from the anyone-younger-than-50-might-be-saying-"Who?" dept.
He codesigned the Internet protocol and transmission control protocol:
IEEE Life Fellow Vinton "Vint" Cerf, widely known as the "Father of the Internet," is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor. He is being recognized "for co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society's critical infrastructure."
[...] While working as a program manager at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office in 1974, Cerf and IEEE Life Fellow Robert Kahn designed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. TCP manages data packets sent over the Internet, making sure they don't get lost, are received in the proper order, and are reassembled at their destination correctly. IP manages the addressing and forwarding of data to and from its proper destinations. Together they make up the Internet's core architecture and enable computers to connect and exchange traffic.
[...] Together with Kahn, Cerf founded the nonprofit Internet Society in 1992. The organization helps set technical standards, develops Internet infrastructure, and helps lawmakers set policy.
Cerf served as its president from 1992 to 1995 and was chairman of the board of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers from 2000 to 2007. ICANN works to ensure a stable, secure, and interoperable Internet by managing the assignment of unique IP addresses and domain names. It also maintains tables of registered parameters needed for the protocol standards developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Cerf has received several recognitions for his work, including the 2004 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The honor is known as the Nobel Prize of computing. Together with Kahn, he was awarded a 2013 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a 2005 U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a 1997 U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday February 03, @04:14PM (15 children)
And now, let's take his medal away and throw him in jail in solitary for allowing Doubleclick, Facebook and TikTok to exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @04:27PM
And then there is also actively aiding and abetting surveillance capitalism with all the bad that comes from it by working for google.
Instead of an award, a stern talking-to might be more appropriate.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Friday February 03, @05:06PM (5 children)
None of that is due to TCP/IP, you are better off tar and feathering whoever came up with javascript and everything from "Web 2.0" onwards.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Friday February 03, @06:52PM (4 children)
My very first comments on greensite, maybe late 90s(?), were how I was worried about javascript and how much power it has. I had stumbled onto Opera and immediately learned of, and used, its ability to globally disable javascript, and enable it on a site-specific basis if truly needed.
Of course the solution, that I haven't done yet but might soon, is run browser in a "sandbox" / container. Much of my browsing is still with Old Opera (12.18) with javascript globally off; on for a few sites.
I'm not sure how much Vint Cerf had to do with allowing / implementing javascript.
All that said, I put javascript in the large category of technologies that have great power and benefits, but it seems that nobody thought through, certainly didn't care about the possible ways they can be abused ("autoplay", html email readers, running email attachments without checking or asking...)
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Friday February 03, @06:58PM (2 children)
I forgot to include: the response to my comments about javascript on greensite was <crickets>.
(now that would have been a useful html tag! :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Friday February 03, @08:33PM (1 child)
Back then, that was the usual response to almost any comment no matter how informative or insightful.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday February 03, @10:18PM
I actually don't like speculating, but we humans like answers (pattern-matching machine brains), so I speculated that most /.ers were techies / programmers and saw javascript as a growing and huge job market (and it is, of course). So, maybe they agreed, but also greed... :-/
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday February 04, @12:38PM
> My very first comments on greensite, maybe late 90s(?), were how I was worried about javascript and how much power it has. I had stumbled onto Opera and immediately learned of, and used, its ability to globally disable javascript, and enable it on a site-specific basis if truly needed.
I was not particularly keen on javascript when it came out. I mean, if you were nuts enough to pull in random code off the internet and execute it on your PC, you just ran ActiveX [wikipedia.org] and prayed to the gods your PC/data would survive.
Javascript seemed like a solution in search of a problem. In fact when it first came out it was called "ECMAscript". Later they renamed it "javascript", because Java was the bees knees back then, and they wanted to ride the Java coat tails by confusing people into thinking it was "Java for the web". It was nothing like Java. As a language, it was awful. It made Visual Basic look good.
The only thing I could think of using it for is doing calculations locally rather than submitting a form to have the results computed by a CGI script and sent back, but without the overhead of downloading an ActiveX component (or a Java applet). Back in the day of modem speeds, the turnabout time for that could be a good 10 seconds, while with Javascript you could do it in a second or two locally, depending on the complexity of the calculation.
Of course, I didn't have the mindset to realise how popular it would be with normies. Before normal people were happy with the use of the "marquee" and "blink" tags, but now they discovered you can do so much more! Suddenly they wanted animated gifs that fly around the page, resize on demand, follow (or avoid) the mouse, text that changes colour constantly, etc... . Javascript became the "go to" tool to make horribly intrusive and gaudy web sites.
After that, javascript became a tool for tracking and "monitisation", used to display ads, animate them, track how long they are on the page, force you to view them before carrying onto the page, and tracking where your mouse is, how long you hovered over ads/links, and what you clicked on.
When I think back now, I can't think of any real benefit Javascript brought to the web. Most of the time when it not used for abuse, it is used to make websites "prettier", which here a synonym for making it harder to actually read the content. Web apps written in javascript are atrocious compared to their native counterparts, and much slower to boot (plus massive memory hogs).
> Of course the solution, that I haven't done yet but might soon, is run browser in a "sandbox" / container. Much of my browsing is still with Old Opera (12.18) with javascript globally off; on for a few sites.
I was a great fan of Opera, until they ripped out their layout engine and replaced it with Chrome. Nowadays I run palemoon with javascript disabled as my main browser, occasionally I enable javascript when sites break that I absolutely have to use (the concept of "degrading gracefully" and "following web standards" is apparently unheard of in modern web programming), but because the web has regressed back to the days of "Works with Internet Explorer", just with "Works with Google Chrome" instead, some pages don't work even with javascript enabled.
Therefore I have Firefox and Chrome in Docker containers, which I fire up for those websites that can't work on anything else. Each time I start it up again it is a complete clean deployment with no history.
> I'm not sure how much Vint Cerf had to do with allowing / implementing javascript.
AFAIK not much at all, he worked on the lower level, TCP/IP being the main thing that he contributed, which is the backbone of the internet (including, but not limited to the world wide web bit). He should be honoured for that work IMO.
(Score: 2, Funny) by shrewdsheep on Friday February 03, @05:40PM (1 child)
Wrong target: it was Al Gore who created the internet.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 03, @08:38PM
Algorithm: The gentle swaying of the trees on the internet superhighway.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday February 03, @08:31PM (5 children)
So, I assume you damn Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite? I far prefer the pre-corporate internet to the 21st century internet where a New York Times page loads as slowly at gigabit speeds as a geocities page did in the last century on a 33.6 bits per second modem, but it's FAR preferable to the days when there was no internet at all.
I see you are one of the kids who never knew a world without the internet, or you'd know better.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 04, @03:55AM (4 children)
T'other day I saw some business-oriented TLD (which I've already forgotten, so much for relevance) offered for your domaining pleasure, for the tidy sum of $999.00 (and that from a regular registrar, not a scammer) -- so yeah, profit center, and nothing else.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday February 04, @04:28PM (3 children)
I'm paying $15 a year for mcgrew.info, and that includes 10 meg of hosting and email forwarding, so yes, $999.00 is in fact highway robbery.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 04, @06:16PM (2 children)
I think I misaimed my replay, but anyway, here we are... and yeah, it was counting on business wanting that special TLD. (In fact I think it was dot-business. Can't recall, already. Probably saw at Godaddy, where I went to see why the hell they claim to still have a never-existed email account for me 20 years after I departed their fold. Asshole sales technique, that's why.)
I pay $15/year each for my various .COMs and $30 for my single .NET, and $15/mo. for hosting that's unlimited everything (or close enough; what do I need with 2000 mailboxes? But I do use a lot of disk space.) I find this reasonable enough, but apparently some folks require a higher bill, and a TLD that no browser will ever default to.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday February 05, @07:00PM (1 child)
I'm paying about $60 a year for mcgrewbooks.com because of all the space it needs. It was $15 a year before I needed more than ten megs, and it has actual email addresses you can set up, rather than just forwarding.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday February 05, @07:25PM
I found 10mb cramped about 20 years ago :) Right now I have about 60GB of various crap stored on mine (websites, backups, files for someone's reference and kept to prevent link rot, my private mirror of an old FTP). Could as well use the $10/mo tier, but wound up on the higher tier by accident and not worth the bother to switch, and some added features I might use in due course so leave well enough alone. Some mailboxes set up to use and some forward to another. A few set up for friends/family. (And some once used but now entirely forgotten...)
Only need the one hosting account, as I can point my domains anywhere, so each gets its own directory. Makes it easy to mirror locally.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @06:42PM (2 children)
Did he help oversee the bunch of "yet another .info" TLDs?
Don't really see how much those added to the Internet.
See also: https://circleid.com/posts/answers_from_vint_cerf_on_top_level_domains [circleid.com]
So was there really a solid rationale for those TLDs other than making ICANN and the applicants $$$$$$$?
Decades ago[1] I proposed the creation of a .here TLD in the style of RFC1918 IP addresses but for TLDs/domain names. For example jukebox.here while connected to your home network would refer to your jukebox. Whereas jukebox.here when connected to a cafe might refer to a jukebox there. I did email the ICANN, IETF, etc about it but nothing really happened.
To me such types of TLDs could be more useful technically than the .info and similar TLDs. I believe some people were using/abusing TLDs that were not formally reserved yet for similar purposes.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-yeoh-tldhere-01 [ietf.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday February 03, @08:45PM (1 child)
The purpose of such TLDs is because there are millions more web sites than there were 25 years ago, and nobody wants to type https://www.icouldn'tgetashortur671.com. [www.icouldn'tgetashortur671.com]
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04, @02:43AM
And instead they're typing https://www.icouldn'tgetashortur671.hosting [www.icouldn'tgetashortur671.hosting] ?
😏