Boffins [Scientists] that want to see Internet protocols extend to outer space – the so-called “Interplanetary Internet” – need to prove they're offering something useful, according to one of the father-figures of the Earth-bound Internet.
Vint Cerf, who has taken an interest in beyond-Earth applications for the Internet protocol stack since the 1990s, told last week's InterPlanetary Networking SIG (IPNSIG) meeting that to get beyond a mere curiosity, the SIG needs to be useful.
“Our challenge, to the extent that we're interested in serious expansion of communications capability for space exploration, is to demonstrate its utility,” Cerf told the gathering.
“It's not that anyone thinks that you should just build this interplanetary thing and hope that somebody uses it,” he added.
One possibility, for example, is that spacecraft that support these kinds of protocols could, having fulfilled their primary mission, have a longer economically-useful life if they can then become nodes in the interplanetary backbone.
And there's no doubt that there'll be a lot more data being flung around in space: last year, for example, the success of NASA's LADEE broadband experiment showed that free space optics could cook along at hundreds of megabits a second without an atmosphere to get in the way.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/27/interplanetary_network_sig/
IPNSIG presentations and videos: http://ipnsig.org/2015/05/26/speaker-presentation-materials-2015/
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @01:48PM
You absolutely build this kind of thing even if it's not considered 'useful' because anyone thinking we won't need to communicate with worker robots on mars like we do RIGHT NOW is dreaming. Robotic expansion will increase exponentially and it relies heavily on data because if something goes wrong that's our only link to the machines.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @04:42PM
If you don't know what or for whom you are building it for, how it would be used, under what limitations, etc., basically building to open-ended requirements, you're wasting your time. You're locking the future into today's technology, so in decades time when it becomes something that is really needed, you're stuck to old technology, protocols, etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:36PM
Uh, am I the only one who realizes that the internet was 'useless' awhile back? It is most certainly no longer so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:55AM
No. I've been on this thing well before there was an Internet, and no, it was never seen as "useless."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:06PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:57AM
We must do something, for that show progress. It doesn't matter what we do, or whether it would be useful, it is just that we need to so something NOW.
. . .
Would I be going out on a limb in assuming that you are in management?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:39AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:01PM
Too lazy to submit this.
http://www.nasa.gov/socialmedia/ [nasa.gov]
https://mobile.twitter.com/nasa [twitter.com]
I assume Vint Cerf did not actually mention pigs right?
-- takyon
(Score: 3, Funny) by jimshatt on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:24PM
(Score: 5, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:45PM
Just think of the possibilities. Pigs are among the smartest animals in the world. Trained flying pigs could augment drones. They'd have many war uses. Could even have kamikaze suicide dive bombing pigs. Imagine the deadly insult to Islam to send a pig of all animals to dive bomb Mecca. They'd make great sport for hunters such as Dick Cheney who was evidently tired of blowing away dumb birds, thought he'd try a bit of long pig. Could be much more challenging to hit. Also, great fodder for Hollywood blockbusters, starting with a "Hognado" movie, trying to bring hog heaven to Earth. Good for at least 2 sequels, and take much more than that to run it into the ground.
Get them big enough, and we could ride them. At last, the age of the personal flying car! An entire economy based upon feeding our flying animals and cleaning up after them, just like the good old days with horses. For an extra bit of fun, riders could dress up as goblins.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:54PM
Flying pigs would be an enormously effective terror weapon in the middle east.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @03:02PM
Imagine the consequences for statues…
(Score: 5, Informative) by bziman on Saturday May 30 2015, @03:03PM
Why not "Boffins (Nerds)"? Or better yet, just "Scientists" without the pejorative. I pretty much ignore anything written by anyone who refers to scientists as "boffins" or any other diminutive.
(Score: 5, Informative) by martyb on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:13PM
Disclaimer: I am an editor, but did not edit this particular story.
The linked story: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/27/interplanetary_network_sig/ [theregister.co.uk] starts with:
This is a direct quote from the original story where, presumably, the editor added a parenthetical to explain the term to non-British readers (El Reg is based out of England.) According to these definitions, it is a form of British slang:
That is an admittedly informal term, but I do not perceive it to be a pejorative, at least not to the extent that I see 'nerd' or 'geek' being used. I personally perceive 'boffin' to be a bit of a portmanteau of 'bafflingly' 'intelligent'.
Lastly, I've met many a 'scientist' who I would in no way consider to be a 'boffin' -- much like I've met many a person who can write code that I'd be hard-pressed to call a programmer.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:44AM
Odd. The only time I've ever seen it was when I was periodically glancing through El Reg, and I got the wrong impression thanks to the way headlines are worded:
"Boffins have devised TERMINATOR-style LIQUID METAL — for an antenna"
"ROBOQUAFF! Boffins build smooth robot arm to lift a pint of beer"
"SLOPPY STELLAR CANNIBAL star is a NASTY 1, astroboffins squeal"
I wasn't reading the linked articles (I was there more for the tech & medical pieces), so my interpretation was that "boffins" referred to lawmakers, politicians, pointy-haired management or at best some sub-par kind of scientist nobody can take seriously.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:23AM
It is good practice to
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @09:25AM
(Score: 2) by martyb on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:05PM
Oops! "(Scientists)" has been changed to "[Scientists]" — thanks for holding us to the highest standards.
Heh. I think I just replied to a grammar boffin!
=)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:26PM
We have had this discussion here before. The term 'boffin' is not intended to be a pejorative title. It dates back to WW2, if not earlier, and was used as an affectionate term for scientists in the UK. Very much like the term geek or nerd is not a pejorative today. Some wear that title with pride, although it can be intended as an insult. It rather depends on usage.
I once worked at a UK scientific establishment for several months. The scientists had their own bar - which they had chosen to call the 'Boffins' Bar' - and I had many a happy drink in there. They did not see the word as an insult. The term is still used reasonably frequently today in the press and on television. The previous time we had this discussion I actually dug out a handful of links showing its usage in today's media. I'm am not repeating that again because I have far better things to do tonight keeping this site running and trying to spend some time with my family. However, a quick search on Google will certainly dig up many examples. Yes, I know about the entry in Wikipedia - but one person's view does not make it a applicable to everyone.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Beige on Saturday May 30 2015, @04:58PM
Obviously there's a need to communicate between planets, but protocols like TCP are probably not going to be practical when the latency is 40 minutes. In this sense Cerf is of course entirely correct. The equivalent of MTUs will have to go up a lot to improve efficiency, and since this will be incompatible with most existing hardware it makes sense to create a new protocol altogether.
From an engineering point of view there will likely be a gateway running on the new protocol for transmitting e-mail, syncing important web documents (such as Wikipedia updates and news digests etc) and then every planet will have their local high capacity proxy for faster local access to said documents.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VortexCortex on Saturday May 30 2015, @05:53PM
I've implemented a modified version of NASA's DTN (Disruption Tolerant Networking). [nasa.gov] It's great for terrestrial use. If the FCC and powers that be would have gave the public back an unregulated slice of the airwaves they got back during the switch to digital over the air TV, then we could implement a mesh network using DTN (space Internet). It's decentralized, and while designed to work via "line of sight" connections, the system also lends itself to the one-to-many properties of HAM packet-radio. Store-and-forward is great. It means that the data moves closer to where it's needed. A tiered caching network by default = free collocation.
NASA's version is a bit flawed, they're still getting down packet level implementation details, but the higher level proposals I've seen still have deduplication via URL (asset name), ignoring that "everything is a file" is just dumb (literally ignorant), everything has a hash is a better approach and avoids the namespace collision issue. The name of data doesn't matter, that's just arbitrary metadata, POSIX allows certain paths to have special meaning to the OS, but when it comes to data itself thinking in terms of names is literally retarding. Instead I use a hash of the data to reference the data, a human readable named link is just an alias resolving to an infohash, so that way if multiple "directories" link to the same data by different names they'll still have the same set of infohashes for the deduplicated data chunks. Separate form from function (separate symbolics from realities), ergo separate content from style and separate names from data. There are some filesystems that already do something similar.
Implement the Interplanetary Internet protocol here on Earth. Instead of funneling traffic into a pipe you can pull your data from your neighbor who just watched the same thing, or from the next cache up the pipe. A whole planet of people need only transmit that cute cat video once across the interplanetary link instead of maintaining billions of active streams to the source, and with infohashes you can avoid multiple renamed copies being sent. With chunks instead of files you can even share clips or excerpts of a video without retransmission of the asset itself. Latency is only an issue for interactive resources (like IRC servers), but using a bulletin board + "push notification" works around that. The key is that most nodes will be receiving additional data rather than what they requested themselves in order to facilitate the store-and-forward. Instead of imagining the network as endpoints that serve requests think of the network as a whole propagating a swarm of data across it. This causes some waste in that some cache data may never need to be retransmitted, but that's simply the cost of redundancy and reliability.
The FCC has strict regulations against packet radio, even on the family band. This is because such a "space-age" decentralized distributed deduplicated network is exponentially harder to spy on -- You have to put up listening posts between every node instead of just taping a trunk line: Am I reading a site or getting it for my neighbor? After I have some data, how many of my other neighbors could have downloaded the data from me? This is much different than logging all requests to the nameservers... Additionally, a mesh node need not pay subscription fees to the mesh other than its cache and relay facilities, thus you buy your gear once and only pay for maintenance instead of exorbitant fees for connectivity and bandwidth caps. DNT mesh would threated the existing cellular network's profit margins, and a proper hash-based deduplication system would greatly reduce ability to spoof data. And that's why we aren't already enjoying the benefits of a DTN here on Earth.
That said, implementing an Interplanetary Internet is far more costly than a DTN mesh here on Earth -- I think that's what Vint Cerf is arguing against, and why I'm arguing for a terrestrial trial run. The thing is, we already have space probes out there, and we'll only have more in the future. Implementing a decentralized deduplicated distributed protocol that turns all nodes into relays and caches and allows us to route around the sun and not maintain direct links at all times with all probes is the ONLY logical thing to do. Eventually we'll have multiple probes that require the same data (perhaps a firmware update), they should be able to update from each other. My implementation started out as a way to load balance internal OS update traffic. The question is not whether the Interplanetary Internet should be built, it's when will we be forced to do so? It's already proven useful, and due to the economics of demand and relativity DNT is the inevitable future of both interplanetary and terrestrial Internet will adopt. As our computing platforms get more complex they'll also have such distributed systems (see: Supercomputer clusters). A DTN is the answer to light's limitations, not Vint Cerf.
I'm sorry, if you lack the foresight to avoid the foolishness of running a centralized "web" atop a decentralized Internet by not building caching and deduplication into the network (ignoring store and forward best practices), then I don't particularly value your opinion of the solutions to the massive problem you've created.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:19PM
What are the specific FCC restrictions on packet radio on the family band etc that hinders DNT? I was under the impression that packet radio is common among radio amateurs? (albeit slow at 1200 bit/s or so).
Perhaps this limitation can be circumvented by laser and other less restricted means of transmission?
Wouldn't your hashes in essence be the name space? and how would low probability but still possible collisions be handled?
Doesn't T.o.r and I.2.P have large similarities to DNT?
Any good papers on DNT?
(Score: 1) by nethead on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:23AM
Most hams are using 2.4GHz WiFi for mesh networks. The lower part of that band is a ham allocation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pryc8jIl6Xo [youtube.com]
How did my SN UID end up over 3 times my /. UID?
(Score: 2) by mendax on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:09PM
... if you are craving bacon or a yummy pork steak.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:01PM
I have reliable sources telling me that flying pork pigs is the best weapon against those ISIS ;-)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mendax on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:09AM
Ah, a good point. However, I have a better idea. Instead of dropping bombs on them, we should be using crop dusting planes to spray pig's blood over their installations. Bacon grease might work even better, especially in the summer. The delicious smell of that unclean pork product should drive them mad!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:38PM
But what if they start licking all their own installations? that would give them more food..
(Score: 2) by mendax on Monday June 01 2015, @10:09PM
That will be beneficial. Those who don't lick the grease will then shoot the lickers because they are no longer religiously clean.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 01 2015, @10:44PM
What an 3V1L pl0t! ;-)