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Communications The Internet

Vint Cerf Wants Help Figuring Out the Future of the Internet and Communications 73

Posted by Soulskill from the cat-gifs-are-the-currency-of-the-future dept.
dkatana writes: Vint Cerf, one of the original creators of today's internet, wrote a letter asking everyone to participate to create the foundation of the next internet. He said, "As communication forms evolve, it will be important to preserve one of the oldest: the letter, which has been critical in building relationships, conducting business and governmental affairs, and preserving history. Rather than sounding the death knell for meaningful, written correspondence, Internet technology has the power to enhance it." Cerf cites Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln as a perfect example of what might not be possible for historians of the next generation. Goodwin pieced together letters written by President Lincoln and his cabinet to write a book about how they interacted. "In the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the letters were 140 years old, and I would guess that digital content that was created 10 years ago won't be accessible 10 years from now," said Cerf. "We have the media around, but you may not be able to read it."
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Vint Cerf Wants Help Figuring Out the Future of the Internet and Communications More

Vint Cerf Wants Help Figuring Out the Future of the Internet and Communications

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  • The biggest impediment however is the fact that *EVERYTHING* is protected by copyright, so historical preservation risks getting you hit by a lawsuit.

  • Integrated government backdoor (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    To help secure our freedom in these trying times.

  • this might take a while.

  • Damn I guess all these Scriptsit files that are 35 years old shouldn't be readable

    Wait they are readable

    Oh maybe I need to toss these word perfect files

    Nope still readable

    Corel Draw files ? Still readable

    Vellum files ? nope still readable

    SPICE simulation files ? Still work

    P-Cap still works.

    Seems crying doom is getting to be more and more popular all the time.

    • Yes, but you had to transfer them to new media in order to keep them readable, something the government should be doing with their files but have already gotten creative about at least pretending they have gone missing and other shenanigans.

      • Lego Punch Card Reader

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        Likely adaptable to Jacquard Loom cards.

        • How well do punchcards have to be kept in order to ensure they aren't damaged in a way that makes them unreadable. Has anybody studied this? Hanging chads? Data density? Not that the government would adopt it as a backup storage device, though.... How fast is the search function. I recently discovered that records from the Nixon Administration are online at http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/p... [state.gov] but that's probably a little off topic.

          • I don't know, the point of comparison though is 140 year old letters that had to be pieced back together.

    • I too have some files from almost 20 years ago that I can still read. I save most things as ASCII text.

      On the other hand, we can still read President Lincoln's letters to his wife. I WISH I could read the messages I sent my wife just eight years ago.

  • Old media's big advantage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Saturday September 12, 2015 @05:28PM (#50511171)

    It isn't just about the technical problem of how to preserve/read digital information.

    Back in the day (get off my lawn!) it took a lot more thought and planning to create a document, without instant digital editing etc. Those old letters, books, et. al., took a lot more time and effort to create, and were considerably more difficult to edit and modify, and as a result, tended to have more forethought and planning before putting words down.

    As a result, penning a few paragraphs or an essay or two wasn't such a casual endeavor as it is today.

    Now that any monkey with a keyboard (and a little cut-and-paste ability) can create volumes of prose, the signal to noise ratio is a lot lower. IMHO, we don't want or need to preserve every piece of text (or image) ever created. The problem is, how do we tell the signal from the noise?

    Even if we were able to preserve all digital information across time, nimbly leaping from one format or platform to another, would we want to? And if we did, what a vast amount of garbage! Might as well preserve all our landfills, in case future historians have a desperate need to pick thru them...

    Of course, the NSA is probably already doing this, and has just the search algorithm to target YOU, citizen!

    • To be fair, today's archeologist dig through the garbage dumps from aeons ago. Don't doubt for an instant future archeologist won't be doing the same to the garbage dumps of today.

      Not to mention it is insanely tricky to decide today what will be relevant in the future. I have a book of graffiti from Pompeii. That probably gives me more insight into the times there than any official account.

      The standard-bearer is that people will preserve what's important to them (including the means of accessing it. You do

      • I have no idea how many of my bookmarks I have changed to point to Archive.org's newest page before the site got deleted. Even some of those, Archive didn't get the site's content completely, but sometimes going to older versions yields more material.
        https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org] is a good example of the loss of data issue.
      • A language teacher that I had did his thesis on ancient Roman graffiti and said the same thing.

  • "Vint Cerf ... wrote a letter ..."

    No he didn't, he wrote a lettr. I'd never seen one of those things before now but it appears to be another Twattr, Wankr or Tossr style meeja platform but with nicer fonts.

    A letter is not broadcast across the world but is a slow, expensive point to point medium. It also requires effort, paper, pens (or possibly crayons), some saliva, an envelope, a stamp and some legwork to post it. I used to be a prolific letter writer and loved to send and receive them many years ago.

    T

    • I still write letters from time to time, and postcards when I travel. In particular, I seldom send emails to my daughter, preferring to *write* to her.

      It's not just about having the right glyphs reproduced in the right order. It's also about her having something that came from her father's hands, just for her.

  • At my humble opinion... (Score:3)

    by AchilleTalon ( 540925 ) on Saturday September 12, 2015 @05:32PM (#50511183) Homepage
    The single biggest problem with the current internet, beside the technical things is this protocol has been designed for peer to peer networking and the Internet has been build as a server centric IBM mainframe SNA network.The fear to really democratize the internet and empower the users has result into this lame architecture where almost everything in this world converge into two dozen datacenters. The data has been made the property of a bunch of happy fews and made them immensely riches. The Internet has not played its role as it should have.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by JSG ( 82708 )

      Beg your pardon daddyo! Peer to peer? I'm writing a reply to someone who could be anywhere in the world, that can be viewed by same. I don't see anything remotely SNA related (I've worked with the real thing - it's more stable).

      At a whim I can use another platform, any platform that will allow me to login and participate, to communicate with a vast number of people. Yes, there are the big ones: the FBs and Twitters of the world. However they come and go. I also use mailing lists and was a fan of USEN

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by hackwrench ( 573697 )
        The software running atop the network enables some democracy, but when it comes to forming links, the hardware is designed for centralization. The data flows from the user across lines that link to central pathways. There isn't a hand-off to other routers that are on the fringe in the current design, but wouldn't be if the topology wasn't to route everything through centralized paths. If the topology was democratized, my router would be in direct communication with other people's routers, all relaying how f

    • Well, that thought is a hoot and a half . . . the former President of the USA fiddling around with LU 6.2, while the "Monitor" (TCP/IP) slugs it out with the Merrimac (ISO/OSI) . . .

      I'm sorry for trolling your dinner . . .

  • Much of what people communicated in the 19th century wasn't preserved. All those telegrams that should have been filed away neatly! And very little of Oral History was ever recorded.

    There's this conceited notion that we can sum up and figure out the world by studying the past. The notion some people have of 'history' presumes that what we have here and now has a permanence. The concept that history has ended and we're just supposed to document everything.

    Maybe everything we 'figure out' by digging throu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JSG ( 82708 )

      "An anecdote: when the Egyptian kings were entombed, they were buried with a lot of mummified cats. In the late 19th century when the British colonialists were excavating the tombs, the remains of the cats were sold as fertilizer."

      They would be "colonials" if they were taking over the place. I think the word you want is "archaeologist".

      A mummified cat is a tiny thing and I doubt it would fertilize anything effectively after several 1000 years, what with being somewhat desiccated. I don't think it would re

      • Are you just a pedant?
        I guess you consider yourself somewhat of an expert on mule shit. Great.

        popular media cite [salariya.com]

        somwhat more referenced cite [strangehistory.net].

        You're not getting your money back. Maybe you should have said something when they were taxing you.

      • I wonder if the people who excavated things back then had the qualifications for being a modern archeologist. I think they still do fit the other term whichever way you want to call it. I don't get this insistence that tax dollars are still yours once you've paid it.
  • ...that old fart may have invented or had dealings that caused what we now refer to as "the internet", but his recent ramblings don't inspire much optimism. No thanks.

  • Better encryption (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Saturday September 12, 2015 @08:07PM (#50511577)

    Start by replacing the broken CA model and push much harder for alternatives like DANE and the EFF Sovereign Keys proposal.

    Stop the NSA or the Chinese Government (or hackers who steal the master keys for a CA ala DigiNotar) from being able to generate a certificate for a domain and perform MITM attacks with it.

    Replace TLS with something designed from the ground up to be as simple as possible. Any "optional" features in the protocol that could be turned on by the server or client are extra vectors for attack.

    Mandate forward-secrecy (via Ephemeral Diffie-Helman or similar) to prevent bad guys who later obtain private keys from decrypting previous traffic. Support only the strongest algorithms (RSA with at least 2048 bits, AES, SHA2/SHA3) and dont support obsolete algorithms like RC4, SHA1, MD5, DES or 3DES.

    Make email encryption so easy anyone can do it. And build it into all the popular email clients (with encryption turned on by default) so that encrypted email becomes the rule rather than the exception.

    Invent open-standard open-protocol chat programs (for voice, video, text and file transfer) with end-to-end encryption (including some sort of forward secrecy so that once the session is over, it becomes impossible for anyone to decrypt the conversations and get the data back)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      He wants to preserve and expose the data to future generations for posterity. Not hide it.

  • "In the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the letters were 140 years old, and I would guess that digital content that was created 10 years ago won't be accessible 10 years from now," said Cerf. "We have the media around, but you may not be able to read it."

    Honestly, I can't think of any format used in 2005 that's not readable in 2015. Anyone? Sure there were a few really odd and obscure formats used in the first years of computing that was heavily tied to playback hardware or media, but that is all. As long as you can dig up a binary to run in a VM most anything should be readable. And purely for reading documents this is beating down open doors, PDF/A already exists and is an extremely well documented standard for long term document preservation.

  • The innovators of the next generation of digital media storage already exist! It's called "Google" and is operated by a philanthropic corporation named "Alphabet" and they have the means to preserve, transform, index, and search the media assets to better develop patterns and similarities between various generations' communication choices.

    Seriously, though, we cannot undo the decisions and mistakes from all past generations who have communicated in any modern or dead language... yet chose to not preserv

  • THE most effective organ critical to the development of INTERNET is missing. Resurrect and revive it.

  • I have plenty (a majority I would say) of 30+ year old Apple II disks that are still readable.

  • no address to reply? my internet design change .... ALL communications must be replyable.
  • Why is the letter dated September 10, 2014?

  • Letter was dated 2014, did anyone notice? But it reads like "2014" is just a typo, and it should have been 2015. Had me wondering if we were being fed old news.

    He wants some futurism? Hmm. The first question is whether any small group will take over control of our networking, or is that impossible? I think it is impossible, but that won't stop control freaks from trying. Since it is impossible, copyright as we know it will wither. Next, one of the things that divides people into nations is language

  • I found this free/open source new protocol that aims at filling the gaps that HTTP has in terms of permanence and security of data. Loosely based on DHT and Coin mining, it allows for website to become P2P instead of centrally served.

    The protocol is called IPFS and the site where you can get more information is http://ipfs.io/ [ipfs.io]

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