September 2, 2014 archive
Sep 02
Watch the 2014 Internet Governance Forum (#IGF2014) Live All This Week from Istanbul (Featured Blog)
The Ninth Annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Meeting is taking place all this week, September 2-5, 2014, in Istanbul, Turkey and live video streams are available for all the sessions... I watched the opening session live stream today from my home office in New Hampshire, USA, and the quality was excellent. There was also a live text transcription. More...
Sep 02
Learn IPv6 Basics in VMware #vBrownBag Webinar On Sept 3
Interested in learning more about “IPv6 for IPv4 Brains”? By way of a tweet we learned that Jeff Carrell will be the guest on VMware’s “#vBrownBag” webinar/podcast on this Wednesday, September 3, 2014, at 19:30 US Central Time (which I calculate to be 00:30 UTC on Thursday, Sept 4, if I do the math correctly).
In another tweet Jeff said that he’ll be talking about “IPv6 basics, contrasted to IPv4 (where possible) to assist in the learning curve“. On VMware’s #vBrownBag page there is a link to register for the event.
I don’t know much about VMware’s webinar series, nor have I personally seen Jeff in action providing training, but he’s one of the most active people I’ve seen on Twitter covering IPv6 issues. I’m not going to be able to join in to tomorrow night’s session live, but I’m looking forward to listening to the archive once it is available.
And… if you are inspired after listening to the session to do more with IPv6, please do visit our Start Here page to find IPv6-related resources tailored to your type of organization or role. The time for IPv6 is NOW!
Sep 02
DNSSEC Deployment Maps Updated Today (2 Sep 2014) With Latest New GTLDs
As part of our ongoing publishing of DNSSEC deployment maps showing visually the DNSSEC status of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), we also publish a comma-separated value (CSV) file that contains the DNSSEC status of all the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), including all the “new gTLDs” that have been published as part of ICANN’s program. We do not yet have any visual display of the generic TLDs, although that is something we would like to eventually include in the distribution. For the moment they are just listed in a CSV file – and primarily what we are listing is that they have a DS record in the root zone of DNS.
The latest maps and CSV files as of today, September 2, 2014, can now be found online. These maps and CSV files are published every Monday morning with whatever updates have been made to the database. If you would like to receive the maps and CSV files, please subscribe to the dnssec-maps mailing list. The list is “announce-only”, i.e. it is not a discussion list, and so you will only receive the weekly map updates and very occasional administrative updates. You can visit the list archives to see the type of messages sent to the list.
Sep 02
Lifehacker: Disabling IPv6 Will NOT Speed Up Your Internet Connection
IPv6 is not exactly a topic we would normally expect to see on the hugely popular Lifehacker website, but there it was on Friday in a story by Patrick Allan, “Why Disabling IPv6 Won’t Speed Up Your Internet Connection“. In the article, Patrick references an earlier article on How-To Geek that aims to dispel the idea that disabling IPv6 would somehow speed up your Internet access.
In both articles, the authors make the point that earlier versions of web browsers would sometimes have significant delays in connecting to web sites if IPv6 was involved. For example, if a website had a AAAA record with an IPv6 address a browser would sometimes try and try… and try… to connect to the site over IPv6… even if the computer itself had no IPv6 connection!
Thankfully, in 2014 almost all web browsers now use some variation of the “Happy Eyeballs” algorithm defined in RFC 6555 where they try to connect over both IPv6 and IPv4 and use whichever connection works best and so these web browser problems are now a thing of the past.
As both articles note, you may do more damage to your computer by disabling IPv6 these days, simply because we are running out of IPv4 addresses and many sites and networks are already well underway with their transitions to IPv6 (or have already completed those transitions).
We’re very pleased to see Lifehacker pointing this out… and look forward to more such articles as the IPv6 transition is happening rapidly around us!
If you would like to make the transition to IPv6, please see our Start Here page to find resources that will help you out!
Sep 02
Can You Please Help The Ottawa Linux Symposium?
If you have ever used the Linux operating system, could you please help out the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS)? For many years OLS has been one of the key events that has helped bring together people from all across the Linux community, and the connections made at OLS have helped to make the Linux operating system that much more powerful and useful. But… as organizer Andrew Hutton recounts on the OLS Indiegogo page, the event has fallen in a bit of a financial crunch and it is now not clear if there will be an OLS in 2015… or ever again.
Could you spare $10? $25? or even $50 or $100? (Or more?)
If so, please help fund OLS on the IndieGogo page!
I first attended OLS back in the early 2000s when I was living right there in Ottawa and working for first a startup called e-smith and then subsequently Mitel Networks. In looking at my list of presentations I can see that I spoke there several times… and the topics I covered take me back to a much different time:
- 2004 OLS – Tutorial: Introduction to OpenPGP, GnuPG and the Web of Trust
- 2002 OLS – Tutorial – Single Source Publishing Using DocBook XML
- 2001 OLS – Maximizing Your Use of CVS
I still remember OLS as the incredibly passionate place where people connected…. and where I made so many connections and learned an amazing amount about Linux.
If OLS was ever important to you… or if Linux has been important to you… please consider donating to help the OLS organization get out of its financial hole and get moving ahead in future years. Organizer Andrew Hutton has poured his heart and soul – and personal money – into making OLS the incredible event it has been… now it would be great if we all can help him! Please consider donating!
Here are a few other viewpoints on the importance of OLS:
- Jon “maddog” Hall: “Ottawa Linux Symposium: May get by with a little help from its friends”
- Matt Domsch: “Ottawa Linux Symposium needs your help”
Please do donate if you can! THANK YOU!
Sep 02
50% Off All O’Reilly Ebooks Through Sept 9, 2014
Want to buy “Migrating Applications to IPv6” at 50% off? (in ebook form) Or any of 8,000 other ebooks and videos?
The folks at O’Reilly are having a “Back to (Tech) School Sale” that is in effect until 5:00pm U.S. Pacific Daylight Time on September 9, 2014. All you need to do is use the discount code “B2S4″ when you are checking out.
I would STRONGLY encourage you to buy my book directly through O’Reilly when you can because you get:
- DRM-free – you can put it on as many devices as you want, and it’s yours.
- As many formats as you want – EPUB, Mobi, PDF, whatever…
- Notification of (free) updates – whenever I post updates to the book, you will be notified.
It’s definitely worth it… I’m buying my tech ebooks directly from O’Reilly whenever I can now, simply because of these three points!
Thank you for considering the purchase of this book – and please do let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback to help make it better. The entire point of the book was to help application developers be able to make their application work over IPv6… so I want to hear from you about how this book can help!
