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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 Justin Case on Saturday September 24 2016, @11:30PM
No ideas to keep it from becoming a wretched hive of scum and villainy?
It's the Garden of Eden all over again. (TBL's web invention too.) You give humans something nice and they promptly get busy crapping all over it.
(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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:40AM
The original net-surfers embraced the internet because it was a wretched hive of scum and villany and the discourse was more free than Kim Kardashian's tits.
However, if that is not your cup of tea, you can simply ignore the internet and go back to your exciting bowls of plain oatmeal every morning.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @04:18AM
A couple of people, not many, we decided that, well, wouldn't it be really swell if we planted a few gardens. We're gardeners after all. Why not come together and show each other what we know about gardening? We could connect our gardens to each other, have our plants grow together, maybe we'll find some awesome symbiosis happening! And we did. And others came and looked at our garden. It was just a little garden, mind you, there was nobody to hold your hands when you tried to only walk around in them, there were few trails and most of the time you had to carve your own, carrying a machete with you was advisable. Most people turned away when they noticed that it's going to be a bit of work to just look at our flowers. Let alone plant their own garden. Because back then, if you wanted to be part of that gardening experience, you better learned a thing or two about gardening, and fast!
Yes, there was the occasional bully who jumped into our flowerbeds and trampled over them, but we knew how to deal with them. And deal with them we did, swiftly and with lasting effect. We were, after all, gardeners. And we were good at that.
More people came along and we were overjoyed. They're really interested in our stuff! You see, nobody really cared about our plants and everyone we showed any of them called us names because, well, it was not "cool" to plant flowers. But suddenly this was the next big thing, everyone wanted flowers! And we were only too eager to share all the knowledge. Hey, the more the merrier! Knowledge multiplies if you share it!
Well, to be honest... we shared more than just knowledge. There were a few flowerbeds that had those camo nets above them, but hey, ya know, who cares what you do in your spare time, amirite? Just pass it and don't bogard the spliff.
Then people came who said they wanted to build some roads through our gardens so people could walk more easily. We agreed, it was a good idea. After all, most people by now weren't really hard core gardeners anymore. Many just wanted to wander about and smell the flowers. And those that joined were... well, let's say they were happy if we gave them a few saplings because they had no clue at all how to grow plants but wanted some good looking flowerbeds too. We didn't mind. After all, hey, it's not like I don't have that flower anymore just because I give you a sapling of it, right? And we get roads across our garden.
A seed shop opened at the corner. We thought it's cool. Hey, that makes it easier to get seeds initially. Someone's gonna buy, and then we pass 'em around and ... so we thought. But suddenly passing seeds and saplings around wasn't "allowed" anymore. The cornerstone of what we built was considered "bad" now. By whom the fuck and who died and made you king, we asked. We dealt with it the way we knew how to deal with it. The same way we dealt with the bullies, or with others that broke the rules. Only to learn that the rules have changed. We no longer make them.
Long story short, our garden is now walled in. Most of the plots have been sold, or rather, "reappropriated". We're sitting in some corners, tucked away from the busy streets where vendors peddle boring, uninspired hybrid plants (that are of course patented and don't you DARE to as much as SHOW it to anyone, let alone hand him a sapling!) where the masses stumble about, not even knowing what gardening is, for it has been turned into a huge amusement park. Allegedly there is still a tree standing somewhere in what used to be our garden, I haven't seen one in a long time, though.
So we moved on. And we learned.
We built another garden.
And this time, we will not make the mistake to invite the masses in. Leave them their amusement park, and leave them in the blissful ignorance that they don't even know what they're missing.
They most likely even wouldn't want to know.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pvanhoof on Sunday September 25 2016, @08:11AM
Where is this new garden of yours?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @06:02AM
Quite frankly none of them have the population or reliability of the old internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgarden though.
I kind of think the serious guys have either given up, died, or turned into those maker snobs with their yuppie lattes and overpriced 3d printers.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday October 07 2016, @02:16AM
originally posted on Slashdot.com by Opportunist
https://slashdot.com/comments.pl?sid=9216259&cid=52277895 [slashdot.com]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday September 25 2016, @08:13AM
Ban all humans?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].