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Russ White On The Process Around Creating RFCs in the IETF
Continue Reading: Russ White On The Process Around Creating RFCs in the IETFHave you ever been curious about the process of creating a Request For Comments (RFC) document within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)? These are the standards like, oh, “HTTP”, that power the Internet. Have you been interested in understanding how they work?
If so, someone I know, Russ White, recently completed a 7-part article series about the entire process over on the Packet Pushers Network site. Russ has nicely summarized the series on his site at:
https://rule11.tech/the-rfc-process/
He does a nice job providing an overview of the long process of starting with an idea, creating an “Internet draft”, working it through the IETF process, and then hopefully getting it published.
There are many more details, of course, but Russ lays out the high-level aspects and mentions some of the parts of the process which are harder to understand for someone new to the IETF.
If you are interested in the RFC process, I would encourage you to give Russ’ series of articles a read.
Using Markdown instead of XML
I do have one area of disagreement with Russ. He advocates for using XML for writing Internet drafts, whereas I used to write drafts in XML but have moved over…
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WhatsApp and End-to-End Encryption (a ChatGPT3 article experiment)
Continue Reading: WhatsApp and End-to-End Encryption (a ChatGPT3 article experiment)For those who use WhatsApp, you may have noticed that your messages are secure and private, thanks to the encryption that is used. But what is encryption, and why is it so important?
Encryption is a process of scrambling information so that only the intended recipient can read it. Essentially, it takes the data you’re sending and scrambles it using a mathematical algorithm. To unscramble the data, you need a key, which is known only to the sender and the receiver.
WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, which means that your messages are encrypted on the sender’s device, travel securely to the receiver’s device, and remain encrypted until the receiver reads them. This means that no one – not even WhatsApp themselves – can see the messages you’re sending.
This is an important feature for anyone concerned about their privacy, especially in an era of increased surveillance. With WhatsApp’s encryption, you can be sure that your messages will stay safe, secure, and private.
WhatsApp is also working to improve their encryption, with plans to add a feature known as “Perfect Forward Secrecy”. This feature will generate a new encryption key for each message you send, ensuring that if one key is ever…
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Remote Working: the Benefits, Disadvantages, and some Lessons Learned in 15+ years
Continue Reading: Remote Working: the Benefits, Disadvantages, and some Lessons Learned in 15+ yearsWith so many people now having to learn to work remotely due to restrictions related to COVID-19, what information can people share who have been working from home? Back in October 2019, I realized it was 20 years ago when I started working remotely, and so I sent out some tweets asking for opinions about the benefits of working remotely, the challenges / disadvantages, and then the lessons people have learned. I subsequently recorded podcast episodes on each of those three topics.
The links to the Twitter threads and podcasts are below.At some point I may turn them into longer articles themselves, but in the meantime, I hope they will help some of you with ideas for how to get adjusted to this new way of working.
And… I would suspect many of you might just want to jump directly to the lessons learned…
Benefits
- Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/danyork/status/1181883371611406336
- Podcast episode: TDYR 380 – Remote Working, Part 1: What are the BENEFITS of working from home?
Many of the benefits were about no commute, the ability to be present with family, freedom to work and live wherever, flexibility, caring for family, and more. (Note that a good number of the benefits mentioned (such as working…
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The Publishing of RFC 8496 Concludes the 10-year Saga of P-Charge-Info
Continue Reading: The Publishing of RFC 8496 Concludes the 10-year Saga of P-Charge-InfoOctober 31, 2018, was a special day for me. Not because it was Halloween, but because after 10 years a small little document I co-authored about the “P-Charge-Info” header for SIP-based Voice-over-IP (VoIP) was published as informational RFC 8496. You can see it at either:
Ultimately, all this document does is register the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Header Field of “P-Charge-Info” within the “SIP Parameters” registry maintained by IANA at:
But the story of getting that registration to happen is a long one!
In the beginning…
The short version is this. Back in around 2007 or so, I was working for Voxeo and we were using the “P-Charge-Info” header in our large SIP-based application server to pass along billing information. Essentially, when someone made a call on our system, we wanted to pass a billing identifier that was often different from the source phone number (i.e. “CallerID”). This quote from RFC 8496 was pretty much Voxeo’s use case:
As another example, a hosted telephony provider or hosted voice
application provider may have a large SIP network with customers
distributed over a very large geographic area using local market PSTN
numbers but with… -
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XKCD Comic Perfectly Captures Sad, Fragmented State of Messaging / Chat Systems
Continue Reading: XKCD Comic Perfectly Captures Sad, Fragmented State of Messaging / Chat SystemsIn one picture, this comic from xkcd nails the very sad state of fragmentation with our messaging systems today. The text says:
I have a hard time keeping track of which contacts use which chat systems.
And that is our major pain point today.
Think about it… do you know how to reach most of the people you need to communicate with?
Some readers may have just decided that they are going to ONLY use one service. They communicate on only, say, Facebook. Or WhatsApp. (Or in one case I know, someone has rejected all new messaging apps and will only communicate with email.)
And so if you want to communicate with them you have to use their one service.
But of course, if you want to communicate with other people, you have to use their service… which leads to this comic and the mental energy we all must expend to remember (names are made up):
- George likes to get Twitter DMs
- Sue and Jose only use Facebook Messenger
- Carlos only uses WhatsApp
- Heidi, Frederick and Laura only use Wire
- Your parents all use iMessage… except when they decide to use Facebook Messenger
- Your teenage kids…
- George likes to get Twitter DMs
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Celebrating 10 Years of Blogging at Disruptive Telephony
Continue Reading: Celebrating 10 Years of Blogging at Disruptive TelephonyTen years ago today, on December 18, 2006, I launched this blog with a very short 1-paragraph post:
Welcome to Disruptive Telephony! For a number of years, I have been blogging about VoIP as part of my personal blog, “Blog.DanYork.com”. However, I’m now in the process of splitting out some parts of my writing into separate blogs. This is one of those blogs. Right now… I’m just setting it up, so don’t expect to see much here. Stay tuned, though… much will be happening soon.
At the time, I was living in Burlington, Vermont, and working remotely for the Office of the CTO at Mitel Networks back up in Ottawa, Ontario (where we lived from 2000-2005). Dave Edwards, a friend from Ottawa, left the only comment on that post.
In 2006, the “VoIP blogging” world was quite small – and we all pretty much knew other. Om Malik was writing on his own site (it was yet to become GigaOm). Andy Abramson had VoIPWatch. Jeff Pulver was writing on his sites. Tom Keating at his “VoIP and Gadgets blog” on TMC. Martin Geddes had his “Telepocalypse” site. Alec Saunders had “Saunderslog”. And there were a few others…
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Audio Interview: Mozilla’s Nils Ohlmeier about Firefox and WebRTC
Continue Reading: Audio Interview: Mozilla’s Nils Ohlmeier about Firefox and WebRTCWant to learn the latest about WebRTC inside of Firefox? Nils Ohlmeier from Mozilla sat down for an interview at the IIT RTC Conference last week with Mark Fletcher of the Avaya Podcast Network. I found it quite a useful explanation of what Mozilla is doing with Firefox and how different aspects of WebRTC come into play in different parts of Firefox. Give it a listen…
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Heading to Romania to ION Bucharest for DNSSEC, IPv6, routing security and more
Continue Reading: Heading to Romania to ION Bucharest for DNSSEC, IPv6, routing security and moreThis week I will briefly be in Bucharest, Romania, for the Internet Society’s ION Bucharest conference. We’ve got a great set of sessions on the agenda, including:
- Deploying DNSSEC
- Romanian DNSSEC Case Study
- Let’s Encrypt & DANE
- Mind Your MANRS & the Routing Resilience Manifesto
- The Case for IPv6
- IPv6 Success Stories
- What’s Happening at the IETF? Internet Standards and How To Get Involved
I will have two roles in the event tomorrow:
- Presenting the “Deploying DNSSEC” technical session.
- Doing the live streaming of the event through the Deploy360 YouTube channel.
I enjoy doing the production of live video streams and so this should be a good bit of fun (it’s also intense work in the midst of it).
You can WATCH LIVE starting at 14:00 EEST (UTC+3, or 7 hours ahead of the US East Coast where I live).
The sessions will also be recorded for later viewing.
It will be a short trip for me. I’m currently (Tuesday morning) writing this from the Munich airport. I land in Bucharest tonight. The event is tomorrow – and then I fly home Thursday afternoon.
Despite the short visit, I’m looking forward to it – it should be a…
- Deploying DNSSEC
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Facebook Messenger’s “Instant Video” Lets You Simultaneously Use Video and Chat
Continue Reading: Facebook Messenger’s “Instant Video” Lets You Simultaneously Use Video and ChatThe messaging wars continue! Today Facebook Messenger added “Instant Video” to it’s iOS and Android app, allowing you to easily share live video while still in a text chat. Facebook has had “video calling” since back in May 2015, but that requires both parties to answer the video call in the same way that Facetime, Wire and every other video app does it.
“Instant Video” is different:
VIDEO STARTS OUT ONE-WAY – Only the video of the person initiating “Instant Video” is shown. The recipient sees the video of the sender, but their video connection is NOT enabled. Now, the recipient can start sending video, but they don’t have to.
AUDIO IS OFF INITIALLY – When the sender starts their video, the recipient receives the video without any sound. They can easily start getting sound by tapping on the speaker icon on the video, but this is great because often you are having a text conversation precisely because you don’t want to use audio.
YOU CAN STILL SEE THE CHAT – The video overlays the upper right corner of the chat window, but that’s it. You can still see the chat messages and continue having your chat.
This last point…
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Facebook Messenger Launches Group Conference Calls (Audio-only)
Continue Reading: Facebook Messenger Launches Group Conference Calls (Audio-only)Continuing their efforts to be THE communication platform you use, the Messenger team at Facebook rolled out “group calling” this week within the Messenger app on iOS and Android. The new feature was announced by David Marcus, head of the FB Messenger team. Right now this is audio-only (i.e. not group video) and per media reports is limited to 50 participants.
I had to go to the AppStore and upgrade the Messenger app on my iPhone to the latest version, but once I did, I suddenly had a phone icon in the upper right corner of a group chat:
Tapping that phone icon brought me to a screen where I could choose which of the group members I wanted to bring into the group call:
After tapping “Call” in the lower right, Messenger launched the call and gave me feedback about who it was connecting, etc:
It then connected those who were available and four of us were in a group conference call:
As you can see in the screen captures, I had the standard buttons to mute my microphone and to activate the speakerphone.
AUDIO QUALITY – The audio quality was quite good. I couldn’t find any technical info…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…