Speaking of Standards

Back in September, I wrote about the creation of the Call Control UUI Service for SIP (CUSS) working group within the IETF. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Alan Johnston, the lead author of the primary document within the CUSS working group, to talk about what CUSS is all about. I posted the video to my Emerging Tech Talk podcast and you can now listen to Alan explain it all (without actually cussing, I might add):

How does IPv6 impact communications applications? How does it affect the SIP protocol? What do you need to think about with regard to real-time communication over IPv6?

Courtesy of our new ability to upload longer videos to our YouTube account, I’m pleased to be able to bring you the recording of our Developer Jam Session last month on IPv6 and Communications Applications. While we uploaded WMV and MOV recordings of the session to that Jam Session web page, with YouTube you are now able to also view the session on mobile platforms and other devices. Enjoy!

In this 15 minute video from the SANS Institute, Dr. Johannes Ullrich provides a good overview of IPv6 addressing and then describes how I think many enterprises will actually deploy IPv6.

I admit that I was concerned by the title… I thought “oh, no, someone who thinks that NAT is going to go away with IPv6 and every endpoint is going to have a public IPv6 address“. For a variety of reasons I should put into a blog post, I don’t see that happening at all. Instead, I see what Johannes Ullrich describes in this video:

• RFC 1918 private address for IPv4 (10.x, 192.168.x, etc) being replaced by RFC 4193 Unique Local Addresses (ULA) in IPv6
• NAT in IPv4 being replaced by application-layer gateways (ALGs) and proxies in IPv6

Effectively making enterprises walled networks with only the holes allowed by the ALGs/Proxies in conjunction with the firewalls.

The only real difference in my mind between ALGs/proxies and NAT is that in a NAT environment typically most outbound connections are allowed by default (subject to whatever firewall rules are there). Johannes Ullrich made a point in an email exchange I had with him that this means that a IPv4 machine behind NAT could be compromised by malware and then open up connections on various ports. In IPv6 without NAT (or for that matter in IPv4 with NAT disabled), connections would only be allowed out on whatever ports the ALGs/proxies allowed. (Of course, many malware clients may just tunnel their traffic over HTTP, which is typically allowed.)

Regardless of the nuances around “NAT vs ALGs/proxies”, the video is a useful tutorial about how to securely set up a network with IPv6. Enjoy…

In December 2010, Voxeo Senior Engineer Rob Green gave a tutorial on IPv6 to a group of interested Voxeons. Others wanted to see it and rather than keep it internal we decided to make it available to anyone to view. Naturally I did edit it a bit to remove some of the references about how Prophecy will work with IPv6 and also about our customers that are using IPv6… but we’ll have more on that soon.

(And if you are seeking IPv6-compliant solutions and want to know more about what we are doing with Prophecy as soon as possible, please contact us.)

You can view the video on YouTube or watch it here:

It’s a Friday afternoon… so what better way to end the (typical) work week then to share two videos about Internet standards!

Videos about standards, you say?

Indeed… the beauty of our brave new world of online content creation is that videos, blog posts, etc can be created for any audience…

So here, for your viewing pleasure are an “Internet Public Service Announcement” from Comcast (who is rolling out DNSSEC on their network) and a rather strange end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it IPv6 office farce from Cisco (who, of course, would be glad to sell you all the equipment you need to upgrade your network for IPv6).

Enjoy…

Comcast and DNSSEC

Cisco and IPv6

This week in New York City, Tim O’Reilly gave a keynote at the Web 2.0 event that I definitely put in my “must-see” category. Not because of anything visual… I mean, it’s just Tim standing on stage talking… but because of his message.

There is a war on out there on the Internet.

It’s a war between those who would like to keep the Internet as the open platform for innovation that it has been for decades… those who champion “The Internet Way” – and those who would like to return the Internet to the world of walled gardens from which it emerged. In his excellent piece published on Monday, “The War For The Web“, Tim speaks of the sides as “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined” and, of course, “One Ring To Rule Them All”. He concludes with:

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it’s time for developers to take a stand. If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.

This IS the battle that will frame the Internet in the next years. As I wrote a few months ago in ‘Of DDoSs and SPOFs: How Twitter and Facebook violate “The Internet Way”‘, the way of the Internet is to use “distributed and decentralized” services. That’s how email works… that’s how the “web” works… that’s what excites me about the promise of Google Wave – not just that it’s a great platform for collaboration (and as I show here, it is), but that the Wave protocol has been designed from the start to be about federation… to be about distributed and decentralized services.

This war is a large part of why I work here at Voxeo, where one of our core values is “Unlocked Communications“, where we are huge believer in open standards (and chair/co-chair many of the standards committees), where we do things like open source our Tropo cloud telephony platform (“The Cloud Must Be Open!”) and where, in contrast to Nuance and TellMe as Tim mentions at 13:22, we give away our speech recognition engine for free as part of our Prophecy IVR/application platform… that’s why I’m here at Voxeo. It’s a war for openness that I believe we must win!

But listen to Tim… and then ask yourself – which side of the war are you on?

Want to learn more about Peer-to-peer SIP (P2PSIP)? If so, I’ve now put up a video podcast episode where I’m interviewing David Bryan, chair of the IETF working group on P2PSIP. As long-time readers are probably aware, I’ve written about P2PSIP here a number of times – and also explained my particular interest. I continue to find P2PSIP a fascinating area of research… and so you can probably expect to continue to see more articles on it in the future.

Meanwhile, enjoy the video – and if you have visited my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, you’ll find other videos there dealing with emerging technology issues:

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS or following on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: sip, p2p, p2psip, voxeo, emergingtechtalk, ett, davidbryan, danyork

At SpeechTEK in New York City a few weeks ago, our own Dan Burnett was recognized by Speech Tech Magazine as one of the “2008 Speech Luminaries” for all his years of work on industry standards relating to speech. We were delighted for Dan to receive the (well-deserved!) recognition and I had a chance to record a brief video interview with Dan at SpeechTEK:

As Dan mentions, he is Director of Speech Technologies in our Office of the CTO (OCTO) reporting in to our CTO, RJ Auburn, and is responsible for looking at how to constantly improve our speech recognition technology and also ensure it is compliant with standards.

Congratulations, Dan, on the recognition by Speech Technology Magazine!

P.S. And yes, for those following along at home, Dan Burnett and I were both hired into the OCTO at about the same time… we thought about instituting a rule where all new OCTO employees had to be named “Dan”, but thankfully that rule was ignored with the recent excellent addition of Wei Chen!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, dan burnett, standards, w3c, voicexml, mrcp, speech, speechtek, speechtek2008