from the social-control-media-is-not-the-Internet dept.
El País has a short interview with Vint Cerf about his thoughts on the Internet and speculation about the future. He has been there since the beginning when, among other things, he and Robert Kahn developed TCP/IP.
Vinton Cerf: 'I refuse to take responsibility for those who abuse my beautiful internet'
Previously:
(2023) Vint Cerf on 3 Mistakes He Made in TCP/IP
(2023) IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Vint Cerf
(2020) On the Disappearance of Open Access Journals Over Time
(2018) Vint Cerf: Internet is Losing its Memory - SoylentNews
(2016) Vint Cerf's Dream Do-Over: 2 Ways He'd Make the Internet Different
(2015) Interplanetary Internet about as Useful as Flying Pigs says Vint Cerf
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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
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."
Vint Cerf, the godfather of the Internet, spoke in Sydney, Australia on Wednesday and issued a blunt call to action for a digital preservation regime for content and code to be quickly put in place to counter the existing throwaway culture that denies future generations an essential window into life in the past. He emphasized that this was especially needed for the WWW. Due to the volatile nature of electronic storage media as well as the format in which information is encoded, it is not possible to preserve digital material without prior planning and action.
[...] While the digital disappearance phenomenon is one which has so far mainly vexed official archivists and librarians for some years now, Cerf's take is that as everything goes from creation, the risk of accidental or careless memory loss increases correspondingly.
Archivists have for decades fought publicly for open document formats to hedge against proprietary and vendor risks – especially when classified material usually can only be made public after 30 to 50 years, sometimes longer.
From iTnews : Internet is losing its memory: Cerf
David Rosenthal discusses the last 25 years of digital preservation efforts in regards to academic journals. It's a long-standing problem and discontinued journals continue to disappear from the Internet. Paper, microfilm, and microfiche are slow to degrade and are decentralized and distributed. Digital media are quick to disappear and the digital publications are usually only in a single physical place leading to single point of failure. It takes continuous, unbroken effort and money to keep digital publications accessible even if only one person or institution wishes to retain acccess. He goes into the last few decades of academic publishing and how we got here and then brings up 4 points abuot preservation, especially in regards to Open Access publishing.
Lesson 1: libraries won't pay enough to preserve even subscription content, let alone open-access content.
[...] Lesson 2: No-one, not even librarians, knows where most of the at-risk open-access journals are.
[...] Lesson 3: The production preservation pipeline must be completely automated.
[...] Lesson 4: Don't make the best be the enemy of the good. I.e. get as much as possible with the available funds, don't expect to get everything.
He posits that focus should be on the preservation of the individual articles, not the journals as units.
Previously:
(2020) Internet Archive Files Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Publisher Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
(2018) Vint Cerf: Internet is Losing its Memory
(2014) The Importance of Information Preservation
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.
The co-creator of the Internet's protocols admits his crystal ball had a few cracks:
Vint Cerf, the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor for "co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society's critical infrastructure," didn't have a perfect view of the Internet's future. In hindsight, there are a few things he admits he got wrong. Here some of those mistakes, as recently told to IEEE Spectrum:
- 1) "I thought 32 bits ought to be enough for Internet addresses."
- 2) "I didn't pay enough attention to security."
- 3) "I didn't really appreciate the implications of the World Wide Web."
These are only his top three - can you think of some that are missing from that group? What about any mistakes that aren't top 3 but still in hindsight should have been done differently?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday May 19, @06:47PM (2 children)
In that regard it appears to be a bit of a flaw. Power of the internet have gone from "being for everyone", after it left the hands of the military and some snooty universities, and instead in the crass deathgrip of capitalism and greed. People are now datapoints in the grip of $. The problem is that they appear to like it, or just doesn't know any better.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday May 20, @02:32PM (1 child)
"The problem is that they appear to like it, or just doesn't know any better. " The average person is stupid and/or mostly just wants to pay less. So what, if they have access to my search history. I'm not a criminal, mentality.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21, @12:43AM
Lack of privacy enables witch hunts.
"Give me six lines..."
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu [wikiquote.org]
You don't like someone? Just find six lines and have them incarcerated!
Just get them tangled up in "The System".
Everyone obediently does their job and reduces your victim to a pulp.
https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/the-power-of-authority-insights-from-milgrams-1963-experiment [simplyputpsych.co.uk]
I have had this happen to me. Cited for something I had no part in. I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I took it to Court. My accuser didn't show. I realize she was sent after someone. They passed me at what I considered to be a very high speed. The pursuing officer nailed me. She was sent to go give a ticket, and by God, she did.
The more exposure you have out there, the more apt others will use you as a scapegoat. ( How the goat got involved still mystifies me ).
These days, privacy is zilch, while technology has reduced the costs of monitoring you to a negligible amount.
Even anonymously, I am having second thoughts of even posting this.
(Score: 5, Funny) by chucky on Tuesday May 19, @07:59PM
Thank God these great minds are also great personalities. If I had to watch my beautiful internet becoming a cesspool, I’d be just an old bitter man refusing to be named next to it and not giving any interviews…
(Score: 2, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday May 19, @10:12PM (3 children)
I have to note that his grousing about social and interpersonal relations goes back at LEAST to ancient greek and biblical times, its not a IPv4 or TCP RFC related problem.
Sometimes I'll get some shit about my refusal to disavow Christianity, humorously almost exclusively by anti-Christian members of another religion, and then stuff like this comes up where the problems of the old days aren't really all that different than the problems today.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
On the other hand this dude is pre-boomer generation and I'm post-boomer generation and one long term perspective I've seen is interop is generally better now. Not perfect, but much better. You'll note he's not grousing about OSI layer 1, 2, 3, 4 stuff, he's all grumbly about OSI layer 7, pseudo-layer-8, etc stuff. "back in the day" we grumbled a lot about OSI layer 1, 2, 3, 4 stuff, that is mostly settled now.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20, @01:51AM
I have experienced so much "marketing" ( aka deceptive "business talk" amongst religious "influencers" trying to attract a funding base / influencing base ) that I have damn near written the whole shebang off as nothing more than a moneymaking and power base scheme of the "Influencer" ilk.
We have so many flavors of religion. Do any of them represent God? Or is this just another yapping dog with a silver pipe jammed up it's mouth trying to be the Grand Poombah on Earth? Most of us know about the "Little Man behind the Curtain" and his control of the noisemakers.
I have already been warned of false prophets and how to recognize them.
I have to fall back to inner spirituality, ( which is that "inner voice" ) that guides many of us.
It usually falls back to a very simple algorithm: " Do into others as you would have others do unto you."
Kindness, compassion, sharing. Until Demanded, If Demanded, that is not kindness or compassion that is Theft. I am not commanded to tolerate that, even though I may delay my reaction to it until it is time to do so.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20, @02:50AM (1 child)
But so many philosophers and atheists assume that if there's a creator of that same inexplicable universe the creator would be so simple that they can pretend to be clever by spouting inanities like "Can God make a rock he can't lift?".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 21, @02:42PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems [wikipedia.org]
In math its a no brainer that its possible to express unprovable math statements, sort of similar but unrelated to the halting problem where the fastest most efficient way to figure out what a program does is to run it or FAFO.
In philosophy / religious studies this is a similar thing. If you want to reason about a theoretical perfect creator or similar related topics, first of all, why its not going to be a useful topic regardless of result, and secondly if you try to use imprecise imperfect created by evolution and randomness human language, the inadequate language will result in all manner of unprovable theorems and imprecision and such.
Its similar to the true statement that in the bible there is a reference to a diameter accurate to 1 sig fig and a circumference accurate to 1 sig fig and declaring that proves the document claims pi is a rational number equal to "3" and THAT proves the entire document is completely false or the opposite of true in all possible topics and interpretations because it doesn't express an irrational number as irrational or to 1 million decimal places (why not a billion?). What it does indicate is if illiterate goat herders have a bright idea, their written interpretation of said idea, translated a couple zillion times, might not live up to the highest standards of modern technical writing. "Oh well" complainers gonna complain LOL.
The crossover to Zen koans with "those people" is pretty interesting. I wouldn't read too much into their interpretation however the fact there's any crossover at all is pretty interesting.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20, @11:53AM
It's well known that Al Gore invented the internet. This guy should tone it down a notch.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Thursday May 21, @04:12AM
He is a pioneer. But, most recently, he was (in)famous for backing the sale of .org to private equity. Something that would have contributed to the abuse he speaks of.