Vint Cerf Explains Why the Internet is Holding Up (washingtonpost.com) 19
In a video interview over Google Hangouts this week, 76-year-old Vint Cerf explained to the Washington Post why the internet's 50-year-old architecture is still holding up, "with a mix of triumph and wonder in his voice."
"Resiliency and redundancy are very much a part of the Internet design," explained Cerf, whose passion for touting the wonders of computer networking prompted Google in 2005 to name him its "Chief Internet Evangelist," a title he still holds...
Cerf, along with fellow computer scientist Robert E. Kahn, was a driving force in developing key Internet protocols in the 1970s for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which provided early research funding but ultimately relinquished control of the network it spawned. Cerf also was among a gang of self-described "Netheads" who led an insurgency against the dominant forces in telecommunications at the time, dubbed the "Bellheads" for their loyalty to the Bell Telephone Company and its legacy technologies.
Bell, which dominated U.S. telephone service until it was broken up in the 1980s, and similar monopolies in other countries wanted to connect computers through a system much like their lucrative telephone systems, with fixed networks of connections run by central entities that could make all of the major technological decisions, control access and charge whatever the market -- or government regulators -- would allow. The vision of the Netheads was comparatively anarchic, relying on technological insights and a lot of faith in collaboration. The result was a network -- or really, a network of networks -- with no chief executive, no police, no taxman and no laws. In their place were technical protocols, arrived at through a process for developing expert consensus, that offered anyone access to the digital world from any properly configured device. Their numbers, once measured in the dozens, now rank in the tens of billions, including phones, televisions, cars, dams, drones, satellites, thermometers, garbage cans, refrigerators, watches and so much more...
Such a system carries a notable cost in terms of security and privacy, a fact the world rediscovers every time there's a major data breach, ransomware attack or controversy over the amount of information governments and private companies collect about anyone who's online -- a category that includes more than half of the world's almost 8 billion people. But the lack of a central authority is key to why the Internet works as well as it does, especially at times of unforeseen demands. Some of the early Internet architects -- Cerf among them, from his position at the Pentagon -- were determined to design a system that could continue operating through almost anything, including a nuclear attack from the Soviets...
Several [Netheads] acknowledged they celebrated just a bit when the telephone companies gradually abandoned old-fashioned circuit-switching for what was called "Voice Over IP" or VoIP. It was essentially transmitting voice calls over the Internet -- using the same technical protocols that Cerf and others had developed decades earlier.
"They're deservedly taking a bit of a moment for a high five right now," added one Comcast vice president (who "has briefed some members of the Internet's founding generation about how the company has been handling increased demands.")
And last week Vint Cerf reported good news about his own recent COVID-19 infection -- that he is no longer contagious -- and briefly summed up the experience for the Washington Post.
"I don't recommend it... It's very debilitating."
Cerf, along with fellow computer scientist Robert E. Kahn, was a driving force in developing key Internet protocols in the 1970s for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which provided early research funding but ultimately relinquished control of the network it spawned. Cerf also was among a gang of self-described "Netheads" who led an insurgency against the dominant forces in telecommunications at the time, dubbed the "Bellheads" for their loyalty to the Bell Telephone Company and its legacy technologies.
Bell, which dominated U.S. telephone service until it was broken up in the 1980s, and similar monopolies in other countries wanted to connect computers through a system much like their lucrative telephone systems, with fixed networks of connections run by central entities that could make all of the major technological decisions, control access and charge whatever the market -- or government regulators -- would allow. The vision of the Netheads was comparatively anarchic, relying on technological insights and a lot of faith in collaboration. The result was a network -- or really, a network of networks -- with no chief executive, no police, no taxman and no laws. In their place were technical protocols, arrived at through a process for developing expert consensus, that offered anyone access to the digital world from any properly configured device. Their numbers, once measured in the dozens, now rank in the tens of billions, including phones, televisions, cars, dams, drones, satellites, thermometers, garbage cans, refrigerators, watches and so much more...
Such a system carries a notable cost in terms of security and privacy, a fact the world rediscovers every time there's a major data breach, ransomware attack or controversy over the amount of information governments and private companies collect about anyone who's online -- a category that includes more than half of the world's almost 8 billion people. But the lack of a central authority is key to why the Internet works as well as it does, especially at times of unforeseen demands. Some of the early Internet architects -- Cerf among them, from his position at the Pentagon -- were determined to design a system that could continue operating through almost anything, including a nuclear attack from the Soviets...
Several [Netheads] acknowledged they celebrated just a bit when the telephone companies gradually abandoned old-fashioned circuit-switching for what was called "Voice Over IP" or VoIP. It was essentially transmitting voice calls over the Internet -- using the same technical protocols that Cerf and others had developed decades earlier.
"They're deservedly taking a bit of a moment for a high five right now," added one Comcast vice president (who "has briefed some members of the Internet's founding generation about how the company has been handling increased demands.")
And last week Vint Cerf reported good news about his own recent COVID-19 infection -- that he is no longer contagious -- and briefly summed up the experience for the Washington Post.
"I don't recommend it... It's very debilitating."
Privacy vs lives (Score:5, Interesting)
Welcome news (Score:4)
Routing "arguments". (Score:2)
"Several [Netheads] acknowledged they celebrated just a bit when the telephone companies gradually abandoned old-fashioned circuit-switching for what was called "Voice Over IP" or VoIP. It was essentially transmitting voice calls over the Internet -- using the same technical protocols that Cerf and others had developed decades earlier."
ATM is still a thing even with NGN.
http://www.oas.org/en/citel/in... [oas.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Ah yes, VoIP. Nothing like speaking to someone an . .. ing them sound like they're talking in a . . . can grrrr trying to decipher if they're under the weather or if it's the connectionnnn.
Re: (Score:2)
What the hell class of connection do you have, a 14.4 modem? While your statement might have held water in 2004 today pretty much every large corporation on the planet uses VOIP for telephony. For that matter my wife makes VOIP calls to her family in Peru almost daily and talks for hours uninterrupted.
Well deserved praise (Score:5, Insightful)
Very Veal (Score:3, Funny)
I don't recommend it...it's very debiltating."
~Vint Cerf
But enough about the doctor's bill.
Less bufferbloat at home would be nice (Score:5, Informative)
Today... download bufferbloat still sucks on cable and dsl, and the cures for that - inbound shaping with sch_cake or the fq_codel based smart queue management [github.com] code - are even more rarely deployed. I recently - before all this blew up - had several dozen bitter experiences around the world at airbnbs and coffee shops about how useless their networks were under a single up or download.
DOCSIS 3.1 has the pie AQM. It's remarkable how much the cable industry has managed to reduce their uplink bloat in the last few years, but there's still a long way to go for all technologies [dslreports.com] to get peak latencies under 30ms. Still, update to 3.1 if you can to take care of 1/4th this problem.
I do kind of hope that the entire slashdot audience? long ago applied openwrt/dd-wrt/ipfire/so many others/ and/or pfsense rules to get their bloat under control, and if y'all haven't, well, a few minutes configuring your existing router better might lead to less familial discord. Ton of commercial home routers just need the right qos/sqm settings (with fq_codel, typically, underneath).
As ISPs sped up, bloated wifi became more and more of a problem. We fixed that for the ath9k and mt76 a few years back [lwn.net]. Take a few minutes to relocate your APs higher up, do a channel scan and, if you can, move to some of the new DFS channels [wikipedia.org] and maybe give the new linux ath10k code [openwrt.org] a shot?
Lastly... and thank you, vint, jim, van, nick, for helping instigate the bufferbloat research all those years ago [acm.org], with solutions unimaginable in 2011, and the problem itself unimagined with the net's original architecture. Amazing architecture, indeed!
Re: (Score:3)
Solved it a few years ago for my home network by splitting the kids and wife off into their own subnet for heavy use streaming, etc. while I was doing online classes (teaching and taking) and needing bandwidth to do work and school both.
Used a Pi with a extra ethernet dongle on it, their subnet is NAT'd by the Pi and then routed out to the world. Pi routes from "my" subnet which can go to the wife/kids subnet or from my subnet right out the main router/"modem". What makes it really work is once all of the
Re: (Score:2)
lol are you kidding me? (Score:1)
Most "internet" services don't includes any NNTP server at all. The internet has been dead for years.
Re: (Score:2)
"Most "internet" services don't includes any NNTP server at all. The internet has been dead for years."
Are you trolling or what? Equating the internet with NNTP is as wrong as equating it with HTTP. White practically all traffic today is carried over HTTP, you can still use other protocols all day if you like.
The jobs which used to be done with NNTP are now mostly done with HTTP[S], for good and ill, NNTP still exists, and so does USENET. If you're determined to use it, that's still possible. There's just l
lol are you filtering me? (Score:2)
"There's just less reason to do so than ever before."
A good reader has better filtering than most social platforms, and more importantly it's self-imposed rather than by the platform.
Soo (Score:2)
Sooo, ISPs?
And now Cloudshare controls 90% of connectivity (Score:1)
Was it recorded? Is there a link? (Score:3)
I don't see any link to a replayable recording of the hangout session, and a google search for hangouts vint cerf, even if limited to the last month or week, shows lots of stuff from 2014 or earlier up to January of 2020.
Is there a link that would let us view this interview?