Dan York

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

Author's posts

Jul 11

DNSSEC Policy & Practice Statements (DPS)

Are you responsible for signing your domain with DNSSEC are are looking to understand more of what may be involved?  Are you perhaps with registry or top-level domain (TLD) operator looking to implement DNSSEC across your country-code TLD (ccTLD) or new generic TLD (gTLD)? Or are you with an enterprise seeking to understand the legal and security policies you should have in place if you are signing your own domains?

If so, a great place to start is with the idea of a “DNSSEC Practice Statement” or “DPS.”  A DPS is a document that simply lays out the policies and procedures related to DNSSEC that an organization chooses to implement.  It may be very short and simple – or very long and complex.  The idea is that a DPS can give other people an understanding of how much they can trust your DNSSEC signing.  For someone new to DNSSEC, looking at existing DPS documents can also provide a clear checklist of what you should be thinking about during your implementation.

The best way to get started may be to look at an Internet-Draft titled “A Framework for DNSSEC Policies and DNSSEC Practice Statements”

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-dnssec-dps-framework

This document explains the rationale for a DPS and provides a framework for creating your own.

Alternatively, you may just want to dive into the list of DPS documents below to get an understanding of what these documents are like.  The .SE DPS may be a good place to start, primarily because the .SE team are very involved with the Internet-Draft framework document referenced above.

If you prefer to learn from a video, we have included at the end of this page a 15-minute video from training given by the OpenDNSSEC project in April 2010 where Anne-Marie Eklund-Löwinder from .SE explains the value of a DPS and the components that should be included.

A few notes about the lists below:

  • The lists contain the gTLDs, ccTLDS and RIRs for whom we can find formal DPS documents. Some of the gTLDs, ccTLDs and RIRs who do use DNSSEC are not listed because their domains/zones were signed very early in the DNSSEC rollout before the DPS framework started to become widely used. They may have other DNSSEC deployment information on their sites, but not in the form of a formal DPS.
  • The root of DNS also has multiple DPS documents but they are not explicitly listed below as the root zone is a special case with special precautions. You may find the documents to be an interesting read, though.
  • You will note in the list below that the DPS documents have several different names, but newer documents seem to be standardizing on “DNSSEC Practice Statement.”
  • These lists will continue to be updated as more DPS documents become available. Expect to see them continue to grow as more TLDs sign their domains.

If you are aware of a DPS document we should include, please let us know.

Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs):

Country-code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs):

Regional Internet Registries (responsible for reverse DNS delegations, i.e. in-addr.arpa):

The video below, while from 2010, provides a good introduction to what a DPS is all about:

 

Jul 10

Oracle Buys Facebook-App-Maker Involver

Oracle buys involverIn an intriguing development today, Oracle announced that it will be acquiring Involver, a startup with a platform to help you rapidly build Facebook apps that work with your Facebook Pages.

I first experimented with Involver a year or two ago when I was trying to add some interactivity to a Facebook Page for my previous employer. Involver had some useful options and while the fit wasn't there with what I wanted to do, I did keep monitoring how they were evolving.

No terms of the deal were announced, although TechCrunch is naturally continuing to try to determine the cost. The TechCrunch piece also has some more information about other ways Involver has been used.

How does Involver fit with Oracle? As both the TechCrunch article and a Business Insider article note, Oracle just recently acquired Vitrue, another social media marketing/engagement platform and has made a number of other acquisitions in the "social" space. For their part, Oracle has published a presentation about Involver that shows Oracle's view of how all the pieces fit together:

Oracle and involver

Time will tell if the pieces do all fit nicely together, but in the meantime Oracle is clearly looking to be a player in helping enterprises connect with their customers over social channels.

Congrats to the Involver team and I do hope this all works out well for them - and for their customers.

P.S. Involver's Don Beck published a blog post providing their viewpoint on the acquisition.

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Jul 10

What is an Over-The-Top (OTT) Application or Service? – A Brief Explanation

OttWhat is an "over-the-top" or "OTT" application or service? How does an OTT telecommunications or media app/service differ from a "regular" application?

The answer depends upon your perspective.

For a regular user of the Internet, an "OTT app or service" is something like:

  • YouTube, Hulu, Netflix or Apple TV for streaming video
  • Skype or Facetime for voice/video calls
  • WhatsApp or iMessage for messages on a mobile device
  • Xbox 360 or World of Warcraft for gaming

Basically, any service you are receiving over the Internet that is NOT provided directly by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Of course, for an ISP / telecommunication provider, the critical point about an OTT app/service is the part I emphasized - it is NOT a service you are paying them for.

And they are not happy about this.

It's not clear to me when precisely we in the industry started talking about "over-the-top" applications and services, but I first saw OTT mentioned back in 2008 or 2009 when the term was primarily applied to video services such as those coming from Netflix or Hulu. At the time, major US service providers such as Comcast and AT&T were rolling out their video-on-demand services and were being challenged by these "OTT" providers. Netflix and Hulu provided their service "over-the-top" of your Internet connection, without any interaction whatsoever with your Internet service provider (nor any revenue to that service provider).

Since that time, I've seen "OTT" applied to the zillions of messaging apps that have now sprouted up in the mobile environment to provide an alternative to the costly SMS provided by the traditional telcos. WhatsApp, Apple's iMessage, Blackberry Messenger (BBM), TU Me... and a hundred others that keep popping up on a weekly basis. Some would even lump Twitter and Facebook into this category. (And SMS revenue by telcos are facing a serious decline from the use of these apps. Ovum estimated the decline at $13.9 billon for 2011.)

I've also seen "OTT" applied to VoIP apps such as Skype (whose network overlay architecture I wrote about previously). And now we have Apple's Facetime and a hundred startups like Viber, Voxer, Tango, etc.

Recently I saw a document that painted "OTT" even more broadly as a term applying to any "content provider" on the Internet, i.e. basically everyone publishing content in any form.

The key point of all of this is that the OTT apps/services do not come from the traditional telcos or Internet service providers.

The telcos and ISPs are merely providers of the IP connectivity. The OTT apps ride on top of that Internet connection.

The telcos and ISPs are simply big, fat, dumb pipes.

Some of the telcos and ISPs out there are smart enough to see what's going on and are trying to become the biggest, fattest pipe out there and provide the best possible service. Some are launching their own OTT apps/service that are NOT limited to their own customer base.

And some of the telcos are so desperate to hold on to their legacy business models that they are trying to get the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to regulate OTT apps and service providers through the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). They are hoping to use WCIT as a vehicle to re-inject themselves into the revenue stream and somehow start charging "OTT" providers. (But that's a topic for another blog post...)

So when you hear people talking about "OTT apps" or "OTT services," they are typically referring to applications or services that ride on top of your Internet connection - but have no relationship with the provider of your Internet connection.

OTT apps and services are a major component of the ongoing war between "content providers" and "access providers"... a fundamental tension within the Internet that shows no sign of being resolved anytime soon. But more on that another time... :-)

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Jul 09

Webinar: “IPv6 For Broadcasters” on Wednesday, July 11

Society of Broadcast Engineers logoWhy should radio and television broadcasters care about IPv6? What potential impact will IPv6 have on broadcasting?  How can broadcasters get started learning more about IPv6?

We were very pleased to see that the Society of Broadcast Engineers is offering a live webinar on “IPv6 For Broadcasters” on:

Wednesday, July 11, 2012, from 2:00 – 3:30 US Eastern time

We couldn’t agree more with this part of the session description:

As a broadcaster, if you are providing content to the Internet, IPv6 migration should be considered to enable providing the best Quality of Experience (QoE) to a growing IPv6 content consumer audience without the use of translation schemes. Carriers and Internet service providers utilize translation devices to provide mixed IPv4 and IPv6 interoperability. The various translation schemes are suitable for TCP based applications such as email and web surfing, but can be detrimental to UDP based real-time media used by the broadcaster. In order to provide the best QoE, broadcasters should strive to provide their media content in a native format to IPv6 only users without the need for translation in addition to providing content to the legacy IPv4 users.

Any number of panelists at recent IPv6-related events have discussed the fact that IPv4-to-IPv6 translation services – as well as techniques like carrier-grade-NAT (CGN) to prolong IPv4 usage – introduce latency into the network connection and can degrade the user experience for real-time communications, including streaming media.  Making your media available over IPv6 will ensure viewers can see it in the best possible fashion.

Google’s already leading the way with YouTube.  Netflix is now offering streaming over IPv6. They will ensure their content is available to users regardless of whether they are on IPv6 or IPv4.

So with that, it’s rather important that other broadcasters understand how they, too, can make their content accessible over IPv6.

This webinar sounds like a great start and we look forward to seeing more broadcasters offering their content over IPv6.

P.S. If you want more info about how to get started with IPv6, take a look at some of the IPv6 resources we’ve included here at our site.

Jul 06

Can You Help? 3rd Annual IPv6 Global Deployment Survey

NRO logoDo you have IPv6 deployed within your network? If so, could you please take a moment to participate in the 3rd annual “IPv6 Deployment Monitoring Survey” on the current and future use of IPv6?

The survey is at:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GlobalIPv6survey2012

The survey won’t take that long and will go far in helping the the Number Resource Organization (NRO) (an umbrella organization for the 5 Regional Internet Registries) understand how the Internet community is moving toward widespread adoption of IPv6.  As the NRO states:

We encourage all organisations to participate in this survey, which we hope will establish a comprehensive view of present IPv6 penetration and future plans for IPv6 deployment. The survey is composed of 23 questions and can be completed in about 15 minutes. For those without IPv6 allocations or assignments, or who have not yet deployed IPv6, the questions will be fewer in number.

The results will be publicly available, as last year’s results are, and will be distributed widely.

Since the time we last wrote about the survey, THE DEADLINE WAS EXTENDED UNTIL FRIDAY, JULY 13th.

If you can spare the few minutes to answer the survey before next Friday it will greatly help the registries – and all of us – understand future trends for IPv6 deployment.  Thank you!

Jul 05

Wow! Dramatic Growth in DNSSEC-signed Domains in .NL

Wow!  Per a tweet from Bert Hubert of PowerDNS we learned of this very dramatic graph of growth in DNSSEC-signed domains in .NL (click on the image to see the most up-to-date numbers):

DNSSEC-signed domains in .NL

That is quite the “hockey stick” jump in DNSSEC usage!  On July 2nd there were around 15,800 DNSSEC-signed domains in .NL and at the time I write this post there are 84,407!

In response to my query about what occurred, Bert said only that a PowerDNSSEC user enabled DNSSEC. Bert was also quick to point out in other messages I’ve seen that this fantastic growth is not exclusively because of PowerDNSSEC but that the PowerDNSSEC team worked hard to make it happen.

According to discussion on the dnssec-deployment mailing list, there are about 5 million .NL domain names. So in just a couple of days the .NL space has zipped by 1% and is fast on the way to 2% of all .NL domain names being signed!

Excellent work by all involved and it will be interesting to see how much farther it climbs!

P.S. I’ll note that just in the past few minutes while I wrote these last couple of paragraphs, the count climbed from 84,407 to 84,913!

Jul 03

Deutsche Telekom Partners With Tropo To Expose Developer APIs for Voice and SMS

Telekom tropo apiIntriguing news out of the folks at Tropo today... Deutsche Telekom has made the Tropo APIs available as part of DT's "Developer Garden" at:
http://www.developergarden.com/apis/apis-sdks/telekom-tropo-api/

This is part of a broad range of APIs offered by Deutsche Telekom and basically gives developers using the DT network access to the full range of Tropo.com capabilities. As they note on the page, you can:

  • Make & receive phone calls from within any web browser or application
  • Run Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) applications with speech recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS)
  • Send SMS out of CRM applications
  • Create conference calls with up to 50 participants

Basically create any kind of "voice mashup" you can think of. I would also note that Tropo supports multiple languages for speech recognition and text-to-speech, a fact that may appeal to European developers.

Now why would a developer want to use "Telekom Tropo" versus just "regular" Tropo? The answer seems to be that DT takes care of all the billing integration and makes it easy for developers to charge for their services. From what I can see, all that billing integration is handled directly by Deutsche Telekom.

Now, obviously, this only works on the DT network, but that network is quite large throughout Europe at around 93 million subscribers.

In reading the Telekom Tropo API Q & A, too, I found an interesting note:

Telekom Tropo is hosted in Telekom data centes in Germany and therefore fulfills the highest European security and privacy standards..

Which means to me that the Voxeo Labs team made it possible for the Tropo server-side software to run directly within a mobile operator's network. This could lead to very interesting business models more where mobile operators could easily deploy Tropo capabilities to their developers as the Deutsche Telekom team has done.

Congrats to the Tropo and Deutsche Telekom teams on this news and I look forward to learning about what developers build now that this capability has been brought into DT's "developer garden"!

UPDATE: BusinessWeek is reporting today that Deutsche Telekom announced a partnership with MasterCard and is in talks with Google - both about adding partners to its mobile payment system.

[Full Disclosure: I was employed by Voxeo from October 2007 to September 2011 and participated in the launch of Tropo.com several years ago. However, I wouldn't write about it if I didn't think what they are doing is cool!]

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Jul 03

Note to PR People: PLEASE INCLUDE A URL With Your News Release!

FACEPALM

Yet again I was reminded today that so many people involved with public relations (PR)[1] simply fail to understand how media works in 2012 - and fail to understand how one simple step could help them help other people tell their story!

As is the case most days, I received another batch of news releases[2], and there was one in particular I wanted to write about... but...

There was NO URL to where the news release was posted on the Internet!

Here's the thing... I write articles on my various sites. In doing so, I like to link to original sources. I'm generally NOT simply going to post your news release verbatim... I want to provide some context or commentary - but I want to provide a link back to the news release for any readers who want to read what the company/organization said.

Usually this takes the form of something like:

blah, blah, blah... As company XYZ indicated in a news release today, they will be... blah, blah, blah...

I like doing this as a way of citing an original source.

But to do this... I NEED A URL!

If you as a PR professional do not include a link to your news release in the email you send me, that means I have to dig for one. I have to go and try to find it on your site.

Odds are with the very little time I have for most of my writing, I'm not going to do that! Unless I am extremely interested in writing about your topic. I'm simply going to move on and write about something else.

Here I am... offering to give you a free link... to send people over to your site. TO SEND YOU TRAFFIC!

And you're missing that opportunity!

Yeah, Dan, but how many people actually read your site, you say? After all, I'm not __<insert name of big site>__.

Well, while my site may or may not send you much traffic, given that you are spamming me with an email you probably sent to a thousand other potential "media", you're potentially missing out on getting easy links from thousands of other people, too!

A Very Simple Recipe

Here's a VERY simple recipe for doing this right:

1. Publish your news release on YOUR site. You do have an area of your (or your client's) site where you post news releases, don't you?[3]

2. Visit the news release web page on your site using your web browser.

3. Copy the web address from your browser. (That would be the "URL" if you don't do geeky three-letter acronyms.)

4. Paste the web address into the news release email.

5. Spam your message out to me and everyone else, because clearly you don't have enough time to do PR correctly and target your messages appropriately.

Okay, step #5 may be a bit snarky... because in truth I've seen messages that have been targeted (and even individually tailored to me) that have still failed to include a URL.

A Bonus!

Here's another tip about why you might want to include a URL. I might not have the time - or interest - to write about your news release today. But I still might think it would be of interest to my "audience" of people who follow my site.

So while I might not post my own article, I might pass along your news via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.

But to do that, what do I need???

That's right... a LINK!

So by you failing to include a URL you're missing a moment when I might, right then, tweet out or post about your news release!

Instead I'll either have to try to find a link (which I may or may not do), or wait until sometime later when I see someone's post about your news.

Either way you lost my moment right then when I might have acted and helped spread your news.

Fix The Process!

Now, when I've asked some PR people why they have failed to send out a link in their email, often the comment is that "it takes a while" to publish the news release to the company/organization's site. They've wanted to get the word out quickly when the news release goes on the wire... and don't want to wait for whenever the company's web or IT team gets around to getting the page up on the site.

So FIX THAT!

This is 2012, people!

If your website is not up to the task of dealing with real-time publishing of content, maybe you need to be asking some tough questions about your site.

Pretty much every content management system (CMS) I am aware of has some mechanism for scheduling content publishing in advance. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, others... they all have it either built-in or available as an add-on. You should be able to get the news release loaded into the website and even get the URL that the news release will be available at. Then, when the news release goes live, you can be all ready to send out your spammy email to everyone pointing them to your site.

You're already loading the news release text into a wire service web interface to distribute it... why can't you (or someone within your organization) also load it into your own site and queue it for publication at a specific time?

This is NOT rocket science or quantum physics.

If the "web team" or "IT team" won't let you load it into the site - or has some other issue making the content available at a specific time or at the very least getting you a URL - well, that is a process issue.

Fix it!

Send me and everyone else a URL to where your news release is posted on your site.

Help us tell your story!

One simple step.

Stop making excuses.

Do it!

P.S. And no, I did not write about that news release I saw this morning because the PR person did not include a URL... and I spent my time writing this rant instead! :-)

P.P.S. And for bonus points, you can even go a step above your other PR peers and have the link you send me also have links to company logos, quotes, photos, videos... other things you might want me to potentially include in my article. It could be a full-blown "social media news release" - or it could just be a set of easy-to-find links in the sidebar next to your news release. Help me tell your story! Make it super easy for me to do... and odds are I will!

[1] When I say "people involved with PR", I do not mean only people at PR agencies. It could be someone on staff or contracting for a company/organization... basically anyone sending out email messages promoting news releases.

[2] NONE of which were actually targeted to me, but rather just spammed out there... but that's another "PR101" topic for another day.

[3] Some people do send out URLs to the news release on distribution services like PR Newswire or Marketwire and while that's at least a link we can use, why send traffic to the distribution services site? Why not send it to your site instead? Where it can be surrounded in your branding and your other links?

Image credit: _maracuja on Flickr

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Jul 03

Slides: SIP and IPv6 – Can They Get Along?

Last week at the SIPNOC 2012 event in Virginia, I gave a presentation about how the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) can work with IPv6 and what some of the issues are around deployment.  I emphasized the fact that SIP works over IPv6 and then took a step back to talk about the basics of IPv6 before diving into more SIP- and VoIP-specific issues.  There was some great discussion and I learned later that a number of people took photos of my slide about SIP and NAT. :-)

To that end, my slides about SIP and IPv6 are now available online for your viewing and/or downloading.  I did record the event on video – and at some point here I’m aiming to publish that to our YouTube account.  Meanwhile, enjoy the slides…

SIP and IPv6 – Can They Get Along?

View more presentations from Deploy360

Jul 01

Flying A Foreign Flag – One Day A Year

Canada dayToday, July 1, here at our home in little old Keene, New Hampshire, USA, we flew a foreign flag from our our front porch.

As we have done on every July 1st since 2002... and probably will do for every July 1st in the years ahead.

You see, today is Canada Day and our 10-year old daughter was born in Canada during the 5 years that we lived in Ottawa, Ontario. Through the beauty of the great relationship between the USA and Canada, she is both a US and Canadian citizen.

So today we proudly flew the Canadian flag to honor our daughter, to honor her birthplace and to honor all the friends we made up there. At something like 5:30am she was softly singing "O, Canada" and we all joined her in singing renditions of the tune multiple times during the day. (In English only, of course, as none of us know French well enough to do that verse, although our daughter is learning French in her school.)

This we all do gladly for her.

Tomorrow, the Stars and Strips will be back on the flagpole... for another 364 days...

Happy Canada Day to all our friends living up north of us... and to our daughter!

P.S. And I hope that any of you celebrating today up North did get a chance to have a beavertail, some poutine, or at least a double-double or some timbits from Timmy's, eh?