Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Nov 29
Syria Disconnects From The Internet (Featured Blog)
This morning brought word that all Internet connections into Syria had been severed. Internet monitoring firm Renesys was among the first to report the news in a blog post that they have continued to update. That news was subsequently confirmed by other sites and services... Multiple reports indicate that all Internet, cell phone and landline connections to all or most of the country have been severed. More...
Nov 29
Skype 4.2.1 for iPad/iPhone Brings Microsoft Integration, Chat Interop, Better IM Features
Skype today brought its increased integration with Microsoft services to the iPhone and iPad with the new release 4.2.1 available in the iOS AppStore. As you can already do in the Windows, Mac and Android versions of Skype, the big feature is that you can now sign in with your "Microsoft account" and merge our Skype contacts with those from Windows Live Messenger (WLM) and Outlook.com. You will now be able to chat back and forth with your WLM contacts directly from within Skype.
This is very cool from the point-of-view that Skype has always been a "walled garden" of instant messaging (IM) that did not interoperate with any other service. Many of us long ago wound up having to use two IM clients on our system: 1) Skype; and 2) a multi-service client (like Adium or Pidgin) for all the other IM networks. This doesn't quite solve that problem because it is now really just expanding the Skype client to work with two IM networks, but it is at least a step toward greater interop.
In a post on Skype's "Garage" blog, Beom Soo Park indicates these new features:
- Sign in with your Microsoft Account to merge your Windows Live Messenger, Outlook.com and Skype accounts - then IM those contacts direct from Skype.
- Ability to edit and delete instant messages
- Choose an emoticon while typing an instant message via a new emoticon picker
- Animated emoticons for devices with a Retina display
- Edit phone numbers from the dial pad
- Create a new Skype account when you download the app
- UI improvements
Skype's post on their "Big Blog" has a bit more detail and mentions that Skype for iOS has now been downloaded over 120 million times. The improvements to the chat interface, particularly the editing, will definitely be useful. I personally don't really care about the improved emoticons, but I know some people do like those and will be pleased.
My only criticism is that in order to make use of the Microsoft integration you have to log out of your Skype account and then login with your Microsoft account, at which point you presumably can merge the accounts. It's not a big deal to me, as I don't use a "Microsoft account" these days. I certainly did have a WLM login that I used to use years ago, but I haven't used it in years and don't really feel any compelling need to do so. Still, it would be nice if the Microsoft account could just be added to your existing Skype login as you can do in so many other IM clients.
Anyway, Skype 4.2.1 for iOS/iPad/iPhone is now out there and ready for download from the AppStore.
P.S. If you installed Skype 4.2 yesterday, you'll need to go back to the AppStore today to get Skype 4.2.1 as there were some critical bugs that were fixed in 4.2.1.
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Nov 28
Can A Blog Post Be A "Work In Progress"?
Are we stuck with the mental model of blog posts as pieces of content that are just published and then not touched again?
Or can we treat a blog post as a "work in progress" that will continue to evolve and expand over time?
I have been asking myself this question in relation to my quest to tear down some of my own barriers to doing more blogging. The model that we have had since the early days of blogging has been one more similar to traditional news media - you write an article, you publish it, you move on to your next article.
You "fire and forget."
Sure, you might go back and update the article if something was wrong or if later information changed the story a bit, but even in the latter case it is often more common to write a new story with the updated facts and then link to the new story from the old one.
But what if we just posted a blog post as a first draft knowing that it would change and evolve over time?
Almost something more like a wiki. ... perhaps a "blicki" :-)
Where you post knowing full well that you will be editing... and then you do so.
Interestingly, I have been seeing news sites doing this. In the rush to be the first one out with a story to get the tweets and retweets and links, they will publish a stub story with "more details to come" - and then they will in those details in the subsequent minutes and hours.
Can we do that as individual writers though? Can we give ourselves permission to post a partially done piece? And can we have the discipline to go back and update it?
An Implied Contract?
To expand on this a bit (and practice this kind of editing myself), I wonder:
Do we have an implied "contract" with our readers?
Do they expect that the content will not change from when they first read it? Or at least not change dramatically?
Many of us, myself included, seem to feel there is this implied contract and so when we do go back and update a post, we'll often put those updates at the top or bottom of the article with some kind of marker like "UPDATE:" to clearly show what was been updated. Or we will use strikethrough to indicate that text is removed.
But what if we just wove all the updates in together to make a cohesive article?
Would readers find that troublesome?
What if the initial content is only a few paragraphs... and then over time it evolves into a lengthy document going on for several pages?
What about the "integrity" of a piece? If someone else quotes an article or references an article as containing a specific quote or bit of information... but then the article gets modified so that that quote or content is no longer there... what does that mean for the original reference?
For these reasons we tend to think of writing that gets posted online as "fixed"... but what if we move away from that and let posts evolve over time?
What About The Aggregators?
In the comments to this post, Michael Richardson asks "what will my aggregator think?" And indeed that is a good question. Many people read blog posts in aggregators / news readers / other clients that often pull copies of the articles down onto the local system for the user to read. However, once the article is retrieved, the aggregator may or may not go back and retrieve the article again. And so the user may be sitting there reading an article that is now outdated.
Even with my own aggregation site, danyork.me, where I aggregate pointers to all of my writing, I have it set to pull in the RSS feeds from all my sites and store the contents in that WordPress site. (The site is not indexed by search engines to avoid "duplicate content" issues.) Now, in the particular syndication plugin I use, I have set it to merge in and overwrite any changes that come in from the RSS feeds. So as I update this post, the changes should be reflected over on that site. But I don't believe that was the default setting. I think the default was to ignore any changes in the RSS feeds... so the aggregation site would be out-of-sync with the real content.
For all these reasons, it's not clear to me that we should move away from the way we work today. But could we?
I don't know... it's a shift in thinking.
What do you think?
P.S. You may also be interested in reading "Subcompact Publishing" by Craig Mod. It's a long piece that is exploring a different question, that of our mental model of a "magazine" online, but a similar kind of thought experiment...
Nov 27
Fashion Designer Chris Benz, Copyright, Photography – And Watching The Social Web React
Photographer Jessica Nichols has laid out her case in a lengthy post that begins:
I have been fighting an infringement of my work since July and it is time to share my story. Fashion designer Chris Benz used my Loads of Ranunculus photograph without my permission and without compensation on his Spring 2012 line.
She goes on to show photographs, including one where a reader matched her photograph pretty much identically to one of Chris Benz's purses.
Having received no response from Chris Benz or his sponsors, she has put out a call to action for people to let Benz and his corporate sponsors know what they think through their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. That post was echoed by others and spread into social networks. I saw one such post of support on Google+ where it was spreading virally through friends of mine.
And it's happening... I can see the comments on Chris Benz's Facebook page filling up... and the "Posts by Others" on the Saks and Lancôme pages seem to have posts there.
As a (casual) photographer myself, I certainly understand why Jessica Nichols is upset - and I do hope some resolution can be found sometime soon.
In the meantime, the social web is responding... and unless there is a response from Chris Benz and his sponsors sometime soon, I don't expect it to go terribly well for them...
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Nov 27
BT Releases Survey Results on DNSSEC Deployment
Yesterday BT’s Diamond IP group released their first DNSSEC Industry Survey Results that resulted from a survey of 120 participants from around the world in October 2012. The key findings they report in the executive summary include:
- Only 13 per cent of respondents have deployed DNSSEC signed zones in production and another five per cent are in the process of deployment. Even fewer have configured their caching recursive servers for DNSSEC validation with eight per cent having production deployments and another nine per cent progressing in deployment.
- Despite modest deployments, nearly two-thirds of respondents agree or strongly agree that DNSSEC can provide organizational benefits and that DNSSEC technology is mature enough to deploy reliably. On the other hand, over half of respondents agreed that DNSSEC provides limited value until more validating resolvers are deployed, highlighting the “chicken and the egg” challenge for DNSSEC deployment.
- Respondents generally agreed but were a bit unsure about supplementing DNSSEC deployments with hardware security modules (HSMs) with nearly half being neutral and over a third agreeing.
- Leading obstacles to DNSSEC deployment were complexity of deployment and the inability to demonstrate a strong business case. Training issues and complexity of ongoing DNSSEC management caused concern as well.
- Because DNSSEC requires knowledge of both DNS and cryptography to some degree, education and training programs may help improve industry awareness of the operation, benefits, and administrative requirements for deploying and maintaining DNSSEC secured resolution.
Most all of which is much inline with what we’ve seen in our own research and in fact the latter two points were precisely why we created the Deploy360 Programms – to get that kind of deployment information and education more widely known so that we can get DNSSEC more widely deployed.
I was particularly interested in the results on page 5 that asked about the value of DNSSEC. Some of the answers were interesting – and also point to areas in which we as an industry need to provide better information to help people understand the value. The “Top obstacles to DNSSEC deployment” chart on page 6 also agreed quite well with what we’ve heard from others.
One interesting question I’d not seen asked on other surveys about DNSSEC was about who would be responsible for the company’s DNSSEC implementation (page 8), with an interesting split between the “DNS” and “security” groups, highlighting an additional internal management challenge that may get involved with deploying DNSSEC:
The division makes a good bit of sense in that DNSSEC is something that you could see being in the area of responsibility of either of those groups, depending upon whether the company/organization views it as primarily a DNS issue or a security issue.
There were a number of other interesting charts as well as a section at the end with the demographics behind the survey.
With any survey like this, you do have to consider the source and BT Diamond IP is a vendor of products related to DNS, DNSSEC and IPAM. Having said that, though, the results are in line with what we’ve seen in other surveys and are a welcome contribution to the ongoing discussion around DNSSEC deployment. I’d love to see more of these type of surveys coming out with data from other demographics, regions, etc.
Thanks to BT Diamond IP for doing this research and also for making it publicly available without requiring a registration form for access.
Nov 26
FIR #679 – 11/26/12 – For Immediate Release
Quick News: Amazon Pages, authenticity on Twitter, the role of RSS, social monitoring and industrial espionage; Ragan promo; News That Fits: 3D printing, Michael Netzley's Asia report, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, respect for PR, listener comments, QR code best practices, TemboSocial promo, Dan York's report, content is king again; music from Burning Shapes; and more.
Nov 26
Slides – Comcast’s Lessons Learned In Implementing DNSSEC
What lessons did Comcast learn in rolling out DNSSEC validation to their 18 million subscribers in the US? Did they have to make any changes to their network? What happened as they scaled up their deployment?
These were some of the many questions addressed by Comcast’s Chris Griffiths at the ICANN 45 DNSSEC Deployment Workshop on October 17, 2012, in his presentation titled, “DNSSEC Activities in North America: Comcast“.
Chris outlined how Comcast began working with DNSSEC and where it is today, but more importantly he highlighted questions that network operators need to be thinking about and discussed some of the issues they have seen. He also mentioned Comcast’s site at http://dns.comcast.net/ where they are now listing sites that are experiencing DNSSEC problems.
At the end, Chris highlighted some of the challenges they still see, such as dealing effectively with load balancers and content distribution networks, as well as solving the upload of DS records to many different registrars.
The slides are well worth reviewing and if you want to hear Chris’ presentation, the audio recording of the entire day is available from ICANN’s website (you’ll just need to jump ahead to Chris’ section).
We definitely appreciate that not only is Comcast deploying DNSSEC, but they are also having people like Chris go out and speak at technical forums about what they have done. Sure, it’s good publicity for them, but the information that they have learned is immensely valuable to share as a case study, and will only help expand the deployment of DNSSEC.
Now, we just need to see more network operators giving case study presentations like this! 
Nov 26
50% Off All O’Reilly IPv6 Ebooks TODAY On CyberMonday
Given that today is “Cyber Monday” the folks at O’Reilly are naturally joining in and offering a 50% discount on ALL their ebooks and discounts. All you need to do is go visit:
where you can learn more. Basically, you can use the discount code “CYBERDAY” when you check out – anytime up until 11:59 pm US Pacific time tonight.
You can naturally order “Migrating Applications To IPv6 or any other IPv6-related ebook… although in truth you can use the code for ANY ebook.
The great thing about buying from O’Reilly is that all ebooks are DRM-free, so you are not locked in to using them on any particular devices.
If you are looking for some good technical ebooks, today is a great day to do some shopping!
Nov 26
WordPress 3.5 Nears Completion – First Release Candidate Now Available
As noted in both posts, as well as the WordPress 3.5 schedule, the goal is to go through a couple more release candidates and then have the final release on December 5, 2012 - only 9 days away!
Whether or not the core team hits that goal will really depend upon how much testing they get (and they are looking for more people to test WP 3.5!) and what the status of the major issues are as the date draws closer.
For communicators/marketers, WordPress 3.5 continues the ongoing series of improvements to the WordPress "user experience" to make it even simpler and easier to use. I don't know that anything in 3.5 necessarily rises to the "MUST HAVE IT NOW!" category, but certainly the improvements look good. I am particularly interested in the rewritten media subsystem that will apparently allow for much simpler insertion and handling of images. One thing that has always bothered me about WordPress' media handling was the dialog boxes around setting a "Featured Image". From the tickets, this seems to be one of many improvements.
New WordPress Multisite Goodness
Another feature I'm looking forward to for new installations is the ability to set up WordPress Multisite in "subdirectory" mode versus "subdomain" mode. To date, Multisite has only worked when you used a subdomain as the base for all blogs. For instance, you might base the blog at:
blogs.example.comand then your individual blogs would be:
blogs.example.com/blog1
blogs.example.com/blog2
blogs.example.com/blog3
...This works fine (and is still in 3.5), but if you want to integrate your blogs into an existing web site, you weren't able to easily use Multisite. Now, with 3.5, you will be able to install WordPress Multisite into a subdomain, so that your base can be:
www.example.com/blogs/and then your individual blogs can be:
www.example.com/blogs/blog1
www.example.com/blogs/blog2
www.example.com/blogs/blog3
...This then allows you to continue using your main domain for SEO or branding purposes, but still have all the power of WordPress Multisite with regard to letting different groups have their own blogs with separate users, access control, etc. ... and all the other goodness you get from Multisite.
Now, this option can only be chosen when installing WordPress Multisite, so it doesn't help existing installations... but any new servers can be spun up in this mode if that works better.
The Normal Caveats Apply...
If you want to know more of the details of what will be in WordPress 3.5, the Beta 1 announcement had all sorts of good info. There's also a ticket with a rough list of changes in 3.5. All of that info should eventually make its way to the Codex page on WordPress 3.5 as the release date nears. There are some really good changes for developers that ought to improve WordPress performance and help in so many other ways.
You should, of course, not just drop WordPress 3.5 onto your production site, even after it has been fully released. There are changes to the underlying systems and so you should really test it with your theme(s) and plugins to make sure that they all work before you make it live. You also of course want to backup your system and make sure that you have the ability to restore if you need to do so.
WordPress also has a "WordPress Beta Tester" plugin for the more adventurous who want to run a site testing out the newest releases. Again, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for production servers given that things will break during the normal course of development. Rather than use that plugin you can also just download the 3.5 release candidate and try it out.
I'm looking forward to seeing what this new release brings and to trying it out on my own systems. Kudos to the development team for their hard work and aggressive schedules!
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