March 2018 archive

Mar 28

Building Our New Website: POSSE and Sharing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and More

As we built our new website, one of my own guiding principles was “POSSE“, a content publishing model from the “IndieWeb” movement. The idea is:

Publish on your
Own
Site,
Syndicate
Elsewhere

Essentially, make sure you own your own content – and then share it out onto other sites and services. (See the IndieWeb page about POSSE for more discussion.) Make your own website the “hub” for all your content, and then have spokes going out to all the other places where people might discover and learn about your content.

To me, this model is the best way to support the principles of the open Internet, while engaging people in the places where they already are.

This is part of a series of posts about the evolution of our new site.

Why does this matter?

We aren’t just publishing reports, papers, blog posts and articles for the sake of talking about what we are doing.

We are publishing content to bring about change that ensures the Internet remains open, globally connected, and secure. As we said in our vision statement for the new website:

Our website is a driving force in realizing our mission of an open Internet for everyone. It empowers all who care about a free and safe Internet and inspires action to make a positive difference.

Our website exists in support of our mission, of our 2018 Action Plan, and of our campaigns to shape the Internet of tomorrow.

But of course, once we publish content, the challenge is to get people to actually READ (and share) that content.

Sadly, we’ve not yet been able to convince everyone on the Internet to set www.internetsociety.org as their home page! (Have you done that yet? Would you consider it?)

So…. we need to share / syndicate our content out to the places where people may discover that content.

We need to go where people are.

WordPress and RSS feeds

The good news about the POSSE model is that WordPress brings many advantages. For instance, it has strong support of RSS feeds, allowing our content to be easily used by viewers – and also published on other sites. You simply add “/feed/” to the end of any URL for a category, tag, or author and… ta da… a feed of all the stories. Super easy and simple.

Unfortunately, the use of dedicated RSS readers has fallen out of style. So while this is an awesome feature, fewer and fewer people are using it.

Thankfully, WordPress also supports a variety of plugins that help with sharing our content out to other channels.

Reaching new audiences

As we reach out to those other channels, it is critical for us to reach NEW audiences. If we only talk to the technical community out of which we emerged, or if we only speak to the “Internet governance” community in which we are involved, we will not be able to fully create the change we believe needs to happen.

We need to reach far larger audiences and help them discover what we are writing about. We need to reach the people who don’t know what “IoT” is – and help them understand why we need it secure by default. We need to reach people in areas without Internet connectivity – and help them understand how community networks can help. We need to reach people who can influence policy makers – and help their regulators understand how the Internet works, and how decisions around the Internet need to involve all sectors of society.

We need many people to take action.

Our ongoing work with the news media is a key part of reaching new audiences. We have had great success in this, and we will continue to expand our efforts. This is critical to our work.

Similarly, we also reach new audiences through building relationships with other media sites to get our articles published (or re-published/syndicated) on those sites. This can bring our ideas to whole new audiences that have not seen our site or even heard of the Internet Society.

But there has also been a large shift in how people discover news and content. For example, recent reports from the Pew Research Center found that 67% of Americans get at least some of their news from social media. For some groups and demographics, the percentage is even higher. Similar research from Pew showed a median of 35%  of people globally getting news daily through social media.

Sharing out to social channels

Given these trends, it is critical for us to get our content out into the social channels where it can be found – and shared. Whenever we publish an article or blog post, we typically share it to at least:

  • one or more Twitter accounts
  • our Facebook page(s)
  • our LinkedIn profile
  • our Google+ page

(See our list of social channels.)

If we look a why we use each of these channels:

  • Twitter has consistently been an excellent way to reach people across a very wide range of social segments and industries. We also find news media see our content, as do policy makers, ISOC members and more.
  • Facebook gives us the potential to reach over 2 billion users (per Facebook’s Q4 2017 monthly average users) around the world. It has the largest reach of any of the currently available platforms.
  • LinkedIn has been a way to share out content out to a professional and business-oriented audience.
  • Google+ historically was a way to reach some elements of our technical audience, although we’ve seen the level of engagement drop there significantly over the past year or two.

The sharing aspect is a key element. As the Pew Research study showed, people are more likely to trust news and links they see from their friends and family. So enabling people to share our content with others is critical.

Now, we don’t only “broadcast” out our content into our social channels. These channels are also one way we gather feedback and comments from people about our content.

We also do use other ways to engage with people in those channels. For instance, our recent polls on Twitter related to IoT and consumer rights. But the distribution of published content remains a major reason why we use the channels.

Sharing out to other channels

Beyond these social channels, we also syndicate and share our content out to other channels on a case-by-case basis. Some of those include:

  • Email lists– We have a wide range of email lists available to Internet Society members. (Membership is free – join today!) Some include Chapter leaders or Organization members. Some are for our Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Others are for open discussion such as the “Internetpolicy” list or the Connect Open Forum. Our challenge here is that with the volume of content we publish, we want to share carefully so we don’t overwhelm people’s inboxes.
  • Medium– We sometimes cross-post articles to our Medium account, although increasingly we are developing specific content for the site.
  • CircleID– For many of our technical and policy folks, we have found that re-publishing our posts on CircleID (under individual author’s names) has brought the information strong additional visibility

Occasionally, we will also post content to some of the sites that aggregate links and provide news listings such as:

  • Hacker News – our developer-focused and very technical articles often do well here.
  • Reddit – some of our content fits in well in different sub-reddits.

We also have used our Instagram account for some campaigns, too.

Future channels

We are always watching for future channels where we should be engaging with people. One of the critical threads of the Internet Invariants is:

There are no permanent favourites.

Remember MySpace? or FriendFeed? or Jaiku? or… USENET?

The channels where people discover and engage with content today are not the same channels they used five years ago – and will probably not be the same channels people use five years in the future.

Facebook and Twitter are where a significant amount of people get their social news today – but will they still be the leaders in five years? Will enough people get upset at today’s platforms that they will actually engage in using new, alternative platforms?

As I look around at where people are engaging, I wonder whether we should do more with:

  • Messaging apps– Should we share content out to a WhatsApp group chat? Or into Snapchat’s Discover area? Or WeChat or Line? Or some of the apps like Wire or Telegram focusing on security?
  • News apps– We are seeing that news apps/services from Apple News, Google AMP, and Facebook Instant Articles are all making the mobile user experience more convenient. I’ve avoided doing anything with these because they are more proprietary than I’d like, but should we?
  • WordPress.com– Our use of WordPress enables us to also have our content flow out into the WordPress.com site to be discovered by others. Should we do more with this?

Or … whatever will be next? Will it be some blockchain mechanism? or…?

It’s hard to know. And to engage in new channels – and do it well – also involves some commitment of staff time and resources. But we will continually be watching, and evolving how we share our content.

POSSE for the open Internet

Our commitment continues to be that we will Publish our content on our Own Site in support of the open Internet. And we will Syndicate that content Elsewhere.

We will go where the people are today – and we will keep watching and explore where the people will be tomorrow.

Our goal is to continue to empower people to take action in support of an open, globally connected and secure Internet.

The future of the Internet is up to each of us. We must work together to #ShapeTomorrow.

Image credit: Tom Kelly on Flickr CC BY NC ND

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Mar 22

How Do We Connect Everyone to the Internet? An IETF 101 Technical Plenary

How do we connect everyone, everywhere, to the Internet? What role do “community networks” play in helping connect more people? How can we best use wireless spectrum and what are the issues with that? How can satellites fit into the picture? And what is the state of satellite technology? And what about the role of “space lasers”?

All that and more was the subject of yesterday’s featured panel at the Technical Plenary at IETF 101 in London.

Interested to learn more? Watch/listen to the Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA) session TODAY (22 March) at 1:30pm UTC:
– Agenda
– Video/slides/chat
– Audio-only

Organized by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), the panel was moderated by our Jane Coffin and included these speakers:

  • Leandro Navarro Moldes, Associate Professor, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (SLIDES)
  • Steve Song, Wireless Spectrum Research Associate, Network Startup Resource Center (SLIDES)
  • Jonathan Brewer, Consulting Engineer, Telco2 Limited (SLIDES)

You can watch the recording of the session at:

The session began with Leandro Moldes outlining how half the world is still not connected to the Internet and is not able to benefit from all the opportunities. He explored the reasons why, the challenges with business models, and the opportunities to improve the situation. He spoke about the different types of community networks and the need for small providers to cooperate and collaborate to be most effective.

Next Steve Song opened with the provocative question – do we care more about connecting refrigerators than poor people? He went on to talk about the impact of fiber optic connections in Africa – and then explained both the opportunities and challenges of using radio spectrum for communication. Steve discussed the economics and politics of spectrum allocation and finished looking at some of the upcoming next generation technologies. A key message: access diversity is critical!

Finally, Jonathan Brewer provided a view on satellite options for Internet access. He outlined typical orbits and latencies; spoke about different architectures and common deployment scenarios; and explained different satellite spectrum bands and then pros and cons. We learned about “rain fade” and other terms. He also offered three newer commercial ventures as examples of the exciting activities in the space sector.

After the panelists spoke, Jane opened the floor to questions. Attendees asked about the diversity of options, the need to include more people and regions, and more. And yes, there was a discussion about “space lasers” and how some of these new networks are building mesh networks based on using lasers between satellites.

It was an educational session that offered many ideas for how to connect the rest of the world.

If you would like to learn more and find out how to help:

Image credit: Stonehouse Photographic

The post How Do We Connect Everyone to the Internet? An IETF 101 Technical Plenary appeared first on Internet Society.

Mar 16

Rough Guide to IETF 101: DNSSEC, DANE, DNS Security and Privacy

It’s going to be a crazy busy week in London next week in the world of DNS security and privacy! As part of our Rough Guide to IETF 101, here’s a quick view on what’s happening in the world of DNS.  (See the full agenda online for everything else.)

IETF 101 Hackathon

As usual, there will be a good-sized “DNS team” at the IETF 101 Hackathon starting tomorrow. The IETF 101 Hackathon wiki outlines the work (scroll down to see it). Major security/privacy projects include:

  • Implementing some of the initial ideas for DNS privacy communication between DNS resolvers and authoritative servers.
  • Implementation and testing of the drafts related to DNS-over-HTTPS (from the new DOH working group).
  • Work on DANE authentication within systems using the DNS Privacy (DPRIVE) mechanisms.

Anyone is welcome to join us for part or all of that event.

Thursday Sponsor Lunch about DNSSEC Root Key Rollover

On Thursday, March 22, at 12:30 UTC, ICANN CTO David Conrad will speak on “Rolling the DNS Root Key Based on Input from Many ICANN Communities“. As the abstract notes, he’ll be talking about how ICANN got to where it is today with the Root KSK Rollover – and about the open comment period on the plan to roll the KSK in October 2018.

David’s session will be streamed live for anyone wishing to view remotely.

DNS Operations (DNSOP)

The DNS sessions at IETF 101 really begin on Tuesday, March 20, with the DNS Operations (DNSOP) Working Group from 15:50 – 18:20 UTC. Several of the drafts under discussion will relate to the Root KSK Rollover and how to better automate and monitor key rollovers. DNSOP also meets on Thursday, March 22, from 18:10-19:10, where one draft of great interest will be draft-huque-dnsop-multi-provider-dnssec. This document explores how to deploy DNSSEC in environments where multiple DNS providers are in use. As per usual, given the critical role DNS plays, the DNSOP agenda has many other drafts up for discussion and action.

DNS PRIVate Exchange (DPRIVE)

The DPRIVE working group meets Wednesday afternoon from 13:30-15:00 UTC.  As shown on the agenda, there will be two major blocks of discussion. First, Sara Dickinson will offer recommendations for best current practices for people operating DNS privacy servers. This builds off of the excellent work she and others have been doing within the DNS Privacy Project.

The second major discussion area will involve Stephane Bortzmeyer discussing how to add privacy to the communication between a DNS recursive resolver and the authoritative DNS server for a given domain.  When the DPRIVE working group was first chartered, the discussion was whether to focus on the privacy/confidentiality between a stub resolver and the local recursive resolver; or between the recursive resolver and authoritative server; or both. The discussion was to focus on the stub-to-recursive-resolver connection – and that is now basically done from a standards perspective. So Stephane is looking to move the group on into the next phase of privacy. As a result, the session will also include a discussion around re-chartering the DPRIVE Working Group to work on this next stage of work.

Extensions for Scalable DNS Service Discovery (DNSSD)

On a similar privacy theme, the DNSSD Working Group will meet Thursday morning from 9:30-12:00 UTC and include a significant block of time discussing privacy and confidentiality.  DNSSD focuses on how to make device discovery easier across multiple networks. For instance, helping you find available printers on not just your own network, but also on other networks to which your network is connected. However in doing so the current mechanisms expose a great deal of information. draft-ietf-dnssd-privacy-03 and several related drafts explore how to add privacy protection to this mechanism. The DNSSD agenda shows more information.

DNS-Over-HTTPS (DOH)

IETF 101 will also feature the second meeting of one of the working groups with the most fun names – DNS Over HTTPS or… “DOH!” This group is working on standardizing how to use DNS within the context of HTTPS. It meets on Thursday from 13:30-15:30. As the agenda indicates, the focus is on some of the practical implementation experience and the work on the group’s single Internet-draft: draft-ietf-doh-dns-over-https.

DOH is an interesting working group in that it was formed for the express purpose of creating a single RFC. With that draft moving to completion, this might be the final meeting of DOH – unless it is rechartered to do some additional work.

DNSSEC Coordination informal breakfast meeting

Finally, on Friday morning before the sessions start we are planning an informal gathering of people involved with DNSSEC. We’ve done this at many of the IETF meetings over the past few years and it’s been a good way to connect and talk about various projects. True to the “informal” nature, we’re not sure of the location and time yet (and we are not sure if it will involve food or just be a meeting). If you would like to join us, please drop me an email or join the dnssec-coord mailing list.

Other Working Groups

DANE and DNSSEC will also appear in the TLS Working Group’s Wednesday meeting. The draft-ietf-tls-dnssec-chain-extension will be presented as a potential way to make DANE work faster by allowing both DANE and DNSSEC records to be transmitted in a single exchange, thus reducing the time involved with DANE transactions. Given the key role DNS plays in the Internet in general, you can also expect DNS to appear in other groups throughout the week.

P.S. For more information about DNSSEC and DANE and how you can get them deployed for your networks and domains, please see our Deploy360 site:

Relevant Working Groups at IETF 101:

DNSOP (DNS Operations) WG
Tuesday, 20 March 2018, 15:50-18:30 UTC, Sandringham
Thursday, 22 March 2018, 18:10-19:10 UTC, Sandringham
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/101/agenda/dnsop/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dnsop/
Charter: http://tools.ietf.org/wg/dnsop/charters/

DPRIVE (DNS PRIVate Exchange) WG
Wednesday, 21 March 2018, 13:30-15:00 UTC, Balmoral
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/101/agenda/dprive/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dprive/
Charter: http://tools.ietf.org/wg/dprive/charters/

DNSSD (Extensions for Scalable DNS Service Discovery) WG
Thursday, 22 March 2018, 9:30-12:00 UTC, Buckingham
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/101/agenda/dnssd/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dnssd/
Charter: http://tools.ietf.org/wg/dnssd/charters/

DOH (DNS over HTTPS) WG
Thursday, 22 March 2018, 13:30-15:30 UTC, Blenheim
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/101/agenda/doh/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/doh/
Charter: http://tools.ietf.org/wg/doh/charters/

Follow Us

It will be a busy week in London, and whether you plan to be there or join remotely, there’s much to monitor. Read the full series of Rough Guide to IETF 101 posts, and follow us on the Internet Society blog, Twitter, or Facebook using #IETF101 to keep up with the latest news.

The post Rough Guide to IETF 101: DNSSEC, DANE, DNS Security and Privacy appeared first on Internet Society.

Mar 09

DNSSEC Activities at ICANN 61 in San Juan on March 11-14, 2018

Sunday marks the beginning of the DNSSEC activities at the ICANN 61 meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As per usual there will be a range of activities related to DNSSEC or DANE. Two of the sessions will be streamed live and will be recorded for later viewing. Here is what is happening.

All times below are Atlantic Standard Time (AST), which is UTC-4.

DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide – Sunday, 11 March

On Sunday, March 11, we’ll have our “DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide” session that will include our usual skit where a bunch of engineers act out how DNS and DNSSEC work! Yes, it’s a good bit of fun and people have told us it has helped tremendously.

Please come with your questions and prepare to learn all about DNSSEC!

DNSSEC Workshop – Wednesday, 14 March

Our big 6-hour workshop will take place on Wednesday, March 14, from 09:00 – 15:00 in Room 208-BC. Lunch will be included. Thank you to our lunch sponsors: Afilias, CIRA, and SIDN.

The very full agenda includes:

  • DNSSEC Workshop Introduction, Program, Deployment Around the World – Counts, Counts, Counts
  • Panel: DNSSEC Activities, including representatives of .CA, .PR and .BR
  • A Sentinel for Detecting Trusted Keys in DNSSEC
  • Experience with DNSSEC Validation at CPE
  • DNSSEC HSM, Signer and KSK Rollover
  • Negative Trust Anchors
  • Real World DANE Inter-Domain Email Transport
  • Panel: Current State of Root KSK Rollover and What’s Next?
  • DNSSEC – How Can I Help?

It should be an outstanding session!

DNSSEC Implementers Gathering – 14 March

On the evening of Wednesday, March 14, after the DNSSEC Workshop is all over, we’ll have our informal “DNSSEC Implementers Gathering” bringing together people who have implemented DNSSEC or DANE in some way for a time to share information, have conversation and light snacks. Invitations have gone out to various DNSSEC mailing lists – if you are interested in attending please send a message to me at york@isoc.org. We thank Afilias for their generous sponsorship of this gathering at ICANN 61!

As I am not able to travel to ICANN 61, I want to thank Jacques Latour for stepping in to help with some of the emceeing and other meeting facilitation duties that I often do.

Please do join us for a great set of sessions about how we can work together to make the DNS more secure and trusted!

If you would like more information about DNSSEC or DANE, please visit our Start Here page to begin.

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Mar 08

Voting open for 2018 Internet Society Board of Trustees elections

The 2018 Internet Society Board of Trustees elections have begun!

Electronic ballots were emailed today to all voting representatives. They will have until Monday, 9 April at 15:00 UTC to cast their ballots.

In this year’s election cycle, Organization Members are asked to elect one Trustee to the Board. So voting representatives may vote for only one of the candidates on the Organization Members ballot.

Similarly, in this year’s election cycle, Chapters are asked to elect one Trustee to the Board. So voting representatives may vote for only one of the candidates on the Chapters ballot.

All new Trustees will serve three-year terms commencing in June.

Additional details on the elections, as well as information on all of the candidates can be found here:

https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-trustees/elections/

To facilitate dialogue between OMAC members and candidates for the Organization Members election, and between Chapter leaders and candidates for the Chapters election, the Elections Committee has again launched an online Candidate Forum. In response to feedback from members, we moved the Forum from the Connect platform to a Mailman mailing list.

Everyone subscribed to the OMAC list was subscribed automatically to the ISOC Organization Members Candidate Forum list. Everyone subscribed to the Chapter-Delegates list was subscribed automatically to the ISOC Chapters Candidate Forum list. (You may unsubscribe from either list at any time.)

If you did not receive an email welcoming you to the Organization Members Candidate Forum list or the Chapters Candidate Forum list, please contact me.

We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the candidates and engage with your Organization’s voting representative or Chapter’s voting delegate on the choices this election presents.

Hiroshi Esaki
2018 Elections Committee Chair
Internet Society

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