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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: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday September 25 2016, @11:58PM
No, this AC is correct, or at least I subscribe to the whack job theory the AC proposes.
Vint Cerf is highly intelligent and his past accomplishments are worthy of great praise.
He is not the same person today. He presently believes that privacy is more of an illusion and that one should accept much less privacy in exchange for various conveniences, conveniences that his employer allows, and allow security benefits from this lack of privacy that enable nations to keep their citizens safe.
The previous views and actions of Vint Cerf had tried to make IPV6 secure; you can go back and read the proposals. "Security built in from the ground-up" or something like that. Not anymore it's not. It's not all his doing of course, but he doesn't seem to mind the results. Those provisions were removed, their safeguards peeled back. Security is to be done by commercial entities you can trust with your privacy, like the businesses that promise to do it for free in exchange for things one would typically keep private. Your privacy secured, data you never really had to provide before to even need securing, by experts in the business, like his employer, at little or no cost to you.
The whole business model means that they are speaking out both sides of their mouth, and what we learn as consumers is the effort to convince a reluctant mark to take the bait.
I want to like the man. He certainly is more capable now, and certainly was back then, more than I ever hope to be as far as dreaming up solutions for networks and protocols and probably whatever hobbies he has as well. He's smart. Maybe there is a reason for his change of mind and the things he says now, and maybe it's a good reason, but I haven't heard anything other than his being stooge for his new masters. He endorses concepts he wasn't endorsing before, so he has come around to a new way of thinking.
Knowing this, I much prefer he sold out and is betraying us for money, than to think perhaps is ideals are slipping with age and that he truly isn't the same person. It is easier to be angry at someone you believe is evil than someone to be angry at the behaviors of someone you believe is mentally ill.
Perhaps he is like Darth Vader and only will find the remaining good within himself when it comes to an unfortunate test that will end up with him destroying himself and the empire he is helping to build. He was a good guy... once. Or maybe I am misconstruing the intent of his employment at Google?