Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony...
The world lost a great man yesterday. Om Malik's family posted that he passed away on June 24, 2026. We lost a master at connecting the dots, seeing the patterns - and then telling the stories. He was only 59 (1 year older than me!). [ Update: John Gruber published a beautiful reflection that included the info that Om had been in the hospital since mid-April dealing with issues associated with his…
Have 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…
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,…
With 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…
October 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: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8496/ https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8496 Ultimately, all this document does is register…
In 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…
Ten 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…
Want 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 ...
This 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…
The 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…