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from the if-only-I-could-do-it-over dept.
Vint Cerf is considered a father of the internet, but that doesn't mean there aren't things he would do differently if given a fresh chance to create it all over again.
"If I could have justified it, putting in a 128-bit address space would have been nice so we wouldn't have to go through this painful, 20-year process of going from IPv4 to IPv6," Cerf told an audience of journalists Thursday during a press conference at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany.
IPv4, the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, included an addressing system that used 32-bit numerical identifiers. It soon became apparent that it would lead to an exhaustion of addresses, however, spurring the creation of IPv6 as a replacement. Roughly a year ago, North America officially ran out of new addresses based on IPv4.
For security, public key cryptography is another thing Cerf would like to have added, had it been feasible.
Trouble is, neither idea is likely to have made it into the final result at the time. "I doubt I could have gotten away with either one," said Cerf, who won a Turing Award in 2004 and is now vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. "So today we have to retrofit."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:05AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday September 25 2016, @12:18PM
The internet is not the web.
Which is why I mentioned both:
(TBL's web invention too.)
And, as someone who knows how to see the constant stream of attempts to ssh into my box as root, when I don't even have an account named root, I would think the asshats are clearly not confined to the web.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Sunday September 25 2016, @12:36PM
No, asshats are a general phenomena, but in this case I don't think there's anything specific to IP that is amplifying it or aiding them. A transport medium shouldn't be blamed for the bad uses people put it to, unless there's something specific about it that encourages them to be bad. I'd suggest that the constant connections you are seeing are encouraged primarily by the existence of vulnerable end-points and would be occurring with IPX or OSI or whatever else we could have wound up with instead of IP.
On the other hand, the vast shittiness of the web does have a technical component, a very very strong one. Many of the biggest problems with it are directly related to the plague of javascript and plugins and 'active content' being used on top of or in place of actual webpages (HTML.) This has created a huge industry built around exploits and another industry built around offering ineffective 'security' on top of a system that's insecure by design. The malware/advertising/antivirus complex depends on that one flaw more than all others combined.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Sunday September 25 2016, @02:18PM
Many of the biggest problems with it are directly related to the plague of javascript and plugins and 'active content' being used on top of or in place of actual webpages (HTML.)
Arik, I would give that comment a thousand up-votes if I could. Further I'd love to give a solid face-smack or clue-bat to every so-called web developer who codes something in JavaShit that can be done equally well or better in HTML.
Do you ever wonder if Tim Berners-Lee throws up whenever he stops to think about what we've done with his marvelous creation?
Sometimes I think Wikipedia is just about the only major web site that deserves to exist.