Disruptive Telephony

In the ongoing debate around the controversial "Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)" bill in the US Congress (that I have covered previously here and here), there are four updates worth reading:

• First, Matt Cutts provided a comprehensive SOPA update last week talking about all the online activism and support against the bill. Great collections of links, and I loved this part at the end:

  I thought we’d have to wait 20-25 years before a critical mass of people would defend the net. But SOPA has brought that day a lot closer. SOPA galvanized the tech community, from start-ups to venture capitalists to the largest web companies. SOPA was an unexpected shock and a wake-up call. Well, guess what? Now the internet is awake. And I don’t think it’s going back to sleep any time soon. We might need to rally again in the near future, but we can do that. The internet learns fast.

• Sandia National Laboratories responded to a request from Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren with a letter outlining why SOPA wouldn't work and would decrease our cybersecurity.
  
  
• The European Parliament adopted a resolution that included among its many clauses, one (#25) that spoke specifically to SOPA/Protect-IP issues:

  Stresses the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names;

• Finally, the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which represents many of the largest tech companies and had been promoted as supporting SOPA, clarified their position and indicated that the law as written is too broad and could have unintended consequences.

All in all a much better situation than was the case two weeks ago...

Image credit: jasonippolito on Flickr

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Please note that this blog post represents my personal opinion and has no connection whatsoever to any employers or other organizations, either past or present.

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It turns out that the Skype 5.x Beta releases for Mac OS X have a hidden feature. In my last Skype-related post about the simultaneous release of 5.7 Beta for Windows and 5.4 Beta for Mac OS X, I mentioned that the release notes for the 5.7 Beta for Windows included a "Push To Talk" feature that was not in the Mac OS X version. From those Windows release notes:

Push to Talk

We have introduced a Push to Talk feature in Skype. Many people who are playing multiplayer games have requested this from us.

With this feature you can set a hotkey which will toggle microphone muting on Skype call.

You can set the Push to Talk up on the hotkey's selection under tools > options > advanced > hotkeys.

In my post, I mentioned that while I personally wasn't sure I saw the need for this feature, it was an example of the continued missing parity between the two products (Skype for Windows, Skype for Mac OS X).

This morning I received a nice note from Skype's product manager for the Skype for Mac product letting me know that this "Push To Talk" feature actually is included in the Skype for Mac 5.x Beta releases, albeit as a hidden feature.  To use "Push To Talk" during a Skype call, you need to press (ready for this?):

Control + Option + Command + Up Arrow

Yep... three keys with your left hand and then the up-arrow with your right hand. (or yes, you could press the command and option keys on the right side, but you still need the control key on the left side.)

It does work.  I tried it on a call and found that once I pressed the key combination the call was in "Push To Talk" mode and I had to hold down that key combination to speak.  I was also able to just click on the icon of the muted microphone in my Skype window to leave this "PTT" mode and go back to regular microphone usage.

Unfortunately, unlike the Windows version, there does not seem to be any way, yet, to configure the key combination. I don't regularly play multiplayer online games so I don't know whether this particular key combination is a problem. It just seems to me to be inefficient in that it requires both hands.  It would be great if Skype would allow the configuration of this key combo as the 5.x release for Mac OS X leaves beta.

Anyway... for those of you using the Skype 5 Beta for Mac OS X, you, too, can now use "Push To Talk"...

 

 

 

 

The Internet Society is hiring! We've got about 10 open positions right now...

17 Nov 2011	Technical Outreach for Identity and Privacy
14 Nov 2011	Regional Bureau Director, North America
09 Nov 2011	Director, Development Strategy
04 Nov 2011	Membership Program Coordinator
27 Oct 2011	Sr. Manager, Next Generation Leaders Programme
18 Oct 2011	Internet Development Manager for Africa
28 Sep 2011	Application Development Specialist
27 Sep 2011	Sr. Director of Business Development and Resource Mobilization
27 Sep 2011	Administrative Assistant
09 Sep 2011	IT System Support Specialist

To apply, just follow the links here or check out the main Internet Society Careers page. I believe strongly in the mission of the Internet Society (as I explained before) and encourage you to consider the openings... we're looking for some great people to help the organization accomplish even more!

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Oops... this post about Google Wave is really over at Disruptive Conversations: http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2011/11/and-so-google-finally-announces-the-formal-death-of-google-wave-in-2012.html (Keeping this post up because it already went out in social networks...)

How exactly will the proposed "Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA)" impact the DNS infrastructure of the Internet? What are the technical and engineering problems caused by the proposed bill? How will the bill actually DECREASE our national cybersecurity?

I covered the basics of SOPA (HR.3261) and its companion bill in the Senate, S.968, the "PROTECT-IP Act", last week and and in the time since I wrote that post the public opposition to SOPA has mounted dramatically as people have come to understand what exactly these bills will do. Like many, I applaud the intent of these bills to protect intellectual property, but am concerned that the mandated mechanism of "DNS filtering" proposed by these bills will have serious negative consequences.

If you want to understand the technical issues with the proposed mechanism, there are three whitepapers I would recommend for reading - and for sharing with your legislators. (I've sent the links in to my representatives.) I'd note that the first two documents were prepared back in the spring of 2011 to address the U.S. Senate's version, the PROTECT-IP Act, but the mechanism proposed in SOPA is essentially the same.

• Internet Society Perspectives on Domain Name System (DNS) Filtering (direct link to English PDF)

  In this easy-to-read paper, the Internet Society explains why DNS filtering is not a solution, how the mechanism can be easily circumvented and how it will "not solve the problem, interfere with cross-border data flows and services, and undermine the Internet as a single, unified, global communications network." The document discusses the issues of "collateral damage" of website blockage, explains some of the non-technical issues and provides links to further resources.

• Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill (PDF)

  This whitepaper was written by 5 of the leading DNS designers, operators and researchers and dives into significant technical depth. In particular, it looks at how the proposed DNS filtering mechanism would break the implementation of DNSSEC, a newer method being deployed to help secure the DNS infrastructure. The paper, too, addresses how easily DNS filtering can be bypassed (and provides very simple examples demonstrating this) and the security issues that come with that circumvention. It also looks at the "collateral damage" issue, the impact to content delivery networks (CDNs) and the overall impact that DNS filtering would have to the Internet.

• Cybersecurity in the Balance: Weighing the Risks of the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act

  This recent paper from Allan A. Friedman, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, frames the SOPA/PROTECT-IP debate in terms of the impact to national cybersecurity. It again covers the issues with DNS filtering, impacts to DNSSEC, unintended consequences, etc., but does so from the point-of-view of how this will affect the cybersecurity position of the U.S., both domestically and at an international level.

All three of these papers are good to read (and share) to understand the technical weaknesses of the proposed solutions in SOPA/PROTECT-IP.

Please do pass them along so that people can understand the technical issues with these proposed solutions.

Image credit: jasonippolito on Flickr

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Please note that this blog post represents my personal opinion and has no connection whatsoever to any employers or other organizations, either past or present.

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Last week I was up in Toronto, Ontario, Canada for the Internet Society's ION conference that was a part of the larger Canadian ISP Summit. This was only the first Canadian ISP Summit, but I've heard only excellent reports on the 3-day session and indeed we were extremely pleased by the attendance and engagement in our ION session on Monday. I was unfortunately unable to stay for the rest of the summit, but I saw this link tweeted out and had to check it out:

Historical Timeline of Canadian Telecommunications Achievements (PDF)

It turns out to be a document created for a presentation at the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly back in 2000 (hence, why the history only goes up to 1999 ;-). I'm assuming someone at the CA ISP Summit referenced this document... thus generating the tweets.

Regardless of the lack of recent info, it's an interesting history of telecom in Canada... and gives an intriguing view into the wiring of a large country. Worth a read for those interested in the history of telecom.

Image credit: dr_opulentfish on Flickr

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Yesterday I sat in such utter shock that I had to look out my window to see if, in fact, we were witnessing porcine aviation. My brain was having a hard time processing something I had just read online. I literally was speechless, which, if you know anything about me, is a very hard state for me to attain. :-)

What created this cognitive dissonance?

You see...

Skype just announced the simultaneous release of new versions of Skype for BOTH Windows and Mac OS X.

Even more, the two versions almost have feature parity.

Yes, indeed, you can now get the Skype 5.7 beta for Windows and the Skype 5.4 beta for Mac OS X, both of which introduce a "Facebook video calling" feature, and both of which bring the two releases closer to "feature parity".

Why is this a big deal?

If you have been reading this site for any length of time, you have probably seen some of these posts:

• December 2008 - Skype launches 4.0 Beta 3 ... still only on Windows... and still a fragmented product strategy..
  
  
• June 2009 - Skype launches version 4.1... (yawn)... still only Windows... still a fragmented product strategy
  
  
• May 2010 - Why I'm NOT excited about Skype 5.0 with group video calls
  
  
• October 2010 - Skype 5.0 brings Facebook integration, group video - but ONLY if you are on Windows

I - and others - have continually asked the question for years now of why Skype couldn't release its product simultaneously on at least Windows and Mac OS X. The answers always given were the lame corporate-speak about "delivering the best experience on each platform", blah, blah, blah...

But the truth is that the siloed development of each platform meant that Windows users would get some features, then Mac users would get some features, then Windows users some more, then Mac users some more... and the net result was that whenever a new feature was released, you couldn't try it with people who were on the other platform.

Meanwhile, many other products from web browsers even to softphones (from Counterpath) were all able to come out with a simultaneous product release across multiple operating systems.

I admit that I had come to expect that we'd probably see a full deployment of IPv6 on the public Internet before we'd see a simultaneous product release out of Skype...

(And with apologies to the users of Skype on Linux who pretty much have to accept at this point that their chance of getting feature parity with Windows and Mac OSX are right up there with the odds of the Pope converting to Judaism.)

The (Almost) Caveat

Of course, you'll notice that I keep using "almost" here... the fact is that this is NOT the same product brought out on two different operating systems, but rather the coordination of the release of two different products.

As Jim Courtney notes in his own post on these new releases the user interfaces are still different in ways that make it challenging to explain to someone on the other platform how to do something in Skype. There are still terminology differences ('categories' versus 'tags'). On the Mac version I still can't pop a chat out into a separate window as I'm told you can do in the Windows version (and we used to be able to do with Skype 2.8 for the Mac). Even in these announcements, the 5.7 beta for Windows mentions a "Push to Talk" feature which I don't see in the 5.4 beta for Mac. (Indeed I can't find any way to set "hot keys" on my Mac, which actually could be useful.)

Not that I personally really want the "Push to Talk" feature... but it's an example of the continued fragmentation of the two products.

So I celebrate the fact that Skype finally delivered a new feature simultaneously across both platforms - great work to all involved!

And yes, now I naturally want the rest of the parity between platforms... ;-)

Image credits: kiss kiss bang bang and eric_liu76 on Flickr

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If you are a U.S. citizen and have NOT been paying attention to the madness going on in the US Congress right now with regard to the Internet, you really NEED to take a look...

If you have a website, you need to be paying attention...

If you own a domain name, you need to be paying attention...

Backed by the traditional media industries (and all their lobbying $$$) the U.S. Senate and House are considering legislation that would seriously break the Internet as we know it. Rather than the DMCA "takedown notices" that have been used to date, these new bills would require ISPs to disable access to websites.

Basically it would give corporations the ability to manipulate (through ISPs) the DNS system to block access to content that they feel is objectionable or violates their copyrights, etc.

I think we all can generally agree that stopping online piracy and illegal activities is a good goal. As well as being a consumer of online content, I am also a creator of online content, and sure, I don't want my content pirated and mis-used by others...

but a "simple" technical solution is NOT the answer!

On a purely technical point-of-view, the Internet Society has issued a DNS Filtering White Paper on why this type of filtering is not a solution to combating illegal activities... and the danger such filtering has to the fabric of the Internet and to users themselves.

In the US Senate, the bill is S.968, the "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP)" Act (also known as "PIPA") while over in the house it was first known as the "E-PARASITE bill (the Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act)" and now has been introduced as H.3261, the "Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)".

There has been a great amount of online content generated around this issue. Some of the articles I found useful include:

• GigaOm: Looks like Congress has declared war on the internet (LOTS of links to learn more)
• Techdirt: E-PARASITE Bill: 'The End Of The Internet As We Know It'
• CNET: SOPA: Hollywood's latest effort to turn back time
• CNET: Five essential changes to Protect IP Act
• Fred Wilson: Protecting The Safe Harbors Of The DMCA And Protecting Jobs
• Ars Technica: House takes Senate's bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse
• EFF: The Stop Online Piracy Act: A Blacklist by Any Other Name Is Still a Blacklist
• Video: PROTECT IP / SOPA Act Breaks the Internet
• Forbes: Why Anti-Piracy Legislation Will Become Law - and a counterpoint

PopVox has an interesting comparison of the organizations supporting and opposing S.968 and HR.3261. Look at the "Organizations Supporting" and "Organizations Opposing" tabs, although I believe there are more opposing orgs than simply those listed... still, it gives a view of the players involved.

The battle is going on right now with one of the latest updates being that tech industry reps were denied a seat at next week's House hearings and that now the 4 presenters to the committee will all be pro-SOPA entities.

Please... take a moment to read these links above... read even more... educate yourself on what the issues are - and let your opinion be known to your representatives in the U.S. House and Senate. Please spread the word online, too, as we who are users of the Internet need to let our voices be heard...

Image credit: jasonippolito on Flickr

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UPDATE #1: Alex Howard has a great collection of SOPA/PIPA-related links, including a video of Senator Ron Wyden (the senator currently putting a "hold" on the PROTECT IP bill in the Senate).

UPDATE #2: While I began this post "If you are a U.S. citizen", Neville Hobson correctly pointed out that those outside the U.S. need to be concerned, too, as this type of government intervention in the Internet by the US government, if successful, will certainly spread to other governments. Plus, any issues affecting DNS will naturally have impacts outside the USA.

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Please note that this blog post represents my personal opinion and has no connection whatsoever to any employers or other organizations, either past or present.

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For those of use with iOS devices, news of today's iOS 5.0.1 that fixes battery issues was welcome... and along with it the news that this update is available "over-the-air" (OTA). NO iTUNES SYNC REQUIRED!

Just go into Settings, then General, then Software Update. Per this article on Mashable, your device needs to either be plugged in or have over 50% battery.

Here's what it looked like on my iPad:

The Mashable piece said that the OTA update was faster and I can personally attest to that. I started the process to update my iPhone 4S via iTunes and the first step was to download the update from Apple. Several minutes later I decided to do the OTA process on my iPad2. The iPad2 finished the update process before iTunes had even finished downloading the update!

So yes, the OTA process is definitely faster!

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• From the Editor’s Desk
• DANE: Taking TLS Authentication to the Next Level Using DNSSEC
• Message from the IETF Chair
• Words from the IAB Chair
• ISOC Panel Addresses Regulation, Innovation, and the Internet
• IAB Plenary Tackles IPv6, Privacy Issues
• New Technology Demo: PCP
• Internet Society Fellows to the IETF Increase Participation on a Global Scale
• IETF Ornithology: Recent Sightings
• IETF 81 At–A–Glance
• IRTF Update
• IETF Meeting Calendar

The IETF Journal is published three times a year and past (and future) versions can be found at:

http://isoc.org/wp/ietfjournal/

If you would like to be alerted to future editions - or would like to contribute articles - more information can be found on that page.
 

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