Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Aug 25
FIR #770 – 8/25/14 – For Immediate Release
Quick News: a passport app, browser extension exposes natve ads, stats on the most popular apps, podcast suit settled; Ragan promo; News That Fits: does a PR firm need to reflect community demographics?, Dan York's Tech Report, Sky News' digital platform promotes dialog ahead of 2015 election, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, Amtrak's content marketing strategy, the past week on the FIR podcast network, Igloo Software promo, FT introduces Twitter aggregator FT Antenna; music from Winter Harvest; and more.
Aug 18
FIR #769 – 8/18/14 – For Immediate Release
Crisis interview coming this week, Linked Conversations host Chuck Hester appeared on The Social Hour, IABC members take note of cyber-attack on association's servers; Quick News: 10 years of podcasting, Snapchat more popular than Twitter in U.S. 18-34 demographic, Facebook post embeds up 50% since launch of Facebook Newswire, robots can do your jobs, Ragan promo; News that Fits: exploiting Robin Williams tragedy, introducing Dark Social, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, UK news audience shifting to mobile, Igloo software promo, the last week on the FIR Podcast Network, the Ice Bucket Challenge; music from Pretty Visitors; and more.
Aug 15
The DNSSEC Coordination “Breakfast” At IETF90
As has been our practice for the last several IETF meetings, a group of us involved with DNSSEC got together at about 7:30am on Friday, July 25, 2014, at IETF 90 in Toronto to talk about… well… whatever we wanted… but often involving DNSSEC! As usual it was an enjoyable time catching up and learning more about each other… and talking about new ideas and new ways we could do things.
This breakfast included: Shumon Huque, Paul Ebersman, Mike Baer, Dan York (me), Russ Mundy, Frederico Neves and Wes Hardaker.
If you’d like to join into DNSSEC-related activities such as this, please feel free to join the public “dnssec-coord” mailing list where we coordinate plans like this to get together.
And if you’d like to learn more about DNSSEC, please check out our Start Here page to learn more about how to get started!
Aug 14
Watch Live Today – DNSSEC Root Key Ceremony #18
If you are interested in understanding a bit more about how the overall DNSSEC infrastructure operates, you can watch the “Root DNSSEC KSK Ceremony 18″ live today, August 14, 2014, from a data center in El Segundo, California, USA, starting at 12:15pm Pacific time, which is 19:15 UTC. All the information and the link to the live stream can be found at:
https://www.iana.org/dnssec/ceremonies/18
The key ceremonies are part of the activities performed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under its contract to operate the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). As explained on the overview page:
Ceremonies are usually conducted four times a year to perform operations using the Root Key Signing Key, and involving Trusted Community Representatives. In a typical ceremony, the KSK is used to sign a set of operational ZSKs that will be used for a three month period to sign the DNS root zone. Other operations that may occur during ceremonies include installing new cryptographic officers, replacing hardware, or generating or replacing a KSK.
This ceremony today is to use the “master” root Key Signing Key (KSK) to generate a set of Zone Signing Keys (ZSKs) that will then be used until the next key ceremony.
There is a complete script that outlines the overall process that is used by ICANN to perform this operation today. In the interest of transparency there is also a live video stream that will show the entire process and that will be archived for later viewing.
Additionally, during today’s key ceremony there will be a replacement of one of the Cryptographic Officers (COs) who each hold a part of the overall master Root Key. Ed Lewis is ending his term as a CO and is being replaced by Olafur Gudmundsson. There is also a complete script outlining the steps of the replacement process.
The “root key” is at the top of the “global chain of trust” that is used to ensure the correct validation of DNSSEC signatures (for more info see “The Two Sides of DNSSEC“) and so it is critical that the security and integrity of this root key be maintained. Ceremonies such as the one today are a part of that effort. If you are interested in learning more, today is a bit of a peek behind the curtain about how all of this happens…
P.S. If you want to learn more about how to get started with DNSSEC, please visit our “Start Here” page to find resources focused on your type of role or organization.
Aug 14
FIR Live #26 – 8/14/14 – Language Translation for Communicators
A panel discussion on the state of language translation technology, the issues surrounding effective translation, and techniques for translation under different scenarios.
Aug 11
FIR #768 – 8/11/14 – For Immediate Release
FIR Live on August 14; Outbrain interview coming; Quick News: Are you making the most of Tumblr?, Michael Netzley's Asia Report, Okay APP and fake LinkedIn profiles, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, MIT Media Lab to launch Fold platform for news and context, Dan York's Tech Report, Igloo Software promo, the last week on FIR, social outreach in India with created content; music from Powergoats; and more.
Aug 08
Goodbye and Thanks To Our Summer 2014 Intern, Andrew McConachie
All good things must come to an end, it seems, and so we must bid goodbye today to our summer intern, Andrew McConachie. It seems only a short while since Andrew joined our team in May, but in that time he’s done a huge amount of work for our team.
Here’s a quick list of some of the ways he contributed over the past three months:
- Andrew wrote around 60 pieces of content for our site in the form of resource pages, static pages and 20 blog posts with an additional 2 posts to be published next week. Some of his posts were quite in depth such as his recent post about certificate transparency and DANE. He got very much into the spirit of how we operate and even brought us some new and different angles such as today’s post about BGP hijacking and bitcoin.
- We used his post about spoofing of IP addresses to launch our new Anti-spoofing section of our website.
- He helped us a great deal with getting some of the new IPv6 case studies and other information together for the World IPv6 Launchiversary back in June.
- He spent time analyzing our new “Start Here” page and identifying where we have some gaps to fill – and filling some of those gaps.
- As part of that, he built out our initial audience pages for government regulators and representatives – we still have a good bit more content to fill in there, but he gave us a good start.
- He also developed some scripts that helped analyze our site and find all the “resource” pages we have published that weren’t linked from other pages, allowing us to then make all the pages flow better together.
He also did a good bit of work behind the scenes, too, in some ways you wouldn’t know, including:
- Refactoring the code behind our DNSSEC deployment maps so that it is closer to being ready to be made publicly available.
- Helping us test some new tools for issue and project tracking.
… and many other ways. We were quite impressed by Andrew’s ability to jump into some of our topics that are admittedly a bit off the regular IT path and rapidly come up to speed to the point where he could write very well about them.
And now as he heads off for a couple of weeks of enjoying the summer before he heads back to the Berkeley School of Information we do wish him all the best!
You may still see him around here from time to time, though… a couple more of his posts are scheduled to appear and he may contribute from time to time in the future. Meanwhile, you can also keep up with him through his blog and open source software.
Thanks, Andrew, for a great summer of work and for your passion around keeping the Internet open – best wishes with whatever lies ahead!
P.S. If you would be interested in being an intern with our program in the future, please contact our director, Chris Grundemann.
Aug 08
TDYR #169 – The Challenge Of Making Time To Create Content
How do you make the time to create online content? Whether it is audio podcasts like this one, or blog posts... what has been your strategy to make the time to create content?
Aug 07
Awesome News About HTTPS As A Ranking Signal, Google! Now Can We Please Get IPv6 And DNSSEC, Too?
The big news hitting the online marketing world today is that Google has indicated that the use of HTTPS in your web site will potentially help your site rank better in Google’s search results. In other words, the use of a TLS (formerly “SSL”) certificate to encrypt the connection to your website will be one of the signals Google uses to rank results. To be precise, here is the key part of the post:
For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.
Because you almost never get SEO advice directly from Google this was big news today. And even though the post says that fewer than 1% of search engine queries will be helped today by enabling HTTPS, I’ve already seen a ton of associated articles from SEO consultants and others saying that you need to go enable TLS for your site today. (Well, okay, to be honest the ones I’ve seen are all saying to go enable “SSL” but maybe some day we can get everyone to use “TLS”! On that note, kudos to Google for NOT using “SSL” in their article!)
I’m sure that many web hosting providers are similarly getting inquiries from customers today about how TLS can be enabled on their websites.
Naturally we’re pleased to see this news out of Google because the goal of our TLS for Applications area here on Deploy360 is to help people get TLS happening across their sites and services. So to the degree that Google can help drive that deployment of TLS – and wind up getting the whole ecosystem of SEO consultants and marketing/PR people to help drive that deployment – we all win with a more secure Internet!
Of course, our thinking immediately jumps to the next step – what if Google were to say that having a site available over IPv6 would count as a ranking signal? Several people on Twitter suggested exactly that today. Here’s one:
Higher ranking by @google when using SSL is great. Next stop: even higher when reachable over #IPv6? #rankingsignal http://t.co/cizwhuTwh4
— Marɕo Daʋids (@marcodavids) August 7, 2014
Can you imagine how many website owners might suddenly be asking their ISPs and hosting providers how to get IPv6? (Tip to website owners/operators: check our our IPv6 resources targeted to you!)
Or… what if the fact that a web site’s domain was signed with DNSSEC counted as a ranking signal?
@mattcutts What other security-signals are you looking at? DNSSEC?
— Jimmy Wirsborg (@Feldon) August 7, 2014
Can you imagine how many website owners might suddenly be trying to get their domains signed? (Again, we’ve got you covered with some steps you can take.)
How about it, Google? Please? 
P.S. If you do want to get your site or network moved to IPv6 or DNSSEC, please check out our “Start Here” page to find resources focused on your type of organization or role.
Aug 07
Video Interviews of IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) Members (Featured Blog)
Want to know more about what is going on with the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG)? ICANN recently published a set of video interviews with members of the ICG. Here, for instance is the interview with Alissa Cooper who represents the IETF on the ICG... While this is certainly not the complete list of ICG members, it is a good sampling of the variety of people involved with the ICG and does provide a range of different viewpoints into what is going on within the ICG process. More...
