Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
May 14
TDYR 245 – Live-tweeting a Conference… From 200 Miles Away!
TDYR 245 - Live-tweeting a Conference... From 200 Miles Away! by Dan York
May 13
Internet Governance and Cybersecurity Hot Topics At GCIG/SIPA Event May 14-15 (Watch Live)
How do we restore trust and confidence in the Internet so that it can deliver on its full potential for communication, creativity, innovation and opportunity? In an era when the Edward Snowden revelations have made us aware of the pervasive surveillance that is possible, and when large-scale data breaches have exposed our most personal information, how do we feel safe when we go online? And as the next billion people look to the Internet for their future opportunities, how do we help address their fears and concerns? What are the roles we all have in bringing about an open, trusted Internet? And what are the most pressing challenges in how we collectively govern the Internet?
Dan York
May 11
#807 – Can every company really be a media company?
Intro: Boston experiences, ‘Geeks Bearing Gifts’ book review is up, Harry Hawk interview with Clammr CEO Parviz Parvizi is coming;
Quick News: There’s nothing fair about fair use at Soundcloud, forgotten wonders of the digital world: Second Life, new data on native advertising’s disclosure issues, more than one million click “I’m a voter” button on Facebook as opinion polls suffer major credibility crisis in UK general election; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop;
News That Fits: Every company is a media company, part 32,556: Uber looks for an editorial director; big moves in content marketing; listener comments in the FIR Podcast Community on Google+; Dan York’s Tech Report: the power of Soundcloud, developments at Ello, and more; how Snapchat made QR codes cool again; the past week in the FIR Podcast Network; Igloo Software promo; catching up with Glenn Gaudet and GaggleAMP;
Music from Guster; and more.
The post #807 – Can every company really be a media company? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
May 11
FIR #807 – 5/11/15 – For Immediate Release
Geeks Bearing Gifts book review is up; Clammr CEO interview coming, Quick News: Nothing fair about fair use at SoundCloud, Second Life is a forgotten wonder, new data on native advertising's disclosure issues, Facebook I'm a Voter button gets more than a million clicks; Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop; News That Fits: Uber seeks an editorial director, Foremski takes a content job, Reddit sets up video division, mattress company builds a sleep-focused online publication, listener comments, Dan York's Tech Report, SnapChat makes QR codes cool again, the last week in the FIR Podcast Network, Igloo Software promo, catching up with GaggleAmp; music from Gusher; and more.
May 10
Celebrating 15 Years of Blogging! Starting with Advogato…
... I started blogging!
Well, in truth it wasn't called "blogging" right then. On Advogato it was called a "diary". The words "weblog", "blog" and "blogging" were still working their way toward becoming the conventions they are today.
Still, it was the start of my journey into what we call "blogging". Oh, I had been writing online for many years before that... after all, I'd first gone online in the mid-1980s. And in fact the reason I was sitting in that office in San Francisco was because of a series of articles on the Linux Gazette site that had brought me to the attention of the Linuxcare founders, who then funded me to help create the Linux Professional Institute (LPI).
But that first post on Advogato was my entry into personal writing on my "own" page and in a form that interacted with others.
15 years later - and THOUSANDS of blog posts across many different sites - and several jobs that came about because of my blogging... it's kind of fun to think back to where it all began.
Look Back At My Blogging Journey
As I look back on that very first entry (still online! (and numbered "0" in typical engineer fashion)) I can notice a few things:
- It was long, as per usual. (As I note at the end - and it's still true today - "no one has ever praised me for my brevity!")
- I was working with the CVS version control system. I haven't touched that in many years and now, of course, use git for version control.
- I had just picked up a paper book about DocBook. I would go on to write and speak about DocBook at many events, and would use DocBook as the source format for all of Linuxcare's documentation in a single-source publishing system. MANY years later in 2011 I would write my "Migrating Apps To IPv6" book for O'Reilly entirely in DocBook.
- The Cluetrain Manifesto was new! :-)
I love that I included this line in the entry:
I decided to join this experiment... let's see if I actually keep up with it.
I would continue to write there... close to 400 more (typically long!) entries until June 2004 when a 5-6 week site outage (Advogato was at that time one man's labor of love, not a dedicated hosting site!) would see me and a number of other folks move over to LiveJournal. I posted only very rarely on Advogato after that, although a few years ago I set it to pull in and cross-post the feed from my Code.DanYork.com blog.
Starting in 2004 dyork.livejournal.com would become my "personal home" on the web (under the domain-name blog.danyork.com) for a few years until 2008-2009 when I switched to my DanYork.com site I still have today.
Meanwhile, in late 2005 I decided to split off my telecom/VoIP writing and also my PR/marketing/social media writing into focused blogs at:
Those two remain the main places I publish my own personal content, although they are not the primary places I write these days.
Years later I would come to regret splitting those two topics as they would come crashing together and the lines would blur... but at the time, working for Mitel Networks, I wanted a separate place to write about telecom and VoIP.
In 2007 when I was "synergized" out of a job at Mitel after their acquisition of Inter-Tel, it was a couple of blog posts that brought me to the attention of Jonathan Taylor and RJ Auburn who brought me into Voxeo where I had a wonderful four years.
It was amusing... I had been trying for most of 3 years to get Mitel to have a corporate blog, but they were at the time reluctant to engage in the more conversational medium. (They have a blog today, of course.) At Voxeo, within 3 weeks I had a corporate blog portal up and over the years that would grow to a peak of having 20 separate blogs for different people, channels, audiences and products.
I also had the most amusing title I've ever had: "Director of Conversations". (Yes, that was on my business card!)
The deep experience in WordPress would serve me well when I left Voxeo in 2011 to join the Internet Society where I was charged with very rapidly getting a web site online to help accelerate the adoption of key Internet technologies. The result was the Deploy360 Programme, a site where I still write quite frequently today.
It was, in fact, my blogging as well as my speaking that had brought me to the attention of the Internet Society.
My blogging over these many years would also lead to:
- MANY different speaking presentations at conferences and events around the world.
- My two latest books (on IPv6 and VoIP security) came about due in part to people finding me due to my writing.
- Countless other opportunities and conversations.
- Learning an insane amount (because to write about topics you need to know them!).
- Getting into podcasting... both audio and video.
- All sorts of new connections and ideas.
- Friendships with some great people.
This last one is important... the Internet is ultimately about people... and it is through the sharing of information on sites like blogs that we get to learn more about our shared humanity.
Today
Today, in 2015, I write across so many different places that I had to build a site to aggregate my feeds just so that *I* could keep track of them all! That is:
http://danyork.me/
My main personal sites continue to be Disruptive Telephony, Disruptive Conversations... and also increasingly CircleID. There are a number of others I list here:
http://www.danyork.com/blogs.html
The great part of today is that my regular daytime job is focused around blogging! As I explained back in February my new role at the Internet Society is to look at our content across all our different sites and blogs. As a result I'm writing not only on Deploy360 but also on the main Internet Society blog and other sites we have. (A curious new aspect is that sometimes I am ghost-writing posts for other people, which is something new for me... but that's a good topic for another post...)
Though the role of "content strategist" didn't even remotely exist (at least as a title) fifteen years ago, it's a sign of how far we've come in the distribution of writing / content creation that roles like mine now exist.
A Long Strange Journey
It's fascinating to me to look back and reflect where that action 15 years ago has ultimately taken me... but it also reflects what I've been saying for all these years:
There has never been a better time to tell your own story in your own words through your own channels!
The traditional ways we communicate have been fundamentally disrupted... and the opportunity is there for anyone who can consistently create high quality content that others find helpful.
It's been an amazing 15 years... and I look forward to seeing what happens with what we now often call "content" over the next 15 years!
May 08
DNS-OARC 2015 Spring Workshop This Weekend (May 9-10) Covers DNSSEC and DNS Security
The 2015 Spring Workshop of the DNS Operations Analysis and Research Center (DNS-OARC) takes place this weekend, May 9-10, right before the RIPE 70 meeting in Amsterdam. As per usual the agenda is packed full of all sorts of sessions related to DNS in general, with a number getting into DNSSEC and overall DNS security. Here’s the full agenda:
https://indico.dns-oarc.net/event/21/timetable/#all
There are currently 137 people scheduled to attended representing a broad range of participants across the DNS community. I will not be there myself, but know a great number of the people who will be in the room.
Sessions of Interest
Saturday looks to have some great sessions related to operational experience with various attacks against the DNS, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These kind of actual case studies in handling attacks are incredibly useful to get out to the wider community.
Sunday morning begins with a series of DNSSEC-related talks:
- Observations on DNSSEC and ECDSA in the wild – by Geoff Huston of APNIC
- Effects of Increasing the Root Zone ZSK Size – by Duane Wessels of Verisign Labs
- Signing DNSSEC answers on the fly at the edge: challenges and solutions! – by Olafur Gudmundsson of CloudFlare
All of those are ones I’d love to see – I’m hoping there will be a video recording as they start at 9:00 am in Amsterdam… which is 3:00 am here on the US East Coast where I live. As much as I’d like to see them… well… I can’t see me getting up that early! 
The remainder of Sunday includes a great number of talks that I’d personally find interesting, diving into various tools, analytics, testing and more. A couple of interest to those focused on DNSSEC include:
- 14:30 – Plan for Decommissioning the DLV – by Jim Martin of ISC
- 17:05 – Update on the DNS Root Key Rollover work – by Ed Lewis of ICANN
This last talk, in particular, should be useful to hear the status of the work related to the Root KSK rollover. (See our background page on why this matters.)
Remote Participation
I don’t see any information on the DNS-OARC website right now about remote participation, but the sessions are almost always streamed live. Given that the event is co-located with RIPE 70, I suspect that they may make use of the RIPE 70 live streaming. I’d watch the RIPE 70 remote participation page or the main 2015 Spring Workshop page for more information.
The good news is that all the materials should be available from links off of the main agenda page, so at least we who are remote should be able to see what slides were discussed.
I also see Stéphane Bortzmeyer is among the attendees and when he is at an event he is usually tweeting out a good bit at https://twitter.com/bortzmeyer, so that’s another way to stay up to date, along with the #DNSOARC hashtag search.
If you are there in Amsterdam, I hope you do have a great DNS-OARC meeting and I look forward to hearing the results.
May 07
Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application Platform
- Cisco blog: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Tropo
- Tropo blog: Tropo joins Cisco to Power next-gen collaboration APIs
As someone who was at Voxeo in 2009 and helped launch Tropo (and wrote many of the early blog posts about it[1], as well as some of the python samples), I'm thrilled for the team there now that this is happening.[2]
Congratulations to all involved!
Over the years since leaving Voxeo, I've written about Tropo from time to time and continued to watch its progress. I've continued to be very impressed by what they've done over the years. They've truly made it easy for people to create powerful applications using simple programming languages.
It looks like the Tropo website is struggling right now so here is a snippet of their announcement post:
Six years ago we launched Tropo with the idea to make it easy to power phone calls through a simple API. Since then, we’ve empowered thousands of developers to add voice and messaging to their applications.
From our very first sign-up in 2009, to powering thousands of mobile and voice applications, our mission has been the same: to make real-time communications more accessible and productive through great APIs.
Today we’re thrilled to share that Tropo is joining Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group. Together we’ll enable completely new ways of communicating by opening up Cisco’s collaboration products to every developer on the planet (and maybe some off the planet…hey, they need collaborative tools on the International Space Station!) :)
Knowing a good number of folks at Cisco, too, I think this is a great win for them in that they'll be able to make some of their products and services more accessible to developers.
I remember well back in 2009 when Jonathan Taylor (then CEO of Voxeo) brought in the Adhearsion team and "Voxeo Labs" was set up. Tropo was the first of the Voxeo Labs products, along with a number of others that were released over the following years. I watched as Voxeo Labs was then spun off from Voxeo in 2012 as a separate company and then Voxeo was acquired by Aspect in 2013... and Voxeo Labs was renamed to Tropo.
I watched, too, as the Tropo team continued their heavy involvement with WebRTC and brought that technology even deeper into their various services.
Congratulations to Jonathan Taylor, Jason Goecke, Johnny Diggz and all the rest of the Tropo team on this acquisition!
I look forward to seeing what Tropo and Cisco will do together to make it even easier to create voice, chat, messaging and other kinds of applications!
UPDATE #1: Jonathan Taylor has published a post on Facebook that outlines some of the history that led to this announcement. He includes this information related to Cisco:
We were even more surprised when Cisco approached us about acquiring Tropo. Selling Tropo was the last thing on our minds. But the potential was clearly huge for both companies, and over the course of the discussion, the deal terms clearly quite attractive. So here we are today!
UPDATE #2: A number of news stories are appearing on Techmeme.
UPDATE #3: Writing over on NoJitter, Zeus Kerravala dives into more detail about the acquisition based on his pre-briefing with Cisco's Rowan Trollope. Zeus' article: Cisco to CPaaS Providers: Game On!
[1] Although in the time since I left in 2011, my account was understandably removed from the Tropo site and the author on all those posts I wrote between 2009-2011 was changed to someone else. :-)
[2] In full disclosure, I should note that I am a very minor shareholder in Tropo after exercising a few options upon leaving Voxeo in 2011. I had no knowledge of this acquisition and have not participated actively with Tropo since leaving in 2011.
May 06
Another Great DNSSEC Statistics Site For Second-Level Domains – rick.eng.br
Want to know how many domains are signed with DNSSEC under each top-level domain (TLD)? We now have another site to help! For over a year now, every week I use a great site that Rick Lamb maintains at:
http://rick.eng.br/dnssecstat/
so that I can find out what new domains I need to add to our DNSSEC Deployment Maps database. By default he shows a reverse-chronological list of all the TLDs that are signed.
BUT…
… if you look over on the right side Rick has added something new! Two new columns labeled “% Signed” and “Misc”. These show you:
- The percentage of total domains that are signed with DNSSEC;
- The raw numbers of signed domains / total domains.
What’s very cool is that you can click on each heading to sort the columns. Click once to sort from lowest to highest. Click once more to sort from highest to lowest.
This second sort is where it gets interesting.
With the “% Signed” you have to scroll down a bit because of course brand new TLDs that only have one domain (often nic.TLD) and also have that domain signed score 100%. But as you go down the list it starts to get more interesting. Here’s a view part of the way down:
What I find MUCH more interesting, though, is the raw numbers showing the number of DNSSEC-signed domains. Click on the “Misc” heading cell twice and you get something like this:
That shows us that .NL has the most with 2.4 million domains signed followed by .COM with 491 thousand domains and then .CZ, .SE and onwards.
What you will notice that is different here from the ntldstats DNSSEC stats site I wrote about last week is that Rick’s site pulls in data from some of the country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) and also some of the original generic TLDs (gTLDs) such as .COM, .NET, etc. The ntldstats site is (understandably) only about the “new gTLDs” whereas Rick’s site covers the wider range of TLDs.
Notice that I said “some” of the ccTLDs and gTLDs. Rick can only incorporate data from TLDs that provide some kind of feed he can use. If you scroll on down the list you’ll see that there are TLDs there that have no numbers next to them:
However, we know from NIC.BR’s statistics page that .BR has 747,000 domains signed with DNSSEC, which would move it into the second position above .COM in the listing. Similarly .ORG has many signed domains, too.
Over time hopefully we can get these other TLDs to offer statistics feeds in a way that sites like Rick’s can consume them and help provide a more solid view of overall DNSSEC deployment.
Meanwhile, it’s fantastic that Rick has made these updates to his site and it is a great service to the larger Internet community that he maintains this info. (Thanks, Rick!)
I’m looking forward to seeing these numbers grow!
P.S. If you’d like to help these numbers grow, why not head over to our Start Here page and find out how can get started with signing your domains with DNSSEC?
May 06
TDYR 244 – Please Help ReConnect Nepal
After the devastating earthquake on April 25, there are many excellent efforts underway to help the people in Nepal. As the initial surge of help continues, the Internet Society's (ISOC) Nepal Chapter is working to help rebuild the communication and Internet systems in Nepal. In this episode I talk about that and ask people to help. More info at:
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/chapters-members/2015/04/people-nepal-need-our-help
and to donate directly:
https://www.internetsociety.org/form/donate-nepal
