful and educational. They include:
- DNSSEC Deployment Statistics
- DNSSEC Activities in Latin America
- DNSSEC For The Enterprise
- Guidance For Registrars in Supporting DNSSEC
- DNSSEC Root Key Rollover
- Automated Update of DNSSEC Information
- Operational Realities of Running DNSSEC
- DNSSEC Innovation: DANE Tools and Ideas
The last of these sessions on DANE will be one where I will be speaking.
The sessions will be recorded if you are unable to watch live… but if you do get a chance to watch live you’ll also be able to ask questions through the web interface. As I mentioned, the slides for the session are all available at that URL above if you’d like to get a head start on seeing what will be discussed.
Do check it out… and get started today with using DNSSEC to make the Internet more secure!
Nov 18
Comcast and Time Warner Show Dramatic Increases In IPv6 Deployment
Great news posted over on the World IPv6 Launch site today – both Comcast and Time Warner Cable in North America have show rather dramatic increases in their deployment of IPv6. Based on the latest published IPv6 measurements, the World IPv6 Launch article included this chart for Comcast:
And this chart for Time Warner Cable:
Both of those show a trend definitely going in the right direction! Congrats to the network operation teams at both Internet service providers for making this happen!
Additionally the article pointed out that Google’s IPv6 adoption statistics continue to climb, again showing a very nice upward trend.
All of it goes to show that IPv6 deployment IS happening! If you haven’t deployed IPv6 yet, please do check out our IPv6 resources and let us know how we can help you get connected before you get left behind!
Nov 18
TDYR #048 – Heading To Buenos Aires To Talk DNSSEC At ICANN 48
TDYR #048 - Heading To Buenos Aires To Talk DNSSEC At ICANN 48 by Dan York
Nov 18
Watch/Listen Live TODAY to “DNSSEC For Everybody – A Beginner’s Guide” at ICANN 48
Want to quickly learn about DNSSEC and how it can make the Internet more secure? Want to see an easy illustration of how DNSSEC works? Want to understand why DNSSEC is so important to strengthen the Internet against attackers? If so, tune in TODAY at 5:00 pm / 17:00 Buenos Aires time ( 20:00 UTC, 3:00 pm US Eastern) for the “DNSSEC For Everybody – A Beginner’s Guide” session where a group of people involved with DNSSEC will answer all these questions and more. Information is at:
http://buenosaires48.icann.org/en/schedule/mon-dnssec-everybody
There are audio streams available in 7 languages and a “Virtual Meeting Room Stream Live” that will get you video and the slides. The slides and session notes are also available at the bottom of that web page.
The overview of the session is:
DNSSEC continues to be deployed around the world at an ever accelerating pace. From the Root, to both Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) and Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs), the push is on to deploy DNSSEC to every corner of the internet. Businesses and ISPs are building their deployment plans too and interesting opportunities are opening up for all as the rollout continues. Worried that you’re getting left behind? Don’t really understand DNSSEC? Then why not come along to the second ‘DNSSEC for Beginners’ session where we hope to demystify DNSSEC and show how you can easily and quickly deploy DNSSEC into your business. Come and find out how it all works, what tools you can use to help and meet the community that can help you plan and implement DNSSEC.
These are great sessions and usually I am participating but this week my travel schedule won’t get me to ICANN 48 until tomorrow. (Warren Kumari thankfully was able to cover my usual role.) You don’t need any knowledge of DNSSEC to participate and it talks about DNSSEC in a fun and interesting way. (And yes, there’s actually a skit involved! )
Look for the blue smoke… 
P.S. If you can’t watch live, the session will be recorded and available later at that same URL for viewing.
Nov 18
FIR #730 – 11/18/13 – For Immediate Release
We're interviewed by Inside PR and the GaggleAmp podcast, two interviews coming, listener survey results imminent; Quick News: Twitter Custom Timelines, adding mobile to monitoring, Google's legal win, study about mobile-text charitable donations; Ragan promo; News That Fits; four Twitter gaffes, Dan York's Tech Report, the JP Morgan hashtag kerfuffle Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, social media throughout the marketing funnel; blogger show-offs; music from Persian Claws; and more.
Nov 15
Google+ Changes Cover Photo Size Again – Removes Huge Image, Moves Profile Photo to Left
If you haven't looked at your Google+ profile or page for a bit... you might want to do so because Google has changed the image size again. It used to be a huge image that took up a great amount of your screen - and then "collapsed" in a funky way when you scrolled down the page. Your name and your profile photo appeared at the bottom of the photo and the photo was greyed out a bit.
That's all gone.
Now your photo is a good bit smaller and does not collapse as the page scrolls... it just disappears off the page as you would expect it to. Most significantly, though, your profile photo and info is on the left side of the photo, taking over about a quarter of the image. Here's what my Google+ page looks like now:
You'll note that the profile photo and info now blurs the image behind them. But... if you had taken the time to create a cover photo with something centered in the middle of the photo, you'll probably want to adjust that to shift the image over a bit.
I've not seen any formal specifications out of anyone at Google about this new image size. The only real note I've seen is this Google+ post by Google engineer Karthik Nagaraj just indicating the change was happening. He indicates that basically any 16:9 image should work.
On my Mac using Google Chrome I did a screen capture of that part a G+ page and that told me that the overall image was 1060x438 and the main visible (non-blurred) part was 780x438 (which math then says leaves 280x438 behind the blurred part. That, however, is just how it was displayed in Chrome on my Mac... I don't precisely how it will appear on other browsers on other operating systems.
The main point is that about the leftmost 25% (actually 26.4% if those numbers I measured) of the image will be blurred, so keep that in mind when choosing an image.
Given that I find myself using Google+ a good bit more these days, I do like these changes... it just would have been great if Google gave all of us a bit more of a clue about the change rather than just waking up to find that it had been done. Ah, well... given how much I've paid for Google+ (i.e. nothing) I guess I can't really complain, eh?
What do you think of the new cover photo size? Do you like this better?
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