Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Mar 12
ICANN DNSSEC Workshop on Weds, March 14, to be streamed LIVE
Want to learn more about the current state of DNSSEC deployment? Want to hear case studies of organizations who have deployed DNSSEC? Want to learn how DNSSEC can be used to protect your organization’s online reputation?
This Wednesday, March 14, 2012, from 8:30am to 1:45pm (UTC-6, i.e. US Mountain time), there will be a DNSSEC Workshop as part of the ICANN 43 meeting taking place in Costa Rica. The good news is that…
THE EVENT WILL BE STREAMED LIVE
You can just go to http://costarica43.icann.org/node/29659 and click on the appropriate link to listen and view the session.
I (Dan York) will be one of the early presenters outlining some of the areas with DNSSEC that we’ve found in the development of this Deploy360 site where we see opportunities for simplifying the user experience and accelerating DNSSEC deployment. I’ll be talking about the end-user experience for domain name holders, the experience at domain name registrars and several infrastructure issues. I’m very much looking forward to giving the presentation and to participating in the ensuing discussion.
The agenda for the full workshop is a great collection of people involved with the actual deployment of DNSSEC. I’ll be intrigued to listen, learn and interact with the participants and am looking forward to having some new content to add to this site.
If you are going to be there at the session in Costa Rica, I look forward to meeting you. If you are not going to be in Costa Rica but are interested in the topic, I do hope you will tune in to the live coverage. Given that past ICANN DNSSEC workshops have been recorded for later viewing, I expect this session will be as well.
Mar 09
Can IPv6 Addresses Be “Fun”?
So what is the most “fun” IPv6 address you’ve seen?
Fun? IPv6 address?
Well, yes… now that you have the letters “a – f” in addition to the numbers, you can add a bit of creativity to your addresses. As was recently pointed out on Twitter, the folks at Facebook had some fun with the IPv6 address for “www.v6.facebook.com” being:
2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3
Obviously a “k” would have been better, but “face:b00c” is rather cool! There are also any number of other possibilities. Consider some of these:
:feed:f00d:
:bad:f00d:
:bad:beef:
:bad:d00d:
:f00d:cafe:
:bad:fa11:
Obviously you don’t have to limit yourself to just two blocks of the IPv6 address. For instance, here’s the perfect IPv6 address for a cattle rancher’s server:
2001:db8:beef:beef:beef:beef:beef:1
Have you seen any creative IPv6 addresses out there in the wild? What is the most creative use of “a-f” plus the numbers that you can come up with? Have you seen anyone else add some branding into their IPv6 addresses?
Just think of the possibilities!
P.S. If you’re looking to get started with IPv6, have you checked out our IPv6 resources?
Mar 09
Skype’s HD Video Quality IS Amazing!
As much as I may criticize Skype at times, I continue to be impressed by the technology they create and the powerful ways in which Skype enables us to communicate.
Yesterday Jim Courtney called me to test out the "upgraded" Internet connection at his home in Toronto and he used the Logitech C920 webcam he recently reviewed while I used my MacBook Pro laptop.
I swear I could probably count every hair in Jim's mustache!
The video quality was truly amazing (and if you click on the image above, you'll get a slightly bigger version - I was not viewing it in full-screen when I made the capture). Looking at the technical specs for the call, Jim was sending 1280x720 using the H264 codec. I was apparently also sending that level of quality over to Jim (although using the VP80 codec).
The audio quality was also excellent and we had a great call. Obviously, Jim's upgraded Internet connection worked perfectly fine! ;-)
Kudos to Skype for making this amazing quality of video calling available - for free - to all of us!
For those curious, here is the detailed technical info for our call:
P.S. If you weren't aware that you can get this kind of info, you need to first enable it on the Advanced panel of the Skype for Mac Preferences. Then you can choose "Technical Call Info" from the Window menu (or just press Cmd+5).
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Mar 08
IPv6-Kongress Happening May 10-11 in Frankfurt am Main
If you can get to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on Thursday and Friday, May 10-11, 2012, there looks to be a fantastic set of sessions going on at the 2012 IPv6 Kongress. More information is available at:
The packed agenda includes a wide range of sessions including deep tutorials, best practices, security topics, networking, routing and more. I see a number of prominent names from within the IPv6 community and also some involvement from the Internet Society’s German chapter. World IPv6 Launch will be very close – and this will be a great time to learn more before the big day! I’ll note that “early bird” registration is still available right now.
Mar 08
WebRTC + Phono SDK = Browser Phone Calls WITHOUT A Plugin
Calling people using your browser - but without a Flash or Java plugin? That's been the mission of the WebRTC initiative for some time now with efforts underway in both the IETF and the W3C to standardize the work so that it can be broadly implemented.
I was very pleased to see the team at Voxeo Labs announce that the Phono SDK can now support WebRTC with the developer build of the Google Chrome browser. They outlined their work in a blog post and produced a video demonstrating the technology and also received a very nice writeup on TheNextWeb:
This is very cool as it has the potential once WebRTC is baked into more browsers to provide us with a very solid browser-based platform for building and deploying real-time communication apps. Kudos to the Voxeo Labs team for what they've done so far!
P.S. Some interesting comments about this topic over on Hacker News...
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Mar 07
The Danger of Amazon’s Power
On the one hand, Amazon continues to be the largest channel for my own books, which are admittedly in some rather niche areas that would not be found in typical bookstores. As one who has long considered self-publishing for some of my even more niche ideas, I have celebrated the tools and services that Amazon has brought to the table such as CreateSpace and their Kindle Direct program. Amazon's leadership in the ebook space has really helped create an entirely new way of reading.
The publishing industry is being incredibly disrupted by Amazon and in many ways that's a good thing for authors and ultimately for readers.
BUT...
... on the other hand, the part of me that advocates for open networks strongly detests the "lock-in" of Amazon's proprietary ebook format (Mobi) and their distribution network. Even more, I've been very concerned lately by the extent to which they've been using their massive distribution control in their contract negotiations. Here's a view on one of the latest skirmishes:
- Dennis Johnson: Return of the thug: Amazon removes buy buttons for thousands of ebooks from indie distributor that won’t play ball
Now, this is perhaps to be expected... Amazon needs the absolute lowest costs possible for their commodity model to work. If you want to sell your books through their service, you have to come to terms with Amazon.
Still, it's troubling. As more and more bookstores close... as people increasingly move to using ereaders... we are increasingly getting to the point where Amazon really is the choice to buy books, particularly when they make it so incredibly easy to do so.
The great danger here lies in having that near-monopoly on our ability to purchase books. How else will they wield that power to extract concessions from others in the publishing chain? Will that be good or bad for authors and for readers?
O'Reilly's Joe Wikert had a good post out recently:
While he obviously comes at it from the publisher's perspective, it's definitely worth thinking about.
How can we as consumers encourage the existence of multiple ecosystems of book/ebook distribution so that we can have a choice?
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Mar 06
3 Months To World IPv6 Launch… Are You Getting Ready?
World IPv6 Launch is only 3 months away on June 6, 2012 -
What are you doing today to be ready?
If you don’t already have plans underway, can you think of a simple project to get started? Perhaps look at how to get your home network running IPv6? Or get your website running IPv6?
Here at the Deploy360 Programme, we’ve got some resources that can help – and we’ll be adding more and more to those resources over the next few months:
Beyond our constant stream of new Deploy360 blog posts related to IPv6, you can also now follow World IPv6 Launch activities directly in social media and interact with others who are launching IPv6:
- @WorldIPv6Launch on Twitter
- World IPv6 Launch page on Facebook
- World IPv6 Launch page on Google+
Please follow, like or add the World IPv6 Launch accounts to a circle… and help spread the word that IPv6 launches permanently on June 6, 2012!
And please let us know how we can help you get started with IPv6!
Mar 06
Gandi.net Adds Support For DNSSEC DS Records
On Friday we learned that Gandi.net is joining the ranks of domain name registrars supporting DNSSEC. In a blog post on their “Gandi Bar” site, “Thomas” outlines the level of support Gandi.net is providing and points over to a wiki post explaining in more detail how to set up DNSSEC for your domains.
It’s important to note that Gandi.net is not providing DNSSEC-signing services – and in fact you cannot use Gandi.net’s own DNS servers for hosting your DNS as their hosting servers do not provide DNSSEC support yet. However, if you host your DNS records on a service that does support DNSSEC, Gandi.net can handle all the relevant Delegation Signer (DS) records for you. We previously provided a step-by-step example of configuring DNSSEC in this manner using GKG.net. It seems that Gandi.net works in a similar manner although it appears you provide them with your full public key and they then generate the relevant DS records.
What is nice to see is that Gandi.net supports a wide range of top-level domains (TLDs), including:
- .be
- .biz
- .com
- .de
- .eu
- .fr (+ .re, .yt, .pm, .wf, .tf)
- .net
- .se
- .us
Further, in their blog post they commit to providing support for even more TLDs in the future. Given that ICANN’s list of DNSSEC-enabled registrars only lists a few registrars supporting multiple TLDs, this news out of Gandi.net is great to see.
We’ve queued them up to add to our list of tutorials for signing your domain with DNSSEC using domain name registrars and look forward to seeing more DNSSEC-signed domains coming out of Gandi.net customers.
P.S. Have you signed your domain today?
