Dan York

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

Author's posts

Dec 03

Initial Thoughts On "Wire", The New Communication App From Ex-Skypers

Wire com 400Another remarkable day in Internet communications! Today brought the launch of "Wire", a "modern communications network" that runs on iOS, Android, Mac OS X and soon in WebRTC-equipped web browsers.

My first thought was naturally - do we really need YET-another-OTT-communication app?

After all, my iPhone is littered with the dead carcasses of so many other apps that have launched trying to be THE communication platform we all want to use. (And indeed I've written about many of them here on this site.)

But what makes Wire different for me from so many other similar apps that have launched (and faded) is really the PEOPLE involved. The news announcement mentions, of course, Skype co-founder Janus Friis as one of the big names behind Wire. Jonathan Christensen is also the co-founder and CEO of Wire. The news post says this:

The company's team comprises former product and technology leaders from Apple, Skype, Nokia, and Microsoft. Christensen held leadership roles at Microsoft and Skype, and was co-founder and CEO at Camino Networks. Along with Christensen, founders include Alan Duric, Wire’s CTO, a co-founder of Telio (Oslo exchange TELIO) and co-founder of Camino (acquired by eBay/Skype); and Priidu Zilmer, Wire’s head of product design, who led design teams at Vdio and Skype. Wire’s Chief Scientist Koen Vos, created SILK and co-created Opus, the standards for fidelity and intelligibility in voice over IP that billions of people use today.

I've known Jonathan over many years from his time at Skype. Alan Duric is a personal friend from the world of SIP, IETF and more. Some of the others are names I've known - and I've been told privately of others who are there, including apparently Jaanus Kase, who was one of the first working on Skype's community relations back in 2006/2007.

It certainly looks like an excellent team!

Does that mean it will succeed? Not necessarily... but it certainly has a far greater chance in my mind than many of the other attempts.

I have a GREAT amount I want to write about with regard to Wire, but for today I just want to write a few initial thoughts.

VERY Minimalist User Interface

When they say that Wire is about "simple, beautiful conversations", they aren't joking about the "simple" part. The user interface is extremely minimalist. All based on gestures and revealing just the information you need.

It's very cool as you get used to it... but it's also a bit non-intuitive - at least for older greybeards like me. At one point I simply wanted to reply in text and wound up calling someone (Alan, as it happened).

It is definitely great to see someone experimenting with a new UI to the degree that they have.

I installed it on both my iPhone 5s and my older iPad2. It worked great on both devices. The iPad, in particular, had a very nice view in the landscape mode. I did not yet install it on my Mac but spoke with several people who did.

Chats With Photos, SoundCloud and YouTube

When you start chatting with someone, it's very easy to add photos. You also could just drop in a link to a SoundCloud sound or a YouTube video and the player would automagically appear in the chat stream. And yes... animated GIFs work, too.

Call Quality - and Chats During The Call

I made several calls today and the quality was excellent. All high-quality voice. Presumably using the Opus codec or something similar. It's great that during the call you still have the full chat capability as I was sharing text and photos with the person I called.

Persistent Group Chats

I was extremely pleased to see how wonderfully well the "group chats" worked. Someone pulled a bunch of us "early adopters" into a chat room and it felt like we were back in 2006 or so in the early days of Skype and many of the early VoIP offerings. A very pleasant experience.

The group chat also synced very nicely between devices. A message I wrote on my iPad showed up just moments later on my iPhone. Others reported a similar experience with the Mac client.

Perhaps best of all the group chats appeared to be persistent group chats. After shutting down the app and then reconnecting later, I seemed to get all the messages that had been exchanged when I was offline. I've written before about the power of persistent group chats in Skype, and it was good to see what looked like something similar here. (Need to do more testing to confirm... but it looked good.)

What's Missing?

I realize today was the first day of the launch and that the product will evolve considerably, but some initial things I found missing:

  • Perhaps the biggest surprise was the lack of video, purely because that seems to be included in almost every other OTT communications app these days.
  • Not having a Windows client also seemed odd, given that they had a Mac OS X client. (Not that this mattered to me personally, but it just seemed odd.)
  • I also missed the ability to edit a message you've already posted.

So Now What?

I'm definitely intrigued by what I see... I'll keep using Wire and will install the Mac OS X client.

There's still the larger issue that this is yet-another-silo-of-communication that is separate from all the other mobile apps and services out there... but that's the topic for another post.

And there's the ever-present "directory" issue, i.e. how will Wire grow the directory of users so that you find the people there that you want to communicate with? But that, too, is a topic for another post. It's not clear, too, what the business model is.

I was also initially intrigued by the idea that Wire might work over IPv6 ... but while the www.wire.com website DOES work over IPv6 (yea!), further examination and network sniffing shows that the traffic going from the application goes to Amazon EC2 servers that are only on IPv4. I'm looking forward to learning more about what might or might not be true here.

All that aside, Wire looks so far like a very cool new entrant into the realm of mobile communications apps... and I'm looking forward to more experimentation and usage in the days and weeks ahead! If you are using Wire (or decide to try it out), please feel free to contact me in the Wire app as "Dan York" or via "dyork@lodestar2.com".

Congrats to Jonathan, Alan, Jaanus and the rest of the Wire team for their launch today!

More Articles To Read

What Do YOU Think?

Have you tried Wire out yet? What do you think? Will you use it?

An audio commentary on this topic is available at:

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

Dec 03

Olle Johansson’s #MoreCrypto V2.0 Slide Deck – With TLS

Olle Johansson is a tireless crusader for bringing about a more secure Internet… and just recently published a new version 2.0 of his “#MoreCrypto” slide presentation that this time incorporates a good bit more information about TLS. He includes some tutorial information about TLS and gives multiple examples of using certificates, including with the DANE protocol.

If you are looking to come up to speed on how we make the Internet more secure as well as why it is important, the deck is very useful.  We do encourage you to check it out!

And when you’re done, why not head over to our “TLS for Applications” area to learn more about adding TLS to your applications?  Or visit our Start Here page to get started with IPv6, DNSSEC, TLS and more?

P.S. Olle is always open to feedback about his slides, too… you can reach him at oej@edvina.net.

Dec 02

TDYR 188 – Testing Out Mozilla’s New Firefox Hello WebRTC App

Today I tested "Firefox Hello", Mozilla's new WebRTC app that is included in Firefox 34. To read more about it, please visit: http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2014/12/how-to-test-firefox-hello-mozillas-new-webrtc-video-call-service.html

Dec 02

How To Test Firefox Hello, Mozilla’s New WebRTC Video Call Service

Wow! Mozilla's new Firefox 34 includes a great new WebRTC-based feature called "Firefox Hello" that lets you call people without requiring them to have an account with Firefox. You simply send them a URL via email, chat or some other method - and they can start calling you from within Firefox.

Here's all you need to do to try it yourself. First, you need Firefox 34, of course. Once you have upgraded or installed the software, you should see a "Hello" button over on the far right side of the browser's top bar:

Firefox hello button

If you don't see this button, as I didn't, you may have to perform the following steps, as documented in a Firefox help page:

1. Open the "Customize" section of the browser to add the "Hello" button to your menu bar:

Firefox customize

2. Drag the "Hello" button to the browser bar or to the drop-down menu.

Now, in my case, that still didn't work and I had to use the additional trick mentioned in the help article of going to http://about:config and changing "loop.throttled" to "false" (simply by clicking on that setting). After restarting Firefox I was then able to go into the Customize window and add the Hello button to the browser.

Initiating A Call

Once the Hello button was visible I just had to click on it to get a URL that I could pass along to someone:

Firefox hello url

I posted it, somewhat ironically, into a Skype chat where a number of us who are "early adopters" of VoIP tech hang out... and Dick Schiferli (of Pamela fame) soon clicked the link. The call request window appeared in the lower part of my Firefox window:

Firefox hello request

The first time we tried Dick was signed in to a Firefox account but I was not. We got an error and the call couldn't connect:

Firefox hello call failure

Now, I don't know if this was a transient error caused by so many people trying it out... or if this was an issue with the "guest" access, but a few minutes later when I was also signed in Dick and I had no problem connecting:

Firefox hello call in browser

And there we were talking!

Cross-Platform Testing

In a good test of cross-platform interop, Dick was using Firefox on Microsoft Windows 8 and I was using Firefox on Mac OS X. The quality both in terms of voice and audio was great. We did notice one interesting difference between the platforms. On OS X I had an arrow that let me "pop out" the Hello window into a separate window that I could then resize and move around my screen:

Firefox hello pop out

There was no way for either of us to simply click a button and make the conversation go "full screen", but with this pop-out window I was able to resize it to take over most of my iMac's screen.

Missing Chat...

Interestingly, one of the things I found missing from our experience was any form of integrated chat. I wanted to share with Dick a link to a screenshot of what I was seeing on my computer and wound up sharing that link through a Skype chat.

I don't know that I need chat... but I found it curious that I would just expect chat to be available. Given that Skype and Google+ Hangouts both offer this, my expectation does make a bit of sense.

Further Testing...

Given that I just created my Firefox account today, I couldn't test the use of contacts as documented in the Mozilla blog post about the beta of Firefox Hello. I look forward to doing so. I also want to go back and try it again when I am not signed in to verify that guest access does indeed work.

All in all I was quite impressed with the ease and quality of this first public release of Firefox Hello!

More info about Firefox Hello and Firefox 34 in general:

An audio commentary about this topic is available on SoundCloud:

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

Dec 02

Google’s IPv6 Traffic Hits 5% Globally, 28% in Belgium, 12% in USA and Germany

Google's IPv6 statistics at 5%

Outstanding news!  Today marked another milestone in the continued evolution of the Internet from the development version based on IPv4 to the production version of the Internet based on IPv6 – Google’s IPv6 traffic statistics showed that global traffic over IPv6 has passed the 5% mark!   Even better, if you go into the per-country IPv6 statistics, you can see the increased growth in IPv6 traffic in countries such as Belgium (28.45%) and the USA (11.85%), Germany (11.88%), Luxembourg (11.38%), Switzerland (9.94%) and a number of others.

As our colleague Phil Roberts writes in an Internet Technology Matters post today, these numbers compare well to what Akamai is showing in their per-country IPv6 traffic statistics.  Phil also mentioned the World IPv6 Launch measurements, which break down the measurements on a per-network basis and show even higher levels of IPv6 deployment such as the 59.4% measured on Verizon Wireless’ networks (because of their IPv6-based LTE).  I would add that APNIC’s IPv6 statistics tell a similar story (and use a different measurement technique) – if you scroll down APNIC’s page you’ll see the list of the top countries and the IPv6 connectivity in those regions.

As far as the global 5% measurement, we definitely agree with Phil:

While 5% might not seem like a large percentage, it’s a big step on the path to IPv6 becoming the prominent Internet Protocol on the Internet, and billions more people and devices being able to connect to an Internet that works like the one we’ve enjoyed and benefitted from so far. And that’s worth celebrating.

Anyone who still doubts that IPv6 will ever happen in their lifetime clearly isn’t reading the statistics!  That graph is going up and to the right… and if you look at the fact just two years ago the % was under 1%… the deployment IS happening!

What about you?  Are your networks, services and applications ready for IPv6?  If you haven’t started yet, definitely check out our Start Here page to find resources for your type of role or organization.  And please let us know if you need more information – the time to make the move is TODAY!

Dec 01

A Blog Post A Day For December 2014 – #Finish2014Strong

Over the weekend I decided that I'd set myself the personal challenge of "finishing strong" in 2014 with publishing at least one post across my various different sites for each day of December 2014.

Why?

Well... I started out strong at the beginning of 2014 publishing content very frequently. In fact, I published a post a day on the Deploy360 site for the entire first quarter, mostly just again as a personal challenge. But then as the year went on I haven't been been as consistent.

In running, we talk about "finishing strong"... about trying to keep a little bit of energy in reserve so that you can have a final boost of effort as you get close to the finish line.

With that idea, I'm setting my own personal goal to finish 2014 in a strong way from a content creation / publishing point of view.

My idea is that I'll publish at least one post every day of December, including weekends - and I'll also tag it at least on Twitter with the hashtag #Finish2014Strong. There are others using that hashtag, too, and for similar reasons and ideas, it seems.

I'm writing about this publicly, of course, because if I put it out there in front of all of you reading this... well... I kind of need to follow through on it, eh?

Any of you are welcome to join me! Let's finish 2014 strong from a writing point of view!

TWO Posts A Day, Really

In truth, my goal will really be TWO posts a day. One will be on the Internet Society Deploy360 blog where I am, in fact, employed to be writing every day:

The other post each day will be on at least one of my various different personal sites, including:

  • Disruptive Conversations - how the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, virtual worlds, etc. are changing the way we communicate
  • Disruptive Telephony - how Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is fundamentally changing the technology we use to communicate
  • CircleID - a site focused on Internet infrastructure where I occasionally contribute articles
  • Code.Danyork.com - a place where I write about programming/developer topics, typically outside the realm of communications/telephony.
  • Voice of VOIPSA - a group weblog from the Voice Over IP Security Alliance on voip security issues
  • Monadnock Curling Club - a site focused on bringing the sport of curling to southwestern New Hampshire
  • DanYork.com - my "personal" site where I write about topics that don't fit in my other sites.
  • Migrating Applications to IPv6, a book published by O'Reilly in June 2011
  • Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks, a book on VoIP security published by Syngress in April 2010

A large part of why I'm doing this is that I haven't been writing very consistently on my personal sites... and I'd like to change that. This is just a personal challenge to see if I can do this.

Quality versus Quantity

A reaction I've heard to this idea is that the quantity doesn't matter if what you do is simply push out a bunch of rather lame half-baked posts. You know the type... a post with one or two sentences that effectively says "Hey, look at this cool new thing..." and then points to another site or article. Or a post that effectively "excerpts" almost an entire other article.

That is very much a challenge with any of these kind of "blog post a day" kind of things... and my goal is definitely NOT to do that.

I want both quality AND quantity!

And the reality is that I have a looooonnnngggg queue of articles I'd like to write - and I need to clean out that queue! In particular, I have a number of more thoughtful/inspirational pieces I'd like to write, probably for my little-used danyork.com site.

The good news is that with the publishing systems I use I can schedule posts out in advance. I don't need to be writing posts each day. For example, there's Christmas in there... and some weekends where I've got some family activities planned. There may be a couple of nights where I spend a few hours getting a number of posts queued up.

The point of the "1 post a day" idea is not so much to guarantee quantity as to motivate myself to get out there and write!

When January 1, 2015, comes around you'll have to let me know how I do. :-)

Plus An Audio Podcast...

And just to keep life interesting, I'm also going to try to record one of my "The Dan York Report" (TDYR) audio podcasts up on SoundCloud each day. Again, I started the year doing one of these a day... and then slacked off a good bit over the past few months. It is so incredibly easy to record these audio segments... I just need to do it!

(And I recorded one for today already.)

DanYork.me - Tracking The Content I Create

I - and you all - will be able to see what content I create this month at my site where I aggregate all the content I write across various sites:

I use a WordPress plugin to pull in the RSS feeds of all the various places I write and display pointers to them on that site. It's a handy way for me to keep track of what I've written and where. A quick scan down can show what I've done.

Join Me?

Do you, too, want to "finish 2014 strong" from a writing point of view? Do you need some extra motivation to pick up the electronic pen and create some more content?

Please do!

This is just my own personal challenge to myself... written publicly... but I welcome any others who want to #Finish2014Strong - having others out there doing the same thing can be an added inspiration for those times when it would be so much easier to do something else rather than write! :-)

Let's see how this goes!

P.S. On day 1 I'm off to a great start with so far these 5 posts plus the audio podcast:

... let's see how the next 30 days go! :-)

An audio version of this post is available:

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

Dec 01

TDYR 187 – 1 Blog Post A Day In December – #Finish2014Strong

I've set myself a personal challenge to "finish strong" in 2014 and write at least one blog post each day of December. More info at: http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2014/12/a-blog-post-a-day-for-december-2014-finish2014strong.html

Dec 01

FIR #784 – 12/1/14 – For Immediate Release

Black Friday in the US and UK; Quick News: UK ad watchdog raps YouTube stars over Oreo videos, Bell Canada employees offer no disclosure along with 5-star reviews for company app, Nordstrom test fitting room mirrors that turn into interactive touchscreens, Amazon activism is now a thing; Ragan promo, News That Fits: native advertising takes root, Dan York's Tech Report, Flipboard is the next big thing for PR, Media Monitoring Minute from Customscoop, listener comments, a talk with Effective Edge's co-founders, the past week on the FIR Podcast Network, Igloo Software promo, social media is being misused by researchers; music from Shockbox; and more.

Dec 01

Australia (.AU) and Grenada (.GD) Are Latest ccTLDs To Sign With DNSSEC

Today’s DNSSEC Deployment Maps have two great new additions for country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs): Australia’s .AU domain and Grenada’s .GD domain both had their DS record published in the root zone of DNS over the past few days.  What this means is that anyone who has registered a domain in .AU or .GD may soon be able to gain the increased security of signing their own domain with DNSSEC and tying it into the “global chain of trust” of DNSSEC.  To be clear, these two ccTLDs have entered the 4th of 5 stages of DNSSEC deployment where the DNSSEC chain of trust now extends from the root of DNS to the ccTLD itself.  The next “Operational” stage is where the ccTLD starts accepting DNSSEC records from registrants.  Hopefully that time will not be far away for both of these ccTLDs.  (To get ready, please visit our Start Here page to find out how you can prepare your organization to work with DNSSEC.)

Given Australia’s large size on a map, the new “DS in Root” bright green shows up wonderfully in the global view:

Global DNSSEC Deployment map as of 1-Dec-2014

and even better in the Asia Pacific view:

Asia Pacific DNSSEC deployment map as of 1-Dec-2014

Unfortunately with the resolution of our maps you can’t really see Grenada on the Latin America map, but I can tell you that it is one of the six ccTLDs in the “DS in Root” stage in the map:

Latin America DNSSEC deployment map as of 1-Dec-2014

Congratulations to the teams at both ccTLD registries!

In the case of Australia’s .AU, the registry organization, auDA, has been experimenting with DNSSEC since back in 2008 and 2010, and signed the .AU zone back in April 2014 (entering into our “Partial” state on the maps).  The news this past week is the culmination of all that work over several years.  AuDA has also published two pages of interest:

We look forward to learning that auDA is accepting DNSSEC records from .AU registrants and enters the fully “Operational” state.

In the case of Grenada, the first we knew was when the DS record was published in the root zone (seen on stats sites like this one). I couldn’t see any further information on Nic.gd, so I don’t know their further plans at this point.  Regardless, it was a wonderful surprise to learn that .GD was signed and had the DS record in the root zone!

In fact, November was a great month for ccTLDs and DNSSEC with Norway’s .NO signing and Ireland’s .IE signing and also entering the “Operational” state.

All great to see!  We’re looking forward to the day when our DNSSEC deployment maps are all green!

If you want to get started with DNSSEC – or just learn more of what it is all about, please visit our Start Here page to find resources tailored for your type of organization or role.

Dec 01

Cyber Monday: 50% Off Ebook of "Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks"

Oreilly cyber monday 2014Want to lean more about how to increase the security of your unified communications (UC) / voice-over-IP (VoIP) system? Today you have a great opportunity to buy "Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks" and hundreds of other ebooks and videos from O'Reilly and associated publishers at a discount of 50% off or more. Simply go to:

http://oreil.ly/Cyber-Monday

and start shopping! Or you can go directly to the book's page at O'Reilly at:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781597495479.do
As I've mentioned in the past, buying direct from O'Reilly offers multiple excellent benefits, including:
  • DRM-free - no stupidity with license restrictions.
  • Free lifetime access
  • Multiple formats (ex. ePUB, PDF, Kindle, etc.)
  • Free updates
  • Sync with Dropbox and other similar services

... and more!  All you do is enter "CYBERDY" as the promotion code when checking out.  The deal expires on Tuesday, December 2, 2014 at 05:00 US Pacific Time.

P.S. While you are there at O'Reilly, you can also purchase my "Migrating Applications To IPv6" ebook and gain insight into what you may need to do to migrate your UC applications over to IPv6 as the Internet moves increasingly to being based on IPv6.