Dan York

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

Author's posts

Feb 25

FIR #692 – 2/25/13 – For Immediate Release

Trying Diigo as Delicious alternative; Quick News: New York Times digital innovations, why podcasting should be the PR consultant's best friend, slow video dooms views, ad creep reaches thighs of young Japanese women; Ragan promo; News That Fits: 2012 Inc. 500 social media report, Michael Netzley's Asia report, CIPR's state of the profession, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, how Maker's Mark turned a social media smackdown into a win, Dan York's report, Google penalizes UK sites that sell links; music from David Cyr; and more.

Feb 22

Canada Joins The DNSSEC World – Sign Your .CA, Eh?

Toy beaver from .CACongratulations to our friends up North in Canada for the DNSSEC signing of the .CA domain, joining the ever-growing list of top-level domains (TLDs) that are securing their DNS records with DNSSEC!  As Jacques Latour of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) outlined in a CIRA blog post they took some time to ensure their system was resilient:

We wanted to create a comprehensive DNSSEC validation process, so we took a different approach to sign .CA that takes into account several known DNSSEC-related issues that affect its operation. Our approach addresses these issues, and we believe we have developed a resilient solution that will result in high availability/no outages.

We created dual independent signing engines using Bind and OpenDNSSEC. There were a few challenges along the way. For example, Bind and OpenDNSSEC produce different, although valid signed zone files and both handle signing differently. These challenges, though, were worth overcoming. The end product will not only be an improved system for .CA, but we’re blazing a new trail here – the global Internet community will benefit from this work.

It’s great that CIRA went through this effort and we look forward to learning from them as they share more information about what they did.

Now, publishing the signed .CA zone is just the first step in enabling DNSSEC for .CA domains.  They still have some work to do before they can begin accepting DS records from registrars that support DNSSEC.  Their stated goal is to complete that work this year so that in 2014 they can begin accepting signed domains.

In the meantime, we’ve been told that people who can sign and host their .CA domains can contact CIRA at  cira-dnssec@cira.ca to find about how to manually get their DS record into the .CA zone.

This is great work and we look forward to seeing more about DNSSEC and .CA over this year.  CIRA has published a DNSSEC page with information. Over on Dark Reading, David Schwartzberg also wrote about Canada joining the DNSSEC party.

Congrats, again, to Jacques Latour and the whole team at CIRA!

P.S. And yes, I did pick up the toy beaver in the photo from a .CA booth at a conference… having lived in Canada for 5 years I enjoy that the .CA team can have some fun with some of the Canadian stereotypes. :-)

Feb 22

SANS Seeking IPv6 Security Stories/Tools For “IPv6 Focus Month” In March

ISC Diary LogoGot an IPv6 security problem you’d like to share? A solution to an IPv6 security problem that you want to tell others about? If so, the team behind the Internet Storm Center (ISC) would love to share your stories as part of their IPv6 Focus Month they are planning for March 2013.  Johannes Ullrich of the SANS Technology Institute (the organization behind the ISC) wrote that they are seeking articles about:

  • a security problem you ran into with IPv6
  • a solution to a security problem (even better)
  • a tool that works really well (or not at all) with IPv6
  • a way to solve an IPv4 security problem by switching to IPv6

Articles – or just ideas – can be submitted via the ISC contact form or to handlers@sans.edu.

We applaud this initiative from SANS and we look forward to seeing what IPv6 security stories they highlight in March – and we may do what we can to further help spread the news about tools and services they promote.

If you’ve got an idea, please do send it in to the ISC team – it’s great to get more info about IPv6 security out there!

Feb 20

SourceForge Redesigns Itself To Compete With Github

sourceforgeWhen I received an email today telling me that one of my ancient projects was being “upgraded” to the “new” SourceForge developer platform, I had to admit that I had no clue that SourceForge was even launching a new platform.

But sure enough, “The Next SourceForge” is out with a host of redesigned features that do look nice… and do remind me of everything that I currently use over on Github!

Of course, the project being “upgraded” is a small python app called “viewportfolio” that I wrote back in 2000 during the height of the .COM insanity when Red Hat’s stock had exploded and the tech bubble was all around us.

I last touched the code over 12 years ago!

I have no clue if it actually still works – and to be quite honest if I were to do anything with that app today, even to test it and make any fixes, I’d probably move it first to my Github account where I do all my work today.

But back twelve years, SourceForge was THE place where you hosted your project.  Everyone was using “SF” and it was where we all interacted for code.

Then, over time, it became a site so hideously overwhelmed with advertising that it was close to useless to interact with the site. And, well, more and more people started using the git version control system and for quite some time SourceForge seemed to still be wedded to SVN.

So I moved any new projects over to Github, as did many others that I knew, and I left SourceForge behind, only occasionally going in there when I needed to find older projects.  Even today, I’m working with someone who has a project on SF, but he’s moving that to Github in the next few weeks where I can work on it with him and where we’ll publicize it.

I applaud the folks behind SourceForge for launching “The Next SourceForge,” if for no other reason than that I do believe it is healthy to have competition around – and having another competitor for Github (there are several already) is a good thing in that it will continue to encourage innovation among the platforms providing project hosting services.

It’s also great to see the visual redesign of SF – a much cleaner interface and thankfully all the ads that were slathered all over the site seem to be gone.  And these new features do seem to be great improvements for projects hosted on SF.

Will “The Next SourceForge” prompt me to launch new projects on SF?  Or to stop migrating projects away?

Probably NOT.

The reality is that I’m now comfortably ensconced over on Github and I rather like it there. I guess I also trust the people/company behind Github more than I do Dice Holdings, the latest corporate overlord of SourceForge, in terms of being responsive to users and to continuing to improve the user experience.  Now this may be unfair… the folks behind SourceForge may be as equally committed as the folks behind Github… but one is a passionate startup and the other is part of a large publicly-traded company that is ultimately focused on helping connect employers and professionals with each other.

What about you?  Will “The Next SourceForge” get you to open new projects there? (Or to not migrate away?)

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: