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Audio Recording: My SIPNOC 2014 Talk – “Is It Time For TLS For SIP?”
Continue Reading: Audio Recording: My SIPNOC 2014 Talk – “Is It Time For TLS For SIP?”Is it time to use Transport Layer Security (TLS… essentially what we used to call “SSL”) to add a layer of trust and security to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) that uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)?Way back in June 2014, I gave a talk on this topic at the SIP Network Operators Conference (SIPNOC) in Herndon, Virginia. I recorded the audio of the session… but then lost track of the recording. I recently found it and, since much of it is (sadly) still relevant, I decided to release the recording as one of my The Dan York Report audio podcast episodes:
The slides that go with the presentation are available on SlideShare:
You’ll see in the slide deck that I also provide some tutorials around DANE and DNSSEC along the way.
Coincidentally, I learned on Facebook over the weekend that my friend Olle Johansson was speaking on this exact topic at the FOSDEM 2016 conference in Brussels this weekend. His slides about SIP & TLS are also available on SlideShare, and he has more recent information – and also the conclusion that we need to use “SIP Outbound” for any of this to work:
Olle’s last slide about what we need…
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Talko’s Purchase By Microsoft Shows The Challenge Of The Directory Dilemma
Continue Reading: Talko’s Purchase By Microsoft Shows The Challenge Of The Directory DilemmaToday Microsoft announced that they acquired the technology of Talko, a communication app created by Ray Ozzie and launched back in September 2014. Fortune has an article on the acquistion, as do a good number of other media sites.After Talko first launched, I wrote about my initial experience – and the problem I had of Talko working through my home firewall. But I was intrigued by the possibilities laid out in a Medium article about how Talko could change communication and integrate voice, chat and messaging in interesting ways.
The reality, though, was that Talko was a classic case of suffering from the Directory Dilemma – as I said in that article:
People will only USE a communication application if the people they want to talk to are using the application.
And that was true for me… I tried out Talko, as I try out many apps. I used it for a while. And then… I stopped.
The people with whom I communicate were not regularly using Talko.
You can see the recognition of this dilemma in today’s front page of Talko’s web site:
However, as engaged as many of you have been, the reality is that the broad-based…
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Giving Up On The iPad2
Continue Reading: Giving Up On The iPad2I finally gave up. After months of trying to continue to use my older iPad 2 with first iOS 8 and then iOS 9, as chronicled in several blog posts, I finally gave in and bought a new iPad Air 2. These two blog posts, and the many comments left both on the posts and on social media, show I am clearly NOT alone in wanting to continue using my iPad 2:
- Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (June 2015)
- UPDATE: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (Reports after the upgrade.) (September 2015)
What finally did it for me is that after the iOS 9 upgrade, I was no longer able to use a specific application that I use all the time.
To explain a bit more, I coach a competitive girls Junior Curling team that my daughter is a member of. As part of that, I’ve been using an app call “iCurlStats” to track the actions and statistics in curling games so that we can be able to go back over them afterward. When I tried to use it in a recent curling tournament (a “bonspiel”) it kept crashing all the time… and at terrible…
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Video and Slides Now Available For My AstriCon 2015 Keynote: Open Source and The Global Disruption of Telecom
Continue Reading: Video and Slides Now Available For My AstriCon 2015 Keynote: Open Source and The Global Disruption of TelecomIf you’re interested in what I said last month at AstriCon 2015 in my keynote on “Open Source And The Global Disruption of Telecom: What Choices Will We Make?“, the video and slides are both available.As I wrote about previously, the context for this discussion was to talk about the changes that are happening all around us in terms of the ways in which we communicate. Here was the abstract:
There is a battle raging for the global future of telecommunications and the Internet. Taking place in networks, board rooms and legislatures, the battle will determine how we all communicate and what opportunities will exist. Will telecom support innovation? Will it be accessible to all? Will it give us the level of security and privacy we need to have the open, trusted Internet? Or will it be restricted and limited by corporate or government gatekeepers?
The rise of voice-over-IP has fundamentally disrupted the massive global telecommunications industry, infrastructure and policies. Open source software such as Asterisk has been a huge driver of that disruption and innovation.. but now what? What role do platforms such as Asterisk play in this space? And what can be their role in a telecom…
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My First RFC – 7649 On “The Jabber Scribe Role at IETF Meetings”
Continue Reading: My First RFC – 7649 On “The Jabber Scribe Role at IETF Meetings”Last month the first Request For Comments (RFC) was published where I was one of the co-authors. Ironically, this RFC 7649 had nothing to do with SIP, VoIP, telecom, IPv6, DNSSEC, security… or any of the other open Internet standards I’ve been working on in recent years!
In fact, it’s not a “standard” at all but rather an “informational” document.
This document collects together a series of best practices for how someone can fill the role of the “jabber scribe” at IETF meetings, such as the IETF 94 meeting about to happen in Yokohama, Japan, starting this weekend. (Which I will not be attending due to scheduling challenges.) You can read RFC 7659 at:
As the abstract states:
During IETF meetings, individual volunteers often help sessions run more smoothly by relaying information back and forth between the physical meeting room and an associated textual chatroom. Such volunteers are commonly called “Jabber scribes”. This document summarizes experience with the Jabber scribe role and provides some suggestions for fulfilling the role at IETF meetings.
The document came about because over the years that I’ve been involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) I’ve come to both value the critical role…
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Keynote at AstriCon on Oct 14: Open Source And The Global Disruption Of Telecom – What Choices Will We Make?
Continue Reading: Keynote at AstriCon on Oct 14: Open Source And The Global Disruption Of Telecom – What Choices Will We Make?Two weeks from today I’ll be in Orlando giving the opening keynote address at AstriCon 2015. The abstract of the session is:
Open Source And The Global Disruption Of Telecom – What Choices Will We Make?
Wednesday, October 14th, 2015 – 9:00 am to 9:45 am – Pacifica Ballroom 7
There is a battle raging for the global future of telecommunications and the Internet. Taking place in networks, board rooms and legislatures, the battle will determine how we all communicate and what opportunities will exist. Will telecom support innovation? Will it be accessible to all? Will it give us the level of security and privacy we need to have the open, trusted Internet? Or will it be restricted and limited by corporate or government gatekeepers?
The rise of voice-over-IP has fundamentally disrupted the massive global telecommunications industry, infrastructure and policies. Open source software such as Asterisk has been a huge driver of that disruption and innovation.. but now what? What role do platforms such as Asterisk play in this space? And what can be their role in a telecom infrastructure that is now mobile, increasingly embedded (Internet of Things) and more and more using proprietary walled gardens of communication?
Join…
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UPDATE: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (Reports after the upgrade.)
Continue Reading: UPDATE: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (Reports after the upgrade.)Back in June, I published a post titled “Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again?” that seemed to strike a nerve with the legions of iPad2 owners out there wondering about the future of their device. There have been a good number of comments on the original post – and I’ve received a fair number of private email messages asking how my upgrade went. The question now being asked is:
Does iOS 9 make your iPad 2 run BETTER?
Sadly, the best answer seems to be…
maybe.
Reports have been decidedly mixed, both in the media as well as in the comments to that June blog post here. Some people reported improvements while others said it was the same (or worse).
A couple of people (one example) have reported that after upgrading to iOS 9 and then doing a factory reset the performance dramatically improved. The issue there, though, as I understand it, is that you lose all your apps, settings, etc. and would basically need to completely rebuild how you have the iPad 2 set up. However, if the alternative is not using it, I guess that’s an…
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Four Years At The Internet Society
Continue Reading: Four Years At The Internet SocietyIt was four years ago today that I joined the Internet Society staff… and what an amazing four years it has been!If I go back and read my long post here about joining ISOC in September 2011, my passion and motivation continues to be the same – if anything, that passion has only gotten stronger!
As I wrote about last year in my three-year post, the “Internet of opportunity” that we all value is under severe threat.
The big change for me this past year, was, of course, the big change of joining the Internet Society Strategic Communications team in March 2015 (you can also listen to an audio recording).
That’s been a wonderful yet crazy change!
If you go back and look at what I wrote last year – or two years ago – it’s all about the technology behind the Internet and how we need to improve the infrastructure to make the Internet work better, be faster and be more secure.
The change this year is that now I’m more involved in other areas of Internet Society work, particularly in the public policy space. You can see that in some of the posts I’ve been writing for…
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Firechat Enables Private Off-The-Internet (P2P) Messaging Using Mobile Phones
Continue Reading: Firechat Enables Private Off-The-Internet (P2P) Messaging Using Mobile PhonesThere was a fascinating article posted on Medium this week by the CTO of messaging app Firechat:
In the text he outlines how they do decentralized “off-the-grid” private messaging using an ad hoc mesh network established between users of the Firechat app. It sounds like the app instances join together into some kind of peer-to-peer (P2P) network and then do normal “store-and-forward” messaging.
Of note, the apps do NOT need an Internet connection, or even a cellular network connection – instead they can use the Bluetooth and WiFi radios in the mobile phones to create a private mesh network and connect to other users of the Firechat app.
Naturally, having spent some time exploring P2P networks back when I was playing around with P2P SIP and distributed hash tables (DHTs) and other technologies, I immediately jump into the techie questions:
- How are they routing messages from one user to another?
- How is the “directory” of users in P2P mesh maintained?
- What addresses are they using for the communication? Is this still happening over IP addresses? Or are they using some other kind of…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…