Dan York

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

Author's posts

Feb 20

Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2013 Begins Today In San Diego

ndss-2013The 20th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) began today in San Diego, California, with a program packed full of talks that look fascinating to someone like me with a strong security interest. While there are no sessions specifically focused on DNSSEC or IPv6 listed on the program, there are a range of network security and web security sessions where both technologies could play a role.  For routing resiliency/security I noted that there is one “short talk” tomorrow afternoon on the topic of “Updates from the Internet Backbone: An RPKI/RTR Router Implementation, Measurements, and Analysis” that sounds rather interesting.

Check out the schedules for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to see what is going on each day.  While there isn’t a live stream of the sessions available right now, the papers from past years have been posted (ex. 2012 NDSS) and so you should be able to see the papers once the event is over.  (And we’ll post an update here when the archive is available.)

Meanwhile, if you are there at NDSS I do hope you enjoy the event – and if you aren’t… watch for the news about next year’s session!

Feb 18

Telemark skiing – and Remembering What It Is Like To Be A Beginner Again

Telemark skiing - and Remembering What It Is Like To Be A Beginner Again by Dan York

Feb 18

FIR #691 – 2/18/13 – For Immediate Release

Schoenberg interview is up; Quick News: Defense contractor releases software to track people via social media, Twitter kills Posterous, American Express enables purchases via hashtag, TD B ank in Google+ local pages; Ragan promo; News That Fits: what do corporate directors and senior managers know about social media?, Dan York's report, European horsemeat scandal widens and deepens, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, is real-time marketing now a requirement?, does Augmented Reality work for PR?; music by Strangefolk; and more.

Feb 15

Ending A Time Of Quiet And Returning To Action

Internet Society Deploy360 ProgrammeAs you’ve perhaps noticed, it’s been basically two weeks since we last posted anything to the Deploy360 site and I thought I’d just take a moment to explain the quiet time. On the afternoon of February 1, 2013, we had a short outage of the site and while it was only offline for a brief period, the experience highlighted a couple of weaknesses we had in our setup both in terms of technology and process. We took some time to analyze the issues and to make some changes, and I’m pleased to report that the site is now running on a new server in a different architecture and we’ve made a number of other changes as well behind the scenes.

As we were working through this analysis and change, we deliberately wanted to not attract large numbers of visitors to the site and so we put a pause on publishing new content.  While we still have a few more changes we may be making in the weeks ahead, we’re ready to get back in action and so you’ll start seeing new posts and resources coming out from us starting today!

Feb 11

FIR #690 – 2/11/13 – For Immediate Release

Schoenberg interview this week, enhancements to FIR Google+ Community page, BBC trials trainee communicators' programme, journalists taking refuge in branded content, new Forrester predictions, site plagiarizes and files DMCA takedown notice, Ragan promo, Technorati's 'State of Digital Influence 2013', Michael Netzley, horsemeat crisis in the UK, Media Monitoring Minute, listener comments, the state of measurement, Dan York, freedom of speech and responsibility and the law, music from Q, and more.

Feb 06

WebRTC Passes Huge Milestone In Rewiring The Web – Video Calls Between Chrome and Firefox

WebrtcThis week the WebRTC/RTCWEB initiative passed a HUGE milestone in adding a real-time communications layer to the Web with achieving interoperability between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Google and Mozilla celebrated with a pair of blog posts:

They also published the video I've embedded below. On the surface, the video doesn't appear terribly exciting: two guys having a basic conversation over video. But consider this:

  • The video conversation was initiated from within web browsers.
  • There were NO plugins used... no Flash, Java or anything else.
  • The entire conversation was securely encrypted.
  • The call used "wideband audio" (also called "HD audio") to provide a much richer experience that far exceeds any kind of conversation you can have on traditional telecom and mobile networks.
  • The call did not have to involve any external telecom networks or services and could have been initiated directly from one browser to the other. (I don't know exactly how they set up this call.)

And perhaps most importantly:

Any web developer can now create this kind of real-time communication using a few lines of JavaScript and other web programming languages.

As I'm said before, WebRTC will fundamentally disrupt telecommunications and add a real-time communications layer to the Internet that is based on open standards and is interoperable between systems. Creating applications that use voice, video and chat is being removed from the realm of "telecom developers" and made truly accessible to the zillions of "web developers" out there.

Congrats to the Google and Mozilla teams... this is a huge step forward for WebRTC!

You can see the video below... and if you are a developer interested in playing with WebRTC further, both the Google and Mozilla blog posts offer pointers to source code. The team over at Voxeo Labs also released a new version of their Phono SDK yesterday with WebRTC support that may be helpful as well.

UPDATE #1: The discussion threads on Hacker News related to the Google and Chrome blog posts make for quite interesting reading and provide many additional links for exploration:

UPDATE #2: Over at Forbes, Anthony Wing Kosner weighed in with a similar piece and proved he can write far more poetic headlines than mine: Google And Mozilla Strike The Golden Spike On The Tracks Of The Real Time Web

UPDATE #3: And over on No Jitter, Tsahi Levant-Levi gets the "wet blanket" award for dampening enthusiasm with his post: WebRTC Browser Interoperability: Heroic. Important. And...Expected

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

Feb 04

Oracle Buys Acme Packet For $2 Billion To Gain SIP Session Border Controllers (SBCs) And More

AcmepacketFascinating news today out of Oracle that they have purchased Acme Packet in a transaction estimated to be around $2 billion US. For those of you not really tracking the VoIP security space, Acme Packet is probably the world's largest vendor of "session border controllers (SBCs)", devices that are used to securely and reliable interconnect VoIP networks. SBCs also provide a very important role in helping with interoperability of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling between the SIP products and networks of different vendors.

As Andy Abramson writes, the fascinating aspect of this acquisition is this:

This is an interesting grab by one of the tech world's true giants because it sqaurly puts Oracle into a game where they begin to compete with the giants of telecom, many of whom run Oracle software to drive things including SBC's, media gateways and firewall technology that's sold.

This acquisition does put Oracle VERY firmly into the telecom sector at a carrier / large enterprise level, as Acme Packet's products are widely used within that tier of companies. As the news release notes:

"The company's solutions are deployed by more than 1,900 service providers and enterprises globally, including 89 of world's top 100 communications companies."

Acme Packet has also long been recognized as a leader by analyst firms such as Gartner. People from Acme Packet, in particular Hadriel Kaplan, have also been extremely involved with industry efforts such as the SIP Forum and standards activity in the IETF.

As far as integration, Oracle already has a wide array of "communications" products, including several unified communications (UC) products that could potentially interact with Acme Packet products extremely well. Beyond all of that, though, this acquisition will have Oracle being a strong player in providing telecom infrastructure as we continue to collectively move to basing all our communications on top of IP.

Congratulations to my friends at Acme Packet and Oracle... and I wish them the best as they proceed down the path to completing this acquisition.

More information here:

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

Feb 04

FIR #689 – 2/4/13 – For Immediate Release

FIR app issue resolved; Schoenberg interview on hold; Quick News:companies failing to accommodate shift to mobile, IBM security tool can flag disgruntled employees, YouTube introducing paid subscriptions, Swedish bloggers commot to 50,000 posts in 100 days; Ragan promo; News That Fits: closing the gap between social media use and usefulness, Dan York's report, three social media kerfuffles, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, three social media kerfuffles, Ryanair's comms chief to eschew social media, Quora and others introduce new blogging tools; music from epic; and more.

Jan 28

Next SIPit Test Event Feb 18-22 – Deadline of Feb 4 For Registration

SipitAre you a vendor of SIP-based products and services? Do you have software or hardware (or cloud-based products) that use SIP? If so, are you planning to attend the next SIPit test event planned for February 18-22, 2013, in Raleigh, North Carolina?

The SIPit events are an outstanding place to test your SIP implementations. Where else will you have so many other vendors also testing their equipment? It's a great place to go, test... and iterate your code even while you are there so that you can test again.

The registration deadline is Feb 4, 2013 for SIPit 30, so you need to act soon if you want to attend.

Olle Johansson posted a great set of slides about why you should go to SIPit:

And reaching back to 2009, here's a video interview I did with Robert Sparks about the SIPit test events:

If you are a vendor of SIP products or services, I would strongly encourage you to consider attending the next SIPit. It's a great way to make sure your SIP works as best as it can.

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

Jan 28

FIR #688 – 1/28/13 – For Immediate Release

Welcome new listeners, Francis Ingham interview is up, Allan Schoenberg interview is coming; today is data Protection day; Quick News: introducing Vine, social branding is key to reputation, Pope urges evangelism via Twitter, Pew says libraries still have a place; Ragan promo, News That Fits: 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, Michael Netzley's Asia report, listener comments, Boeing communicates with customers during crisis, Dan York's report, lack of social participation could lead to disenfranchisement; music from Steph Barrak; and more.