Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Jul 16
Rough Guide to IETF 90: DNSSEC, DANE and DNS Security
Tuesday at IETF 90 seems to be "DNS Day" with two of the major DNS-related working groups, DNSOP and DANE, both meeting that day and addressing some major topics. There are, of course, other items related to DNSSEC and "DNS security" in general scattered throughout the week - let me walk through what the week looks like...
Dan York
Jul 15
Planning An Organizational Meeting In Early August 2014 (Curling in Keene)
Are you interested in bringing the sport of curling to Keene, NH, and the greater Monadnock region? We are planning to have an organizational meeting in early August 2014 to bring together as many of the people who have already expressed interest – and hopefully more – to talk about the next steps we need to take to move forward with our vision and our plans.
We are finalizing a date and location – if you would like to be included please contact us so that we can be sure to let you know!
Jul 15
Planning An Organizational Meeting In Early August 2014 (Curling in Keene)
Are you interested in bringing the sport of curling to Keene, NH, and the greater Monadnock region? We are planning to have an organizational meeting in early August 2014 to bring together as many of the people who have already expressed interest – and hopefully more – to talk about the next steps we need to take to move forward with our vision and our plans.
We are finalizing a date and location – if you would like to be included please contact us so that we can be sure to let you know!
Jul 15
TDYR #165 – Curling In July, And The Fun And Challenges of Arena Ice
Curling in July? I had that opportunity at the Union Ice Arena in Woodstock, VT, this past Sunday and in this episode I talk about that experience and discuss the challenges of curling on "arena ice"... I also mention our efforts to try to get curling happening in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire where Keene, NH, is located:
http://monadnockcurling.org/
Jul 14
Live Video Stream of IGF-USA On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 (Featured Blog)
Coming up on this Wednesday, July 16, 2014, the 2014 Internet Governance Forum - USA (IGF-USA) will take place at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I'm told by one of the people involved that there are around 500 people currently registered to attend. The agenda looks quite amazing... If you are, like me, unable to attend in person, the good news is that we can follow along through a live video stream... More...
Jul 14
China Telecom Completes IPv6 Test On 4G LTE Network
By way of a news release from ZTE Corporation we were pleased to read about China Telecom’s recent successful testing of IPv6 capabilities on its 4G/LTE network in the Hunan province of China. Given that LTE has been a huge area of growth for IPv6 globally, such as the recent measurement of Verizon Wireless’ network as having over 50% IPv6 deployment, we certainly see LTE as one of the first ways that many people will receive IPv6 in a mobile environment.
Given that ZTE Corporation is a equipment vendor their news release naturally explains how they helped China Telecom, but overlooking the marketing for a moment there are some useful data points in the news release:
The comprehensive weeklong test involved trial users and covered IPv4/IPv6 single- and dual-stack services, billing systems and backend IT infrastructure systems, demonstrating China Telecom’s 4G LTE network to be IPv6-ready.
<snip>
As China Telecom rolls out 4G LTE services nationwide, IPv6 will help the operator manage the anticipated explosion in demand for new IP addresses. Becoming IPv6-ready is a key part of China Telecom’s plans for wider 4G LTE network deployments.
<snip>
This successful IPv6 test fully verified the IPv6/IPv4 dual-stack capabilities of China Telecom’s 4G LTE network in Hunan, laying a solid foundation for the operator’s plans for wider deployment of 4G and other next-generation services in the future.
All great to see. Beyond a “test”, of course, we look forward to seeing the full deployment of IPv6 across China Telecom’s 4G LTE network!
Are you looking to get started with deploying IPv6? Or just simply understanding more about IPv6? Please see our “Start Here” page to find resources focused on your type of organization – and please let us know if you need even more information.
Jul 14
FIR #764 – 7/14/14 – For Immediate Release
Quick News: Twitter's analytics dashboard, gaming Google Maps, unfollowing/muting/ignoring people on every social network, threats to the Internet; Ragan promo; News That Fits: should companies provide media as a service?, Michael Netzley's Asia Report, report on ethics of wearable technology debate, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, the disconnect between bloggers and communicators, Dan York's Tech Report, Igloo Software promo, last week on the FIR Podcast Network; music from Tauk; and more.
Jul 11
WordPress.Com Restores Ability To Add Media When Using New Post Window
Last week people in one of the various web forums I'm in started complaining about the new "WordPress" user interface for posting and how they couldn't easily add images or access their Media Library. I and others were completely confused because nothing had changed in our WordPress installations.
It turned out to be that the people were using the WordPress.COM hosted service while we with no problem were using self-hosted WordPress on our own servers. (What Automattic folks call "WordPress.ORG" software.)
I still have a WordPress.Com account and so I logged in and hit the "New Post" button and... sure enough... there was a brand new user interface. Well... first there was a "Beep Beep Boop" :-) :
And THEN the editing window appeared:
And yes, indeed, there was no way to add an image! You could create a "gallery", but there was no way to add a single image. Nor could you get to your Media Library to add an existing image! There was also nothing on the WordPress.com main blog or in the support forums - although there were many threads asking about this.
You could still add media to a post by going into your Dashboard and then doing "Posts -> Add New" to get to the traditional editing window, but this "new" window was the default if you just clicked the link at the top of the admin window.
I found this quite bizarre and even talked about this in my report into last week's FIR podcast episode.
I went as far as opening a new topic in the WordPress.com support forums where it was confirmed on July 5th that there was no way to add media.
But two days later on July 7th a post to that topic alerted me to the fact that the "Add Media" button was back... and indeed it is:
So all seems well and people can get back to adding media from the window.
I still haven't seen any explanation other than that the team is "working on some updates and changes". I would hope that in the future if they are going to remove something big like this they'd give people a bit more of a clue... but... by the same token I commend the WordPress.com team on all they regular work they keep doing to that site. While I use self-hosted WordPress software, I do recognize that many of the changes and improvements to that software first get tested out on the WordPress.COM hosted service.
Anyway, if you were frustrated about this last week... it's back! All is good now. :-)
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Jul 11
CloudFlare Releases Open Source CFSSL, a TLS/SSL Toolkit
Yesterday the folks over at CloudFlare introduced their “CFSSL” toolkit for working with TLS (SSL) certificates. Their blog post explains what CFSSL is all about, and they have also made the code available along with further documentation on Github: https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl
This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, their blog post has some excellent diagrams outlining the challenges with ensuring that a TLS certificate is able to be validated by a web browser. The author Nick Sullivan points out that different browsers trust different numbers of Certificate Authorities (CAs) – and that older browsers may not trust newer CA certificates. He outlines the need to create “certificate bundles” that include multiple TLS chains. The key point of all of this is to make it so that your TLS certificate is accessible to the widest range of browsers and systems.
As a tutorial alone, the post is a good read.
It also highlights the complexity (some might say “brokenness”!) of the current CA system and why many folks are looking for mechanisms to add more trust into the system (the DANE protocol being one of those potential mechanisms).
The post also explains their CFSSL tool which is available for anyone to use. While it is not exactly a TLS library, like some of the other tools we’ve highlighted in our TLS for Applications area, the source code is available and some developers may find it of use. I found it interesting that the tool could also be used to create your own CA and generate your own certificates. This might be useful for people looking to do additional testing or to run their own CA for their own purposes.
Regardless of what you may do with the toolkit, kudos to CloudFlare for making it available under a permissive open source license and for providing the documentation they do. I hope it will help some folks out there make the Internet more secure!
