March 2015 archive

Mar 31

New DNSSEC Deployment Map Available In Global Internet Maps

Our DNSSEC Deployment Maps are now also available as part of a larger set of Global Internet Maps produced as part of our annual Global Internet Report.  My colleague Michael Kende wrote about these new maps earlier this month and explained a bit about them. This new DNSSEC deployment map is rather fun in that it is interactive and you can zoom around and hover over any country to see what stage the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is at.  This map is based off of the 5 stages of DNSSEC deployment that we track as part of the weekly DNSSEC deployment maps we generate. (Click/tap the image to go to the site.)

DNSSEC maps in Global Internet Report

One note of caution – these Global Internet Maps are only updated periodically and so that DNSSEC deployment map will not necessarily be as up-to-date with ccTLDs as the weekly DNSSEC Deployment Maps.  The best place to get the most current maps is the archive of the dnssec-maps mailing list.  New maps get generated every Monday morning.

However, the Global Internet Map is current now (March 2015) with regard to ccTLDs – and it’s a very nice view of where we need to have more ccTLDs signed with DNSSEC.  Please do enjoy using it – while you are there, please do explore all the other maps that are made available.  These kind of visualizations are great to see!

The post New DNSSEC Deployment Map Available In Global Internet Maps appeared first on Internet Society.

Mar 31

New DNSSEC Deployment Map Available In Global Internet Maps

Our DNSSEC Deployment Maps are now also available as part of a larger set of Global Internet Maps produced as part of our annual Global Internet Report.  My colleague Michael Kende wrote about these new maps earlier this month and explained a bit about them. This new DNSSEC deployment map is rather fun in that it is interactive and you can zoom around and hover over any country to see what stage the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is at.  This map is based off of the 5 stages of DNSSEC deployment that we track as part of the weekly DNSSEC deployment maps we generate. (Click/tap the image to go to the site.)

DNSSEC maps in Global Internet Report

One note of caution – these Global Internet Maps are only updated periodically and so that DNSSEC deployment map will not necessarily be as up-to-date with ccTLDs as the weekly DNSSEC Deployment Maps.  The best place to get the most current maps is the archive of the dnssec-maps mailing list.  New maps get generated every Monday morning.

However, the Global Internet Map is current now (March 2015) with regard to ccTLDs – and it’s a very nice view of where we need to have more ccTLDs signed with DNSSEC.  Please do enjoy using it – while you are there, please do explore all the other maps that are made available.  These kind of visualizations are great to see!

Mar 31

Never Give Up

Curling final 770

Never. Give. Up.

I was vividly reminded of that lesson last night in the championship game of the Men's Curling League at the Petersham Curling Club where I play. Our team, which had played extremely well together all year, had made it through the playoffs to be in the final championship game against another excellent team.

This was it. The end of the long curling season and a chance to have our names inscribed on the league trophy at the club.

After 5 of the 8 ends (think "innings" in baseball or "periods" in hockey), both teams were tied. Then the other team scored 2 points in the 6th end. Then they stole 1 point in the 7th. So we were going into the final 8th end three points down with a score of 7-4.

We thought we were doomed. It was highly unlikely that there was any way out. Scoring 3 points to tie was going to be extremely difficult based on how well the other team was playing.

In my mind, I had mostly given up.

But part of why I enjoy the sport of curling is the degree of skill it takes... but also the unpredictability of what can happen. A piece of lint on the ice could cause a rock to go off in an unplanned direction. A change in humidity can make the ice slower or faster than it was just a few minutes ago. The skip can call the sweepers on too early or too late and have the rock end differently than planned. The person throwing the rock can throw it wrong... missing the line he/she is supposed to hit or throwing it too hard or too light.

So many variables.

The 8th end began as you would expect. The other team fired their first rock through the rings... just got it out of there. They were up by 3 points - all they wanted to do was knock rocks out and make sure we couldn't score any points.

But then things happened. We made some good shots. They missed a couple of shots. We missed some shots. They made some good shots... the game went on.

But in the end we came down to the final stone of the opposing skip with 4 of our stones sitting in the rings. You can see a photo above that I took of the way it was set up. Our skip had his final stone to throw, too, but we expected the opposing skip to simply come down and sit on our rock that was in the blue "four-foot" ring. Either that or hit our rock out and roll over behind the other rocks where it would have been extremely difficult to get to his rock. It was a comparatively "easy" shot and the opposing skip had made shots like this all the time.

Looking at it I thought we were done.

But... the other skip's final stone was too light! Even with the frantic sweeping of the team the rock didn't make it down to the rings and instead hit the rocks in the front.

Unbelievably... we had just scored 4 points to win!!!

Our skip didn't even have to throw his final rock.

We sat there with our mouths open... uncomprehending at first.

And THEN we celebrated!

Never. Give. Up!

An audio commentary is also available:

Mar 30

TDYR 236 – Winning A Curling Championship

TDYR 236 - Winning A Curling Championship by Dan York

Mar 30

The Hobson & Holtz Report – Podcast #801: March 30, 2015

A new podcast, Wag the Dog FM, from Philippe Borremans; FIR Interview coming: a second conversation with Millennials at Syracuse University London Campus;

Quick News: Brands flock to Periscope, being seen as innovative boosts a company’s bottom line says Ketchum survey, Slack is killing IRC, all 650 Members of Parliament in the UK will receive an iPad Air 2 after the May election; Ragan promo;

News That Fits: New apps – including Periscope, Meerkat and NewsByMe – could boost citizen journalism; Dan York’s Tech Report: Periscope and live streaming, Dave Winer’s MyWord, Facebook; drilling a social media crisis with Polpeo; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; listener comments in audio and in the FIR Podcast Community on Google+; wearable tech will shift from novelty to norm in the next five years; the past week on the FIR Podcast Network; Igloo Software promo; summary of what we learned from Facebook’s F8;

Music from Moon Taxi; and more.

So, until Monday April 6…

The post The Hobson & Holtz Report – Podcast #801: March 30, 2015 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Mar 30

Some Quick Thoughts On Periscope, Meerkat And The Era of Simple Livestreaming

Periscope 1Unless you've been offline or ignoring social media for the past couple of weeks you've no doubt seen the dueling "livestreaming wars" between the iOS applications Meerkat and Periscope. Perhaps you've viewed some of the streams... or broadcast some yourself.

Given that I do live streaming as part of my employment, I'm fascinated by these new and emerging apps. They also remind me of what Qik tried to do back in the mid-2000s before Skype bought Qik in 2011 and promptly shut the service down. (Only to have Qik re-emerge recently as a different kind of mobile messaging service from Skype.)

I've been playing with both Meerkat and Periscope and offer a few quick thoughts based on my own experience. I will be exploring these apps more... but want to record some comments for today's For Immediate Release podcast episode and want to use this post as a basis for that report.

The beauty of both of these apps is that it makes it absolutely TRIVIAL for someone to start live streaming. Just login with Twitter and press the a button to start broadcasting live to the world!!!

Here are some thoughts about both apps and then some thoughts on this larger new era of simple live streaming.

Periscope

Periscope was purchased by Twitter and apparently had the app in development for quite some time. Things I like:

  • Polished user interface.
  • The "hearts" that you can give to "like" something are fun.
  • The replay capability is useful... although it seems the stored videos are only available for something like 24 hours.

Things I am not as excited about:

  • The comments appear and then disappear... and there seems to be no way I could find to go back and see them again, without replaying the video. Given that in a couple of trials I was driving with my iPhone on my dashboard, I could NOT read the comments while driving.
  • No horizontal orientation... you have to hold the phone in a vertical orientation. Yes, you can turn the phone sideways and hold it horizontally, but all the comments and hearts still come in the vertical orientation.
  • Several people viewing my live streams indicated they had connection issues.

Meerkat

Meerkat was out before Periscope and captured a great amount of attention at SXSW and recent conferences. Things I like:

  • Comments are scrollable within the stream. You can read them later (during the time of the stream).
  • You can hold the camera horizontally.
  • Comments can be out onto Twitter.
  • You can answer comments by text within the app (although is this really important? I'm not sure).
  • So far no connection issues for me... but I've seen others have issues.

Things I am not as excited about:

  • Comments are gone after the stream.
  • No replay capability.

Changing Our Expectation Around Privacy

I think there is a larger societal question we need to be thinking about - that person walking down the street holding a phone up can be streaming everything they see live out onto the public Internet?

Intellectual Property

To that point... there are a whole host of intellectual property issues that I think we as a society will need to address. Nothing whatsoever technically prevents someone from streaming a concert or any presentation live. There are many artists and speakers who charge for their events and don't want them live streamed.

Cost

People in the mobile telecommunications companies have to be loving this - here are ways that people will generate a great amount of mobile data very quickly! Unless people have "unlimited" telecom data plans, they are going to be running up some good-sized costs. Great for the telcos... not so great for the producers. However, any event with "free" WiFi around could easily attract a good number of streams.

Bandwidth

All of these live video streams will create some interesting additional pressures on the Internet's infrastructure. Particularly in situations where there is "asymmetrical" connections, i.e. you have a faster download than upload speed. The streaming out of events could create a much larger requirement for upload speeds than there has been before.

Digital Divide

All of which feeds into a question about the "digital divide". The Internet users who are in regions with good Internet connectivity will be both able to produce/broadcast and also able to consume all these live streams. What about people in other parts of the world where bandwidth is much more limited? How will they be able to participate in this new era of live streaming?

Similarly, these Periscope and Meerket apps are right now only available on Apple's iOS platform... what if you can't afford an iPhone?

Ephemeral Moments and FOMO

One of the interesting elements of Meerkat is that once the stream is gone... it's gone. It's ephemeral like Snapchat... it's there... it's gone. You have to be there to see it and participate.

This leads to the "Fear Of Missing Out" (FOMO) and the "need" to be part of that.

Periscope allows replays, which changes it a bit. Now it's a recording available for some time. I'm not sure which is better.

[Side note: I don't know how truly "ephemeral" either Meerkat or Periscope is... the streams have to go through some server out there and the server could easily record any and all streams.]

Rich Interaction

What I did find very cool about using both Periscope and Meerkat was the rich interaction I could have with the audience. They were able to leave comments that I could react to right within the stream itself. They were able to guide the conversation... asking questions that I then answered.

In several cases friends I knew joined into my live streams. In one case this meant I switched to speaking German because I knew a German friend was watching. In another I switched the camera to view myself so that a friend I hadn't seen in a few years could see what I look like today.

It was great in so many ways to have this rich interaction during a stream. I'm looking forward to trying this out in some events in the future.

Final Thoughts...

... I'm very intrigued by these new applications. They make live streaming so incredibly simple and easy for anyone to do. I think we do have some of these larger societal issues and conventions to think through... but our era of ubiquitous live streaming is definitely upon us.

I see great potential for these apps in live streaming of events... for citizen journalism... breaking news... bearing witness to unfolding events... marketing/webinar types of events... indie musicians and artists... tutorials...

The reality of course is that we'll also see a lot of incredibly mundane and boring live streams. We'll probably see a good deal of porn. We'll see other ways to abuse live streams that will appall us. That's what always happens with any new service.

I will continue testing the apps. I want to see what else they can do. I want to explore more of the technical aspects - things such as their actual bandwidth usage. I want to know if any of them work over IPv6. (Sadly, expecting them NOT to do so.) I want to understand how secure they are.

So I'll be writing more... as I have time to do so.

Meanwhile, these are just some initial thoughts.

What do you think? Are you experimenting with either Periscope or Meerkat? Or some other similar app?

P.S. See also "Periscope and live video are changing the internet forever", a good take on how these apps are already changing live news...

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

Mar 30

Keeping The Web Open: Dave Winer’s "Radically Silo-Free" MyWord Editor

silosDave Winer is at it again. The creator of some of the original blogging software back in the early 2000s and one of the creators of RSS released last week his "radically silo-free" blogging editor MyWord Editor (MWE) with this purpose:

A shot in the arm for the open web. A way for JavaScript developers to collaborate on a new fun project. A way to escape from the silos that threaten to turn us into commercial robots, consumers and promoters, when we aspire to be thinkers and doers.

Think of it as bringing the ease and beauty of writing of Medium... without being locked into Medium's platform. (Or at least... I would say that is the aspiration... Dave's MWE is still in development.)

The MyWord Editor code is available as open source on Github at:

Dave calls it "radical" for this reason:

These days blogging tools try to lock you into their business model, and lock other developers out. I have the freedom to do what I want, so I decided to take the exact opposite approach. I don't want to lock people in and make them dependent on me. Instead, I want to learn from thinkers and writers and developers. I want to engage with other minds. Making money, at this stage of my career, is not so interesting to me. I'd much rather make ideas, and new working relationships, and friends.

He goes on to explain why MWE is “silo-free”:

  1. There's an open API that connects the in-browser app to the server. So you can replace the app. Or the server. Or both.

  2. Because there's an open API, you can build anything you want at either end. You're not limited by my vision of what's possible. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

  3. The app is provided in source, MIT license. So there are no secrets. And you can use my source as the starting point for your own editor.

  4. The server is provided in source, MIT license. No secrets, etc./p>

  5. The app has a command that downloads all your content in JSON, so you can move your data from one server to another, at any time. If any instance removes this command, alarms should ring out all over the land. It's your content, ladies and gentlemen, not theirs.

  6. Of course every MyWord user has a great full-featured RSS 2.0 feed. We love RSS and it feeds us and we feed it, it's doing great, and anyone who disses it is a mean rotten silo-lover.

He followed this with another post explaining more:

and then he further expressed his view that WordPress is also silo-free... but there is also a need for a better and simpler user experience:

where he made this statement:

Blogging is frozen

There haven't been new features in blogging in a long time. Where's the excitement? It looks to me like there's been no effort made to factor the user interface, to simplify and group functionality so the first-time user isn't confronted with the full feature set, left on his or her own to figure out where to go to create a new post or edit an existing one. Blogging platforms can be both easier and more powerful, I know because I've made blogging platforms that were

You can read more about this at http://myword.io/ ... and you can play with a hosted version yourself at:

(Yes, of course, I had to try it out.) It uses Twitter as an identity provider right now... but of course the code is open source so someone could hack away and look to use a different identity provider.

As someone who has been gravely concerned about "lock in" and the need for us to have control over our own content (think back to my posts about Known And The Indie Web), I am pleased to see this entry into the range of tools we can use for sites. Yes, I do most of my own work in WordPress these days... but I also very much understand Dave's notion that we need simpler tools with an easy user experience.

As I have the time I definitely intend to check out MWE and set up my own instance of it. I'm glad Dave is out there building tools like this... let's see where it goes!

What do you think?

Image credit: Doc Searls on Flickr

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Mar 30

FIR #801 – 3/30/15 – For Immediate Release

New PR podcast from Philippe Borremans; FIR interview coming with Syracuse University London Millennials; Quick News: Brands flock to Periscope, being seen as innovative is good for the bottom line, Slack is killing IRC, MPs will get iPad Air 2 tablets; Ragan promo; News That Fits: new streaming apps could boost citizen journalism, Dan York's Tech Report, drilling a social media crisis, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, wearable tech will become the norm within 5 years, the past week on the FIR Podcast Network, Igloo Software promo, lots of announcements from Facebook; music from Moon Taxi; and more.

Mar 29

TDYR 235 – Sundays, Churches and the Impact of Youth Sports

TDYR 235 - Sundays, Churches and the Impact of Youth Sports by Dan York

Mar 27

The Intersection of Human Rights…. and IETF Protocols?

Should considerations for human rights such as freedom of expression or freedom of assocation be incorporated into the development of Internet protocols and standards?

That's the key question being asked today in a session at IETF 92 in Dallas, TX, where there is a proposal to create a "Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group" within the IRTF. You can tune in live from 11:50-13:20 US CDT (UTC-5) at:

http://www.meetecho.com/ietf92/hrpc

Dan York