Dan York

Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...

Author's posts

Nov 14

No Power = No 1s and 0s. Internet Resilience Requires Electrical Resilience

an image of a road with power lines falling across it after a tornado has been through the area

Last week, Cuba lost all Internet connectivity when Hurricane Rafael struck the nation and caused a failure in its power infrastructure. This was only a few weeks after the shutdown of a major power generation plant caused a nationwide power outage and a loss of all Internet connectivity. In late October, the Caribbean island of Guadalupe […]

The post No Power = No 1s and 0s. Internet Resilience Requires Electrical Resilience appeared first on Internet Society.

Oct 20

AVFTCN 037 – Resilience, Connecting Carolina, and ITDRC Response

Climbing back up into the crow’s nest and turning the spyglass toward the southeastern United States, it’s hard to escape the utter devastation caused by the cascading effects of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. The photos are unbelievable. The stories are heartbreaking. The recovery costs will be enormous. And the people responding are amazing! (And the disinformation is despicable!🤬)

All of that has brought me back to this theme of “resilience” that has been percolating through my work for the past year or so. I have stories exploding inside my head that I want to write here.. so my plan is to start with my next issue on the theme of “Building Resilience” – both the network kind and the human kind, and both at a community and personal level. I just want to capture some of my own thoughts and thinking… and will invite you to come along with that exploration.

Meanwhile, I want to talk about two efforts happening RIGHT NOW to respond to the hurricanes in the southeast US…

The western part of North Carolina was devastated by Hurricane Helene. Many people might not have heard of Asheville, NC, before… but now they do. The whole are needs severe help! And soon!

Aaron Huslage, who I’ve known for many years, lives in North Carolina and in response launched Operation Connect Carolina to help restore connectivity. He’s got a team of people working hard to build mobile hotspots that can be moved out into western NC and deployed. You can follow the journey on the project’s Facebook page or LinkedIn page.

Most importantly, he’s seeking donations to help his local teams get these hotspots out to where people need them.

The second effort is the volunteers of the IT Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC). The organization has deployed throughout the region providing WiFi access and charging stations. If you are in the region, or know people who are, please share their map of WiFi locations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Additionally, if you have some IT experience / background and are located in the USA, you can sign up to volunteer with the ITDRC. Volunteers are needed to deploy out into the field to help get these trailers set up and then to keep them up and running, and to generally help people with connectivity in the local community. It’s going to be a long haul to get connectivity restored all across the affected region, and to ITDRC is planning to be there for a while. They’ll need more volunteers to help keep all these systems going. There are also opportunities to provide remote support if you don’t have the ability to go out into the field for a couple of weeks (typically a 2-week deployment).

I’ve been an ITDRC volunteer since 2021 and while I have not yet deployed into the field (I need to finish up one last FEMA training course) I have learned a huge amount from the ITDRC training programs and community.

You can also donate to ITDRC as it is entirely a nonprofit operation. They’ve received multiple grants (including from the Internet Society Foundation, affiliated with my employer) which helps, but they do need all the support possible.

At the same time they are also supporting wildfire response out in the western United States. There are many communities in crisis that need connectivity!

If you are able to help with either effort… THANK YOU!

Next time, I intend to write a bit more about building resilience…

P.S. As you may notice, ITDRC only operates in the US. If you live elsewhere in the world and are active with a similar IT-related crisis response organization, please drop me an email with the info, as I’d love to share info. The NetHope organization includes members in other regions who do similar work.

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

Content I’ve published for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

  • <nothing>

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Oct 01

TDYR 417 Returning From A Hiatus

It’s been a while since my last episode… almost 6 months in fact. In this episode I explain a bit of what went on, and talk about plans for returning in a slightly different format.

Sep 24

AVFTCN 036 – A Hard Drive Failure, a Puppy, Climatebase, a New Role… and an Unplanned Hiatus

Hi! Remember this newsletter you subscribed to? The one you haven’t seen since back on April 22, 2024?

Welllllll… it’s been a wild ride… and an unplanned hiatus.

But… my goal now is to get back into this a bit more, and so I want to fire off this short note to just give a personal update.

Next time, I’ll be climbing up into that proverbial crow’s nest and looking out at the horizon ahead of us. For this newsletter… I’m going to look back instead at where the ship has sailed over the past few months.

If you visit my danyork.me aggregation site, you’d see that I have published some work articles… but nothing personal since the last issue (035) of this newsletter back on April 22, 2024. No blog posts. No podcast episodes. No newsletters. No livestreaming to Twitch. No… nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Nichts.

So here’s the story…

The fun began back in early May when the 2017 iMac I’d been using to produce my podcasts, do all my livestreaming, and write many of my posts started acting really funky. It was acting very slow.. and freezing completely. Many reboots and upgrade attempts later, I was finally able to identify that it was having “S.M.A.R.T. disk errors”. Which wasn’t good.

“It’s dead, Jim” would be the Star Trek (Original Series) way to say it.

Given that it’s from 2017, I can’t upgrade it to the latest MacOS X. And heck, it’s so old Apple won’t even give me anything for a trade-in. (But they’ll help recycle it for me if I want. 🤦‍♂️) Giving other things going on (see below!) fixing it has been super LOW priority… which has meant that my normal platform for content creation and production has been offline. So no podcast episodes or livestreaming.

As that was all happening, a more massive disruption was entering our life – we adopted an 8-week-old puppy!

Named “Barkley”, he’s a very lovable and adorable mix of a pug and a miniature schnauzer (apparently called a “Schnug”) who keeps growing and growing and now at 6 months old is larger than our 17-year-old miniature poodle.

But.. my wife and I had never had a puppy before! We’ve had a couple of dogs (and cats) but they’ve all been a few years old when we adopted them. Anyone who has had a puppy probably understands what these last months have been like! Constantly watching where he is… “puppy-proofing” the entire house… constantly watching where he is… stopping him from eating everything… trying to train him a bit… constantly watching where he is… trying to prevent him from always attacking our 17yo dog… stopping him from eating whatever… oh, and constantly watching what he’s doing. It’s been… exhausting!

Basically like having a newborn child again… only one that can run fast all over and has sharp teeth! 😀

But in the end… he’s a wonderful addition and we’ve come to love him dearly. He’s curled up against my foot as I write this… and tomorrow night you’ll find me in a class with him.

While all of this was going on, I was also enrolled as a Climatebase Fellow in a very intense 12-week program of 10-15 hours of sessions each week all related to improving my understanding of the current state of information and science around climate change. As shown in the image below, it covered a very wide range of topics:

A grid of 12 blocks showing the 12 weeks of the program. At the top is the title "Climatebase Fellowship program overview by weeks"

Participating in this fellowship was part of my professional development at my employer, the Internet Society. In the last issue, I pointed to my article about “The Internet and Climate Change” and that continues to be an area of great interest and exploration for me. I’ll undoubtedly write some future newsletters specifically around this whole area.

My interest was mostly to refresh my understanding of current climate thinking. I’ve been involved in “environmental” issues since the 1980s, and was very active in the broader movement in the early 1990s, serving in different volunteer leadership roles for different organizations. But then life took me away from that heavy involvement and my knowledge has aged. I heard phrases like “regenerative agriculture” but didn’t know what they meant. (Now I do!)

It was a good program and I met some great people and enjoyed participating in the community (which I am still doing).

As we came into summer here in Vermont, the Climatebase Fellowship wrapped up, but the intensity of the puppy and work and family and everything else continued.

And then a very cool opportunity was presented to me… at the Internet Society we had a new President and CEO, Sally Wentworth, start on September 1, 2024. Back in July she approached me about taking on a new role that we eventually called “CEO communications” where I’m helping with developing and executing plans across both the Internet Society and Internet Society Foundation for consistent communication from the CEO’s office internally, externally, and with our community and partners.

I formally took on this role on September 1 (and mentioned something on LinkedIn later) but began some aspects of it back in August. I’ve known Sally for the 13 years that I’ve been at the Internet Society (she’s been there 15 years) and have deep and great respect for her. So I’ve been excited about the new role, grateful for this opportunity to stretch my own skills in new and different ways… and just… busy! 😀

And now on this 24th day of September… it’s time to get back in the flow again and start creating some content again. There are so many stories to tell… so many changes happening… so much ahead on the horizon… both icebergs to avoid and opportunities to explore!

Time to climb up into that crow’s nest, whip out the spyglass, and get back to looking out ahead at the horizon and sharing what I see!

See you soon!

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Here is some of the content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

  • <nothing!>

[I do still contribute reports to the “monthly” episodes of the For Immediate Release podcast.]

I did publish some new posts for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

More on why so many of them are law-related… in a future newsletter!

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Sep 23

Texas’ Mandatory Age Verification Law Will Weaken Privacy and Security on the Internet

a rusted padlock is open and hanging from a latch. the background looks like blue metal

Texas' mandatory age verification law will weaken Internet privacy and security and will not provide an effective solution to children being exposed to adult content online.

The post Texas’ Mandatory Age Verification Law Will Weaken Privacy and Security on the Internet appeared first on Internet Society.

Jul 19

Global Tech Outage Demonstrates Need for Resiliency in Software Systems

An ATM screen showing no functionality

Today's global outage of many systems was not an Internet outage, but it demonstrates the need for greater resilience in all our technical systems.

The post Global Tech Outage Demonstrates Need for Resiliency in Software Systems appeared first on Internet Society.

Jul 01

US Supreme Court Upholds Right of Websites to Moderate Content 

Photo of the US Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC

In a decision on the NetChoice cases, the US Supreme Court upheld the rights of social media platforms to moderate content.

The post US Supreme Court Upholds Right of Websites to Moderate Content  appeared first on Internet Society.

May 06

Montana’s TikTok Ban: Breaking the Internet and Undermining Online Privacy 

a photo of a field with mountains in the background in Montana

Asking TikTok, Google, and Apple to more intrusively track nearly every American with a cell phone, based on the possibility that a TikTok user might enter Montana, would be a significant invasion of privacy. And yet that is the likely outcome if Montana’s law SB 419 is allowed to take effect.  A law that claims […]

The post Montana’s TikTok Ban: Breaking the Internet and Undermining Online Privacy  appeared first on Internet Society.

Apr 22

AVFTCN 035 – 3 Articles To Read On Earth Day

Today is Earth Day… and when I climb up into that crow’s nest, hold up my spyglass, and look out at the horizon… it can look pretty bleak. It seems like the whole world is on fire in different ways. But amidst the chaos… what gives me hope is seeing people taking action. And they are!

Today I offer you three articles to hopefully provoke some thoughts on this day: one by me and two by others.

”The Internet and Climate Change” – In this article that I published today on the Internet Society’s site, I explored how the Internet is helping address climate change, how the Internet is harming the climate, and how the Internet’s infrastructure is at risk in the face of our changing climate.

I’ve been talking about these topics with many different people, but this article was my first attempt to bring all these thoughts together into one piece. I would love any feedback you have! Was it helpful? Did you learn something? Do you have ideas or pointers to other people working on these topics? Or do you think I have things all wrong? Or are there other articles or papers you think I should read?

Please do let me know any feedback. If you received this via email, you should just be able to reply. If not , you can send it to me at dyork@lodestar2.com .

If you are looking for a speaker or a panelist for a workshop, podcast, webinar, video, presentation, etc. about this whole topic… it’s one I’m looking to spend more time on and I’m eager to engage in discussions about!

“The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud” – in this excerpt from a longer case study for MIT Press, anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate dives DEEP into the data centers that power all the applications and services we use every day. He goes first into energy consumption, offering staggering statistics along the way, including:

The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.

He goes on to talk about the enormous amounts of water required by data centers, and then gets into the noise pollution that affects local communities. His excerpt concludes with a section about the huge amount of electronic waste generated from data centers, and some final thoughts.

If you’ve been looking to understand climate impacts of the apps and services we use, this is a great piece!

”We Need To Rewild The Internet” – This is an amazing article by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon! It’s not about climate change … or anything directly related to Earth Day… but rather it uses the lens of ecology to look at today’s Internet, and to offer suggestions for its future. As they subtitle it:

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

It’s a brilliant piece! I enjoyed it and found it so powerful that I just may have to write an entire newsletter about it. I probably will… but in the meantime I wanted to get this out to you all.

BONUS: One fourth article to wrap on a hopeful note – if you have not read “Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History” from the folks at FutureCrunch, do so now! It’s another amazing piece of writing that gets to the core of the stories we tell … to ourselves… and to everyone else.

With that, I wish you a Happy Earth Day! And… the reminder that really every day must be Earth Day if we are to keep living on this pale blue dot of ours! 🌏

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Here is some of the content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

And new posts I wrote for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Apr 22

The Internet and Climate Change

Two men wiring a power inverter to solar panels amid green mountains.

As we celebrate Earth Day 2024, the world seems to be on fire. Quite literally with some regions battling extreme wildfires, while other regions are drowning under massive flooding. Sea levels are rising, temperatures are climbing, and ice is melting. Amid all of this, it’s worth pausing and thinking about the Internet’s relationship with climate […]

The post The Internet and Climate Change appeared first on Internet Society.