Today at the ISC2 Security Congress 2023 in Nashville, TN, I gave a well-received talk on "Demystifying the World of Routing Security". Unfortunately, the mobile app for the event had (and still has) the wrong set of slides. Instead of mine, the attached deck was for a 2019 talk. So I told participants I would put the slides up on one of my sites. And here they are: Download 2023-ISC2-Security-Congress-RoutingSecurity-Final.pdf (12033.0K) As you will see, a great amount of the slides are about the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative. Also, for people seeking info about how to... Continue reading

Booking airline tickets for my first business trip since December 2019, I get down to the part where United notes your status level and it says… “General” No “Premier” status of any level. Which makes total sense given: 2020 - 0 flights 2021 - 0 flights 2022 - 0 flights 2023 - 2 flights (so far) 🤣 I totally understand why I am now just a “general” traveler. 😀 Continue reading

I find it fascinating that Meta just announced the ability of Facebook users to have multiple accounts attached to their single Facebook account. So you can have different “personas” for interacting with different communities differently. Now, this is nothing very... Continue reading

As of today, May 1, 2023, 43% of web sites will no longer be able to easily auto-share posts to Twitter. I’m referring, of course, to WordPress, which W3Techs shows as powering around 43% of all sites they scan. Due... Continue reading

When ChatGPT and similar systems started being available, people noticed right away that they could provide completely wrong answers. But they would do so in language that was so confident and plausible (because that is how they are designed). Some people started to say “ChatGPT lies about information”. But somewhat immediately, people started pushing back and saying that it isn’t “lying” because that implies sentience or consciousness. Say it is “lying” is “anthropomorphizing”, i.e. attributing human behavior to something that is very definitely not human. Instead, some people said, let’s refer to this false information as “hallucinations”, as that is... Continue reading

On April 8, 2008, I started using Evernote as a place to store all my various notes. It would come to be a critical part of my daily workflow… so much so that I became a paying customer back in 2011 or so. Today, March 13, 2023, I uninstalled it from my devices. I’m done. It’s been a long time coming. Way back in 2012 I was super frustrated with how they destroyed the Skitch application with its 2.0 release. And yet I kept using Evernote because it had become my central repository. And… I hung on long enough that... Continue reading

Today I was wondering why “March 13” was pulling at the back of my brain as a date of some importance… and then I realized why. Three years ago today, everything changed. It was on Friday, March 13, 2020, that Governor Phil Scott issued Executive Order 01-20, “Declaration of State of Emergency in Response to COVID-19 and National Guard Call-Out”. It imposed visitor restrictions at hospitals and state facilities, restricted travel by state employees, prohibited large gatherings, and called up the National Guard to assist. The Executive Order did not itself shut down schools, but it directed the Secretary of... Continue reading

For most of 50 years, I held very firm to the belief that the ONLY time I should ever see a time beginning with a “4” in the morning was when I needed to get up and go to the airport to catch an early flight. Otherwise, any time like 4:30am was just downright uncivil and hostile. I should be asleep at that time. I should NEVER be awake at times beginning with a 4. And yet… here I am writing this post at 4:55am. 🤷‍♂️ What happened? Well, our dog got older! (And I might have, too.😉) For some... Continue reading

As I’ve frequently lamented in my yearly themes (although not this year), I would like to get myself to write more. And back on December 1, 2022, I tried to commit to #100DaysOfBlogging, but that hasn't worked out so well. I’ve been watching how I spend my time lately, and to I’m sure the surprise of absolutely NO ONE, including myself, it would seem the single biggest thing preventing me from doing more writing is… getting distracted by social media! 🤣🤣🤣 Take this morning. I was awake early at around 5:00am (courtesy of our wonderful but early-rising dog) and I... Continue reading

In the last six months or so, I have had an unpleasant revelation about myself. I realized that for most of my 55 years of life whenever I’ve been listening to people, I’ve been listening to offer “fixes”, i.e. solutions. You’ve probably done this yourself at some point. The classic example is something like: Someone: “Ugh.. my legs hurt so much from <skiing | biking | skating | running | hiking | etc.>" Me: “Oh, that’s rough! You should take two ibuprofen. You’ll feel better!" There I was, jumping in with a solution and trying to help. But here’s the... Continue reading

There is an awesome clarity that comes when you have very clear priorities - and in my case one of those is my health. As I alluded to in my three words for 2023, I’ve had a couple of recent minor incidents that have brought this home to me. A key one was back in November 2022 when I went for a routine colonoscopy. Having had colon cancer, this was my three year checkup and all was great. No signs of cancer and everything looked good. BUT… they had to keep me a bit afterward in the recovery area until... Continue reading

Last month I boosted a post on Mastodon where an early pioneer of networking relayed an amusing story about shutting down part of the ARPANET during a storm. After I did that, I was asked “@danyork Do you have a similar story from your archive?" As I said in a reply,I have stories, but none quite so dramatic. Born in the late 1960s, I got involved with the Internet in the mid- to late 1980s at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). I was not part of the late 1960s / early 1970s group that was involved with the ARPANET.... Continue reading

After Simon Willison wrote about how accurate questions from ChatGPT were when he asked “I am interviewing Simon Willison. What are some good questions I can ask them?”, I had to give it a try. Simon’s had some questions specific to the areas he works in, web development and open source, so I was curious to see what might be in one with my name. I was particularly curious because there are so many “Dan York”s out there on the Internet. Alas, my response from ChatGPT was boringly generic: I am interviewing Dan York. What are some good questions I... Continue reading

If you read nothing else this week, I encourage you to read Cory Doctorow’s latest … rant? … essay? … article? Written in a style uniquely his own, he calls the article “TikTok enshittification”, giving us an ever so appropriate... Continue reading

Back on December 1, 2022, I boldly said that I was going to attempt 100 consecutive days of blogging. Today marks day 50, the halfway point. So.. how did I do? Wellll… how many different ways can you say... FAIL!... Continue reading

As has been my practice for the past 14 years (see list), my first post of 2023 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles. Health Health (or a health-related word) has been one of my three words in 11 of these 14 years. 🙁 BUT… the truth is that I’ve reached an UNhealthy point where I MUST prioritize caring for my body. I’ve had a couple of minor health scares. I’ve been too sedentary. And I’ve continually made... Continue reading

A tip for all the newcomers to Mastodon - if you are seeing a lot of posts in your timelines in languages that you don’t know, there is a very simple way you can filter those posts out. You just:... Continue reading

In a sign of the growth of Mastodon in the midst of the continuing drama at Twitter, Techmeme, the news site I use the most to keep up on tech news, has started to highlight Mastodon posts in addition to... Continue reading

It’s great to see nonprofit organizations getting into the business of operating public Mastodon / Fediverse instances. Two announcements recently caught my attention. First, Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, announced that they would launch a public server (“instance”) in early... Continue reading

This past holiday weekend our older daughter brought a new fun activity - “Hallmark Christmas Movie Bingo”. If you are familiar with the “Hallmark Channel” here in the USA, they produce many seasonal romance movies. They vary widely in quality and some are a bit cheesy and cringe-worthy. Many of the movies follow a common formula … something like… high-powered marketing exec in New York City finds out her fiancé is cheating on her, and so goes away to spend Christmas with one of her old friends at her house in some rural location (often Vermont). While there, something happens... Continue reading

For those who celebrate Christmas, as I do… MERRY CHRISTMAS! As I am off celebrating the holiday with my family, I thought I’d ask an AI to tell the Bible’s Christmas story. So I went to ChatGPT and asked: > Tell the biblical Christmas story in iambic pentameter Why iambic pentameter? I don’t know… other than thinking it could be more interesting than just having Chat GPT regurgitate blocks of text. This requires a little bit more effort. After getting the first version, I found the focus on Herod to be a bit odd, so I pressed the “Regenerate response”... Continue reading

As more people embrace the decentralized world of the Fediverse - and as we WANT more people to migrate to the Fediverse - we are seeing an explosion of new Mastodon servers/instances set up by all sorts of people and... Continue reading

Just as Twitter is killing off it’s Revue newsletter service, Automattic is promoting their hosted WordPress.com service for newsletters - and providing some new tools to make that easier. In their announcement blog post, they note that WordPress.com has already... Continue reading

I have always enjoyed our ceremonies of light and dark, here in the cold mid-winter of northern New England. The winter solstice here is always a time of celebration. For us, it is the shortest “day” in terms of daylight - and the longest night. It is cold here at this time of year. The solstice gives us hope. From here on out, the days only get longer… and at some point will start to actually get warmer. (We have to go through some much colder periods first, though!) We celebrate here so often with candles… with fires… with flames…... Continue reading