Tag: Google

May 19

Playing Google’s Interactive Rubik’s Cube Over IPv6

Today Google’s front page is an interactive “doodle” celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Rubik’s Cube.  Apart from feeling old since I remember when the Rubik’s Cube first came out, I was also of course thrilled to note that being on a Google website, this interactive Rubik’s Cube is available over IPv6:

Google-rubikscube

Using the IPvFoo add-on for Google Chrome I can verify that almost all of my communication is indeed going over IPv6:

Google Rubik's Cube Doodle

I am guessing from the URLs that the IPv4 connections are to some type of measurement site.  Regardless, the main communication is all happening over IPv6.

And this doodle reminded me, too, that it’s been a looooonnnnnggg time since I worked with a Rubik’s Cube! :-)

If you play with the interactive version today, I hope you have fun… and if you aren’t seeing it over IPv6, why not check out our “Start Here!” pages to see how you can join the rest of us?

Mar 21

Google Is Now Always Using TLS/SSL for Gmail Connections

Gmail logoWe were pleased today to read that Google is now changing their Gmail service to always use TLS-encrypted connections. As they note in their announcement blog post:

Starting today, Gmail will always use an encrypted HTTPS connection when you check or send email. Gmail has supported HTTPS since the day it launched, and in 2010 we made HTTPS the default. Today’s change means that no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between you and Gmail’s servers—no matter if you’re using public WiFi or logging in from your computer, phone or tablet. 

The key point is the one I emphasized in bold in the text: attackers cannot listen in on your messages as they go between your mail client (which could be your web browser) and Gmail’s servers.   Obviously the messages could still be potentially viewed either on your client device or on Gmail’s servers… but this step is removing the ability for the messages to be viewed “on the wire”.

This is a great example of the kind of action we’d like to see to make communication over the Internet more secure- and why we launched our new “TLS for Applications” section of this site.  We want to encourage more application providers and developers to make the steps that Google has done here.

Kudos to the Google/Gmail team for taking this step!

Feb 10

Google’s IPv6 Stats Pass 3% Less Than 5 Months After Passing 2%!

Wow! The pace of IPv6 deployment is rapidly accelerating! This morning Google’s IPv6 measurements crossed the 3% milestone just under five months from when the 2% milestone was crossed.  Prior to that it had taken 11 months to go from 1% to 2%.  The growth path is certainly heading in the right direction:

Google hits 3% IPv6

 

To be clear, what Google is measuring here is the percentage of users that access Google services over IPv6.  Given the range of IPv6-connected services that Google offers, including YouTube, Google+, and Gmail, these measurements do provide a good view into the amount of IPv6 deployed in access networks around the world.

What is driving this growth?  In a post on our Internet Technology Matters blog, my colleague Phil Roberts writes:

More operators in more countries are deploying IPv6 and increasing the size of their subscriber base that use the technology. You can see the list of networks that have measurable IPv6 deployments in the World IPv6 Launch. You can also look at the Google country graph of Europe to see that there are substantial deployments in Switzerland, Belgium, Romania, Germany, and France, for example. The IPv6 traffic from Belgium alone has almost doubled in the last month.

As Phil notes, we recently predicted IPv6 will get to 10% deployment this year and while that may be an aggressive prediction it is very clear that IPv6 is no longer something that will be mythically deployed “some day“.  IPv6 deployment IS happening… and more rapidly than ever!

If you haven’t been thinking about making your content available over IPv6 and/or making your network work over IPv6, now is definitely the time to do so!  Please check out our IPv6 resources and please do let us know how we can help you make the move!

Sep 30

Lesson Learned The Hard Way – Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) Have A Maximum Time Limit of 4 Hours

I learned a hard lesson today that Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) are limited to 4 hours in length. Today when we were live streaming our five-hour ION Krakow conference out of Poland using a Google+ Hangout On Air (HOA) everything was going along fine. (It was, indeed, working over IPv6!) People were watching on both our Google+ page as well as our YouTube channel. All was fine.

Then, all of a sudden... it stopped. No warning. Nothing. I didn't even notice that the red "Broadcasting" button was gone from the G+ HOA window.

Someone pinged us on Twitter to let us know the stream was down... and sure enough, the HOA had stopped broadcasting... right in the middle of one of our panel sessions!

I had to quickly exit that HOA and then relaunch a new HOA, which resulted in a new HOA for people to join on our Google+ page... and then pointing people to a YouTube URL with our channel name ending in "/live" to get our live stream (in our case, http://www.youtube.com/user/depoy360/live).

What Happened?

Why did the Google+ Hangout On Air just quit broadcasting on us?

Gplus hoa four hoursI didn't have a definite answer... but if you look at the first YouTube recording of our ION Krakow event, you'll notice the interesting time amount that I'm highlighting in the image to the right.

Yep... 3:59:59!

So I was thinking either:

  1. Google+ Hangouts On Air have a 4 hour maximum; or
  2. there was some kind of software or network glitch conveniently at the 4 hour time mark. (And unicorns might be grazing in my back yard when I get back from my trip, too.)

I searched online tonight and couldn't find any reference to a time limit. I saw nothing in the Google+ HOA FAQ or even in the HOA Terms of Service. I looked through the Google+ HOA Technical Guide, too, and found again nothing there.

The Answer (Maybe?)

Then I wound up searching Google's Support site with the phrase "hangouts on air maximum time" and... ta da... there was an answer in Google's product forums from May 2012 that said:

the time limit for Hangouts On Air is 4 hours. At 4 hours, the broadcast will automatically stop.

which is exactly the experience we had today. There was also another answer in a product forum from December 2012 that said:

Hangouts On Air can last up to 4 hours. You’ll receive a warning when you have 1 hour remaining, and then subsequent warnings as you approach the 4 hour limit.

If there were any warnings, I have no idea where they went to. I certainly don't remember seeing any warnings! It just stopped.

What was worse what that the Google+ HOA window stopped broadcasting but still continued to show the video stream as per usual - so when I was just glancing at the window it all looked fine. I didn't notice that the big red button was missing.

Thankfully for me...

Now... being the paranoid type, I was recording the video out of Wirecast onto my local hard drive at the same time I was sending it to Google+ HOA, so I do now have a copy of the video of the several minutes in the middle of our panel that didn't get streamed. But:

  • It was a poor user experience for anyone watching to just have it stop.
  • We now have two video segments instead of one big one. (although that's not necessarily a bad thing... I just would have liked to break the segment at a break in the panels)
  • This means additional post-production work to stitch it all together.
  • We had no warning.

This last point is perhaps the biggest annoyance... if we had known there was a four-hour limit, we could have planned for that. We could have stopped and restarted in one of the breaks, for instance. We just didn't want to do that because then it means viewers have to start watching a new video stream, and we thought that some number of users might miss that they had to start watching a new stream.

We wanted the viewer experience to be as simple and painless as possible.

So consider this a warning for you all... should you decide to try using Google+ Hangouts On Air to live stream sessions longer than 4 hours, well, you need to first have some plan to break the HOA into smaller segments!

P.S. And yes, if you listen to our ION Krakow recording on YouTube, the first 1 hour and 45 minutes have terrible audio quality... but that will be the subject for a post tomorrow. Essentially, I missed that HOA had a separate setting for bringing in the audio from our camera (which was supplied by the A/V mixing board) and so I was using audio from my laptop's mic. :-( Thankfully: 1) we fixed it; and 2) I was running a backup audio recorder pulling an aux feed from the house mixer so I can bring that audio back in from that separate recorder.

P.P.S. I'll also be putting up a blog post in the next few days about how we successfully did do this live video streaming over IPv6.

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Sep 30

Lesson Learned The Hard Way – Google+ Hangouts On Air …

I learned a hard lesson today that Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) are limited to 4 hours in length.... and to read the rest of the story, visit Disruptive Conversations...

(Good lesson that I shouldn't be posting articles at 1:00am! But leaving this post up here for a bit because there are now social media links out there pointing to this URL...)

Sep 24

Google Now Seeing 2% IPv6 Traffic – The Internet Is Changing!

Woohoo! The awesome news this morning was that over the weekend Google’s IPv6 measurements showed that 2% of all traffic was hitting Google’s networks over IPv6!

“So what?”, I’m sure some of you are saying… yes, I admit, 2% is a tiny amount of traffic, but consider what Phil Roberts wrote in an Internet Technology Matters post this morning:

Google crossed the 1% threshold on 27 October 2012, and there are now more than twice as many IPv6-connected users since World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012. 2013 marks the third straight year global IPv6 usage has doubled.

So in just slightly less than a year, the amount of IPv6 traffic has doubled … and after so many years with so little growth the trend line now is moving in the right direction!

google-ipv6-2percent

The World IPv6 Launch measurements and the many other sites tracking IPv6 deployment statistics are all showing similar trends.   Phil’s post also mentions some of the large deployments of IPv6 that have happened this past year:

  • Telefonica del Peru in South America roll out IPv6 on a large scale
  • Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Swisscom in Switzerland launch their IPv6 deployments
  • Time Warner Cable in North America join other major North American network operators with its own IPv6 offering
  • Two operators in Singapore, StarHub and M1, start rolling out IPv6 for their end users

The Internet is changing… and IPv6 is well on its way to becoming “the new normal”. The move is happening, and your choice is to continue to ignore it… or to get out in front and not get left behind.

What are you doing to get your networks, services, content and applications running over IPv6?  Please do browse our IPv6 resources and let us know how we can help you make the move!

P.S. If you aren’t aware of our “Internet Technology Matters” (ITM) blog, we write there about the current state of Internet technology. To stay up-to-date on our most recent posts, you can subscribe via RSS, follow @isoctech on Twitter, like the ITM page on Facebook or add the ITM Google+ page to a circle.

 

Sep 16

Google Confirms Having IPv6 And IPv4 Will NOT Cause Duplicate Content Issues For Search Ranking

Great to see Google’s Matt Cutts formally confirming what many have us have assumed all along – that making a website available over both IPv6 and IPv4 would not bring about a “duplicate content” issue that would incur penalties in search engine ranking.  The question Matt answers is:

As we are now closer than ever to switching to IPv6, could you please share info on how Google will evaluate websites. One website being in IPv4, exactly the same one in IPv6 – isn’t it considered duplicate content?

Here’s Matt’s response saying that there won’t be an issue:

If this was a reason you were hearing for NOT moving to IPv6, consider it addressed… why not get started today with making your sites available over IPv6?  We’ve got a number of IPv6 resources available for you, including these:

and many more!  (And if you can’t find what you need, please let us know!  We’re here to help you make the move to IPv6!)

May 24

Further Thoughts on the Google Voice / Google+ Hangouts Integration

Google hangoutsMy post this week about Google Voice ringing into Google+ Hangouts generated a good bit of commentary, not only on the original post but also out on Hacker News, Reddit, Google+ and other areas. Given the range of responses, I thought I'd reply to a couple of points and also expand on some further related topics. So here goes...

"DUH! This is nothing new/disruptive. You could do it forever with GTalk/Gmail!"

A common response was to point out to me that Google Voice had been integrated with GoogleTalk / GMail for quite some time and so this integration was really nothing new.

Okay, fair enough. Point taken.

I'll admit that I never keep GMail open in a web window and so while I do recall that this integration was there in the past, I never personally used it.

Similarly, in Google+, I've taken to logging out of the GoogleTalk/chat sidebar because I found it was sucking up CPU cycles on my Mac. For whatever reason, the new Hangouts sidebar doesn't seem to consume as much CPU cycles and so I've left it running there.

So yes, the integration may have been there in the past and now it is there in Hangouts - and people like me are actually now noticing it. :-)

Ringing G+ Hangouts BEFORE Ringing Other Devices

There were a couple of comments that it seemed like calls to a Google Voice number rang the Google+ Hangouts first and then rang the other devices connected to the GV number. In my own testing there does seem to be about a 3-second delay between when the call starts ringing in Google+ Hangouts and when it starts ringing on my cell phone and Skype. Now, this may be a fact of Google giving priority to their own application - or it may just be an architectural fact that when they fork the call out to the different numbers it is faster to connect to their own service while the calls to my cell and my Skype numbers have to go through various PSTN gateways. Either way, there does seem to be a degree of delay before all devices ring.

Delay In Answering

A couple of people noted that there was a delay from the time you hit "Answer" to when the call was actually established. I've noticed this, too, although not consistently. I think part of it may be with starting up the Hangouts component inside of your browser - particularly with getting the video going, since that seems to be required for the Hangouts component. It may also be just the paths through whatever systems Google is using. It's certainly something to monitor.

Google Voice Call Does Not Ring The Hangouts App on iOS

In my own testing, I found a curious omission. When I call in on my Google Voice number, it does not ring on my Hangouts app running on my iPad. It rings Hangouts on my web browser... but nothing happens in the mobile app. Now, my iPhone rings - but that is because it is also connected to the Google Voice account. I didn't try removing that number from Google Voice and then seeing if the Hangouts app on the iPhone would ring. At least for the iPad, nothing happens. It would be great if this did work so that I could receive the calls on that mobile device.

XMPP...

Multiple people pointed out that my final remark about maybe some day getting SIP support was probably unrealistic given Google "dropping" XMPP support. I was admittedly away on vacation and at a conference last week and so I missed this point in all the announcement about Hangouts coming out of Google I/O. I wrote about this yesterday, though: Did Google REALLY Kill Off All XMPP/Jabber Support In Google+ Hangouts? It Still Seems To Partially Work

Although, as pointed out in a comment on Google+, this "partial" XMPP support may just be a factor of the continued GoogleTalk support - and may fade away when Google finally pulls the plug on that.

This is definitely an area where it would be helpful if Google could provide a few clarifications.

That's all I have right now for a quite update and response to points. Thanks for all the great comments and I do look forward to seeing where Google is going with all of this.

You can also listen to an audio version of this post:

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May 23

Did Google REALLY Kill Off All XMPP/Jabber Support In Google+ Hangouts? It Still Seems To Partially Work

Google hangoutsDid Google really kill off all of their support for XMPP (Jabber) in Google+ Hangouts? Or is it still there in a reduced form? Will they be bringing back more support? What is really going on here?

In my excitement yesterday about Google Voice now being integrated with Google+ Hangouts, I missed a huge negative side of the new Hangouts change that is being widely reported: the removal of support for the XMPP (Jabber) protocol and interoperability with third-party clients.

But yet a few moments ago I did have a chat from an external XMPP client (Apple's "Messages" app) with Randy Resnick who received the message in a Google+ Hangout. I opened up a Google+ window in my browser and I could see the exchange happening there as well. Here's a side-by-side shot of the exchange in both clients:

Googleplusxmppinterop 450

So what is going on here?

Reports Of Google Removing XMPP

This issue has been widely reported in many of the tech blogs and sites. Matt Landis covered this issue very well in his post: Hangouts Won’t Hangout With Other Messaging Vendors: Google’s New Unified Messaging Drops Open XMPP/Jabber Interop which then generated long threads on Reddit and Slashdot.

The Verge in their lengthy story about Google+ Hangoutscontains this statement from Google's Nikhyl Singhal:

Talk, for example, was built to help enterprise users communicate better, Singhal says. "The notion of creating something that’s social and that’s always available wasn’t the same charter as we set out with when we created Talk." With Hangouts, Singhal says Google had to make the difficult decision to drop the very "open" XMPP standard that it helped pioneer.

The "Google Talk for Developers" pagealso very clearly states this:

Note: We announced a new communications product, Hangouts, in May 2013. Hangouts will replace Google Talk and does not support XMPP.

A Google+ post by Nikhyl Singhal has generated a large amount of comments (not solely about XMPP) and a post from Google's Ben Eidelson about how Google Messenger will be changed by Hangouts has also received many comments.

There was also a Hacker News thread about the news out of Google AppEngine that apps hosted there would not be able to communicate users of the new Hangouts app via XMPP - and providing a couple of workarounds.

A couple of Google+ threads from Matt Mastracci and Jan Wildeboer are also worth reading as is this note from Daniel Pentecost about how he has lost interop with his clients / customers.

But Is XMPP Support Still There?

I was a bit puzzled, though, by a couple of comments from Google's Ben Eidelson down in one of the G+ threads:

Ben Eidelson
+Thomas Heinen Thanks for your report of the issue. Hangouts supports basic interop with XMPP, so you can-for the time being-continue to use 3rd party clients. It does not work the same way as Talk, and so I believe the issue you're having with the XMPP bridge will not resolve in Hangouts.
Jason Summerfield
+Ben Eidelson So there is still some basic XMPP functionality under the hood? Does this mean that Hangouts will still be able to communicate with federated Jabber servers/clients, at least for now?

Ben Eidelson
+Jason Summerfield Not federated support, but supports interop with XMPP clients. Meaning you can continue to use XMPP clients to log in to Google Talk and those messages will interop with folks on Hangouts.

It was this that prompted me to call up Messages on my Mac, where I am logged in via XMPP to my GMail account, and to initiate a chat with Randy as shown above. We found we could chat perfectly fine. We couldn't initiate a callinto a Google+ Hangout from an external XMPP client - although I'll be honest and say I don't know how well that worked in the past. My own usage of external clients has entirely been for chat.

So What Is The Story?

I don't know. The statement quoted in The Verge's story seems pretty definitive that XMPP has been dropped, as does the message sent to AppEngine developers. It does seem so far that:

  • "Server-to-server" XMPP, used for federation with other servers / services, has been dropped.
  • "Presence" and status messages have been dropped (because the idea seems to be with Hangouts that you just send a message and people will get it either right then or whenever they are next online).
  • Within the Hangouts app, you can only connect to people with Google+ accounts, i.e. contacts on external XMPP servers no longer appear.
  • Google hasn't made any clear statements on what exactly is going on.

But is this partial XMPP support only temporary? Will it go away at some point whenever Hangouts fully "replaces" GoogleTalk? Or is this a communication mixup? (As happened recently with Google's announcement of DNSSEC support for their Public DNS Service?)

For me the disappointment in all of this is mostly that Google has been one of the largest advocates for the open XMPP protocol and I enjoyed the fact that I could use multiple different chat clients to interact with my GoogleTalk account. I was also very intrigued by the federation that we were starting to see between GTalk and other systems out there via XMPP.

Whereas before Google+ seemed to be an interesting social/messaging backbone to which I could connect many different apps and systems, now Google+ is looking like simply yet another proprietary walled garden - and we don't need more of those!

Hopefully we'll hear something more out of Google soon.

P.S. Here's another interesting viewpoint: Google Hangouts and XMPP – is cloud harming the Internet?

UPDATE: In a comment over on Google+, Daniel Pentecost states that Randy and I were not actually using Hangouts:

Dan, you weren't actually chatting through Hangouts. You were chatting through Google Talk which itself has a bridge into Hangouts. It only works b/c Randy is a Gmail user and still has access to Google Talk in Gmail.

Perhaps that is the case, which again then begs the question of whether this is only a temporary capability until GoogleTalk is shut down.

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May 22

You Can Now Call Into Google+ From Regular Phones – Google Connects Google Voice To Hangouts

Want to hear the sound of Google further disrupting the world of telecom? If you have a Google Voice number and also use Google+ (as I do) with the Hangouts feature enabled, you'll soon be hearing this new sound if you haven't already.

UPDATE: I have written a follow-up post responding to several comments and expanding on several points.

An Unexpected Ringing

Yesterday a random PR person called the phone number in the sidebar of this blog to pitch me on why I should write about her client. This phone number is through Google Voice and I knew by the fact that my cell phone and Skype both started ringing simultaneously that someone was calling that number.

But as I was deciding whether or not to actually answer the call, I realized that there was another "ringing" sound coming from my computer that I had not heard before. Flipping quickly through my browser windows I found my Google+ window where this box appeared at the top of the "Hangouts" sidebar on the right:

Googleplus incoming call

Now, of course, I HAD to answer the call, even though I knew from experience that most calls to that number are PR pitches. I clicked the "Answer" button and in a moment a regular "Hangout" window appeared, complete with my own video, and with an audio connection to the phone call.

Hangouts phonecall

The PR person and I then had a pleasant conversation where I rather predictably determined quickly that she'd probably never actually readthis blog or she would have known that I've never written about her client's type of software. Be that as it may, the audio quality of the call was great and the call went on without any issues.

A subsequent test showed me that I also had access to the dialpad had I needed to send any button presses (for instance, in interacting with an IVR or robocall):

Hangout keypad

The only real "issue" with the phone call was that when I pressed the "Hang up" button I wound up still being in the Hangouts window with this message displayed:

Google+ Hangouts

The irony of course is that that phone number was never in the "video call"... at least via video. Regardless, I was now alone in the video call with my camera still running. I needed to press the "Exit" button in the upper right corner of the Hangouts window. Outside of that, the user experience for the phone call was fine.

The Future Of Google Voice?

Like many people interested in what Google is doing with Google+, I had read the announcement from Google of the new streams and Hangouts features last week and had gone ahead and installed the iOS Hangouts app onto my iPhone to try it out (marking Google's entrance into the OTT VoIP space). But nowhere in there had I seen that this connection was going to happen between Google Voice and Hangouts. I'd seen speculation in various media sites, but nothing direct.

So it was a bit of a surprise when it happened... particularly because I'd done nothing to enable it. Google had simply connected my Google Voice number to my Google+ account.

I admit that it is a pleasant surprise... although I do wish for the sake of my laptop's CPU that I could somehow configure it to NOT launch myvideo when I get an audio-only call. Yes, I can just go stop my video, but that's an annoying extra step.

It seems, though, that another feature removed from Hangouts, at least temporarily, was the ability to make outbound phone calls. Given that all signs of Google Voice were removed from Google's interface and replaced by "Hangouts", this has predictably upset people who used the service, particularly those who paid for credits to make outgoing calls. There does seem to be a way to restore the old Chat interfacefor those who want to make outgoing calls so that is at least a temporary workaround.

Google's Nikhyl Singhal posted to Google+ about the new Hangouts featuresstating these two points:

1) Today's version of Hangouts doesn't yet support outbound calls on the web and in the Chrome extension, but we do support inbound calls to your Google Voice number. We're working hard on supporting both, and outbound/inbound calls will soon be available. In the meantime, you can continue using Google Talk in Gmail.

2) Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning. Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.

I'm sure that won't satisfy those who are troubled by the change, but it will be interesting to see where they go with Hangouts and voice communication.

(Note: the comment thread on Nikhyl Singhal's Google+ post makes for very interesting reading as people are sounding off there about what they'd like to see in a Hangouts / Google Voice merger.)

Will Hangouts Do SIP?

Of course, my big question will be... will Hangouts let us truly move beyond the traditional telephony of the PSTN and into the world of IP-based communications where can connect directly over the Internet? Google Voice once briefly let us receive VoIP calls using the SIP protocol - can Hangouts finally deliver on this capability? (And let us make outbound SIP calls as well?)

What do you think? Do you like this new linkage of Google Voice PSTN numbers to your Google+ account?

UPDATE #1 - I have written a follow-up post about XMPP support in Hangouts and confusion over what level of XMPP/Jabber support is still in Google+ Hangouts.

Audio commentary related to this post can be found in TDYR episode #009 on SoundCloud:

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