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It’s Time To Fall Back An Hour in the US and Canada: Daylight Saving Time Ends This Sunday

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 01/11/2013

I was prodded this morning much too early: “I expected to hear from you with DST ending this week.”

Typecast much? 😉

Work has been busy, and I’ve spent more time providing updates on external and internal social media, but I’m never too busy to call attention to once again, a simpler time when we fall back in much of North America.

Daylight Saving Time ends on Sunday, November 3, 2012 at 2:00AM local time in much of the U.S and Canada, except in parts of the countries (including Hawaii and Arizona). Although many would like to abolish DST, and the venerable National Geographic magazine makes the case against it, I like to get the extra hour of sleep on Sunday. Our friends in much of Europe have already bid goodbye, adieu, auf wiedersehen, gesundheit, farewell to European Summer Time, as they fell back on the last Sunday in October each year. (Not to worry, they’ll get back up and Spring forward again on the last Sunday in March.)

As noted here, you can thank candy makers for some of the politics behind DST. There’s a rich history as to why we have daylight saving time, and you can read more than you’ll ever want to know about DST here and on our official Microsoft Daylight Saving Time Help and Support Center at http://www.microsoft.com/time. DST in much of the US and Canada ends in accordance with the US Department of Energy’s Energy Policy Act of 2005 that was passed into law. DST ends later than it did prior to 2007, on the first Sunday of November; more details on the new DST start and end times can be found here). This results in a new DST period that is approximately three to four weeks longer than in past years.

Also important to note, but often ignored: the switch to daylight saving time also means the time zone suffix changes in North America, now using Daylight Time: for example, Pacific Standard Time is now Pacific Daylight Time (aka PDT). The other time zones move to Mountain Daylight Time (MDT), Central Daylight Time (CDT), and Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

Last year I noted the National Geographic article on “Daylight Saving Time – Why and When Does It End” – it’s still there, along with the very cool photo of the display model of the inner workings of a clock at the China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing. One of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, is responsible for the concept of daylight saving time, as noted in David Prerau’s book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. I personally liked TaylorBigler’s piece on the Daily Caller earlier this year…

Franklin, however, never actually meant that we should actually turn our clocks back in the fall and forward in the spring. According to research done by the geeks over at Geek.com, Franklin — who was living in Paris at the time — brought up the idea of daylight saving time in a letter to a friend who happened to be the editor of Journal de Paris. The letter, which satirically suggested that something could be done to better light one’s home, was subsequently published in the Journal on April 26, 1784.

Franklin wrote that one morning he was abruptly woken by a noise at 6 a.m., but that if that hadn’t happened he would have slept through six more hours of daylight. To combat this, Franklin satirically wrote up an analysis of how much people could get accomplished if they used more daylight and less candles. He also wrote up a series of punishments and requirements so that people would wake their <e.d.> up.

According to Geek.com, Franklin wrote that there should be a tax on people who had shutters on their windows to keep the sun out, church bells — or even a cannon — should go off every day at sunrise, and in order to conserve one’s energy for the day, guards would monitor the streets and forbid any carriages from driving after sunset — with the exception of doctors and midwives.

So what does this have to do with the price of tea on K Street?

As I noted in this article, Microsoft strongly recommends that DST and time zone updates be installed on all affected systems, devices and applications to ensure consistency with current DST rules and time zone settings worldwide. Customers should review the product updates available and posted on this site and at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist for the latest and updated information of Microsoft products affected by daylight saving time. For the most part, customers on our Windows platform won’t need to do anything, as updated time zone definitions are already included in the products.

Here’s more coverage on DST this year from Bing News. I hope that you have a glitch-free, uneventful fall back.

On a personal note, remember to keep things in perspective. Time is a precious thing. Never waste it…

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, DST.

References to DST on Bing: 1,270,000.

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ICANN Committee rejects dotless domain names, won’t “pursue any additional studies”

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 06/09/2013

As you may recall from prior posts on this blog, there has been significant interest in the new gTLDs (e.g. foo.microsoft, foo.docs) and proposals from Google to allow one of their gTLD applications (.search) to function as a dotless domain (e.g. http//search). This ask was in sharp contrast to the report from ICANN’s own Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), that said dotless was a bad idea.

Microsoft and many others in the industry (including Yahoo, Verisign) expressed concerns in allowing dotless domains on the Internet. The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) published a public statement, noting the relevant standards published by the IETF RFCs and supporting ICANN SSAC’s report SAC053 as

“a reasonable summary of the technical problems that arise from the implementation of dotless domains.”

And a further study directed by ICANN (from Carve Systems here) arrived at the same conclusions as the SSAC. In it, Carve supported SSAC 053 that dotless domains would not be universally reachable, and serious security vulnerabilities exist and would be enabled by allowing such use. It concluded the

“inherent trust in dotless names, by users and software, may lead to confusion when handling new Internet facing dotless domains. This confusion can result in unexpected behavior and a misappropriation of trust, ultimately degrading the stability and security of the Internet.”

The “broad theme” of dotless domain names is accurate, and significant issues exist with current and legacy software and services that follow the tradition of using dotless names exclusive in the intranet space. Dotless domains are used as a core part of many intranet networks, and as such there would be serious implications and repercussions related to their use. To address some of the “technology confusion” raised in the report, Microsoft and many others in the industry have provided guidance for developers, service providers and enterprises to use unambiguous Fully Qualified Domain Names to specify locations in the tree hierarchy of the DNS.

So, after many months, I was happy to read recently that ICANN’s New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) passed a resolution definitively rejecting the push for dotless domains. This was also supported by ICANN’s board, as announced last week. You can read more about how ICANN rejected the request to support dotless generic top-level domains on the Internet in Charlie Osborne’s article here on ZDnet.

Tags gTLD, internet, Microsoft, news, policy

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An update on so-called dotless domains on the Internet

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 15/07/2013

A couple of months ago I wrote here about the challenges with so-called “dotless” domains (e.g. http://microsoft instead of the common http://www.microsoft.com). Such shortcuts may seem harmless at first glance, but they raise many more issues than might be solved when it comes to completing and validating an Internet URL or email address.

As you may recall, Microsoft’s position is that such shortened domains (as noted in our comment here) are not a good idea, as called out in the report from ICANN’s own Security and Stability Advisory Committee. (You can view the complete report here.) We know that many others also support the view that dotless domains would not be universally reachable, along with the serious security vulnerabilities enabled. Dotless domains would be confusing and customers might not know what to expect when they entered in such a shortened name.

In addition, the surface area to address all the different software components for stability and security concerns related to using such dotless names is tough. Not just a problem for consumers, many businesses and organizations (from small business to complex and worldwide enterprises) have current and legacy software and services that follow the tradition of using dotless names exclusive in the intranet space.

For instance, here at Microsoft, if I type in a dotless domian (e.g. “http://search“) into the address bar at work, I’ll go to my internal intranet search web page. Many companies function the same way, and you can imagine that any number of terms or strings used on a number of many different intranet networks could have serious implications and repercussions related… particularly if companies had to do additional work to parse and allocate these terms from a set of new top level domains.

I saw an example of what confusion could look like over lunch, as I attempted to register on a web site. In this case, the site failed to recognize an email address with only dotless domain as valid…

Now, multiply that by the number of websites where you enter in your email or web address and you can imagine the confusion, in addition to the work involved if every web site had to support new (and growing) dotless domains. (Certainly one of the new services that will opened up will include selling/ leasing new second level domains or Internet email addresses on the new crop of gTLDs.)

To address some of the confusion we’ve seen in the past (where companies have deployed single label domains), Microsoft and many others in the industry have provided guidance for developers, service providers and enterprises to use unambiguous Fully Qualified Domain Names. These FQDNs are sometimes referred to an absolute domain name, which specify locations in the tree hierarchy of the DNS and ensure that people get where they are expecting when they type in an address on the Internet URL and avoid any confusion.

Last week, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) published a public statement calling attention again to the concerns on using dotless domains in the root zone, noting the relevant standards published by the IETF RFCs. In the statement, the IAB also cites the ICANN SSAC’s report SAC053 as “a reasonable summary of the technical problems that arise from the implementation of dotless domains.” The Register offers their own take in an article posted today.

I look forward to ICANN’s latest study to examine the potential risks related to dotless domain names (based on ICANN’s SSAC 053 report). Once released, Microsoft is interested to provide additional feedback and comments. The good folks at ICANN are holding their latest meeting in Durban this week, and I can imagine there will be some discussion around this (and many other pressing topics).

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Tags gTLD, internet, IT management, Microsoft

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What I do at Microsoft: It’s all about the customer

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 10/05/2013

I was asked yesterday, “what the heck do you do at Microsoft these days?” That was a follow up to a friend seeing a post in Computerworld that I’d missed, which was interesting as I was calling out the importance of numbers in names… as I have one in mine (hence the emoticon, which Gregg Keizer neglected to note in his post).

But back to what I do.

As I wrote here, many people in our offices focus on the work to make and keep customer satisfaction a top priority, especially important now more than ever. That’s a positive. Steve Ballmer said previously that Microsoft has more work to do to please our customers and partners, noting that “we’ve only begun to tap the real potential of computers to help you communicate, find answers, solve problems and be more productive.”

At Microsoft, I have the privilege to coordinate and support the work our product and services teams do (our business groups, aka BGs) as they focus on improving satisfaction with our customers and partners. We call this “CPE” at the company, and you can read a little more about it here.

Along with a small group focused on the BGs, and with a great team of people in our worldwide Sales & Marketing team, we help frame and prioritize issues, make connections across teams (challenging when you have as many people around the world as we do, serving so many customers) and improve upon the customer’s experience with Microsoft. This isn’t done in a vacuum, and I get to work with our talented and dedicated product and services teams to provide guidance and work with teams when needed, and sometimes actively engaging on issues. For me, that includes evangelizing best practices, identifying and resolving broad issues, and working on broad, cross company efforts (most often technical in nature, as I’ve documented on this blog).

In short, rule #1 about my job in CPE is about making our customers happy, and for ones that are happy, keeping them happy. For ones who run into an issue or have a problem with products and services, it’s about referring to rule #1 and working with teams to make them happy.

As I wrote here, fools may find fault with ease. It takes the persistent to note that the customer experience isn’t a commodity, and to course correct when we find fault…

Benjamin Franklin and Dale Carnegie both said that “any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain – and most fools do.” But if you listen to the criticism and respond to it — take the criticism and do something positive with it — then you can course correct and improve the customer experience.

With that, I’m off to course correct. And offer some advice.

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Tags CPE, Microsoft culture, what i read, Your Questions

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Microsoft Account Gets More Secure with Two Factor Authorization

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 17/04/2013

ICYMI, your Microsoft Account will get more secure as the team rolls out a new upgrade which includes two-step verification, as noted on the Bing newswire. This will improve the security of the devices and services currently used by more than 700 million people worldwide, including Windows PCs, Phones, Xboxes, and services like Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype.

Microsoft has increasingly focused on delivering connected devices and services that are currently used by more than 700 million people around the world. A Microsoft account is the key that unlocks your experience across these products—from your Windows PC to your Windows Phone, from Xbox to Outlook.com, from SkyDrive and Skype to Office and much more.

Given this critical role for Microsoft account, we remain vigilant in working hard to protect your account, which is why we’re adding an option so you can enable two-step verification to further protect yourself. You should see this option show up in your account in the next few days. You can enable this capability at https://account.live.com/proofs/Manage.

Two-step verification is when we ask you for two pieces of information anytime you access your account — for example, your password plus a code sent to a phone or email on file as security info.

More than a year ago, we began bringing two-step verification for certain critical activities, like editing credit cards and subscriptions at commerce.microsoft.com and xbox.com, or accessing files on another one of your computers through SkyDrive.com. For these scenarios, two-step verification is required 100 percent of the time for everyone, given the sensitive nature of these tasks.