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As much as everyone's chuckled at it, myself included, it's worth clearing up the Gore thing, especially in light of who made it to the White House instead.

He pitched in, and was one of the proponents of making what was once the rather 'closed' (or at least, nonprofit save for the likes of BBN) ARPANet a full public resource. What we can gather from the sweep of history is that he probably believed that, as such a resource (even one used for commerce), it should be policed to the same extent as the public airwaves (note amateur radio's longstanding restrictions against 'profanity' and the use of cryptography), and, er, the media at large -- gotta protect those kids. That was, of course, his mistake; "the Internet" of today doesn't run on limited public spectrum so much as a theoretically 'unlimited' set of private wires, and while it couldn't have been built in the form we know it without the ARPANet, the First Amendment and property rights rather, erm, 'rightly' intervened, to a greater extent than they were previously able to in the limited broadcast-media bandwidth.

If you look at his other 'initiatives,' it's obvious he's a futurist of sorts, albeit one who might not realize his 'great ideas' have often already been implemented to degrees. Of course, he was proposing more of a national art project than anything else (follow the reference chain from here, if you wish),
but his 'backing' attracted funding for a technically useful climate-monitoring mission that's now complete and awaiting a slot for launch.

[No, don't look at me... I voted Libertarian.]

Yes, it does sound that way which is why it caused such a fuss in the first place.

Just because he was a congressman during the pushing for its opening to the world doesn't mean he had anything to do with its creation and/or the voting for it. He likely had absolutely no idea the implications it would have in the future, but just thought "hey, lets let the anti-socialites play with their toys". It was (in my opinion) just a line to impress the voters (the dumb ones at least) and people need to get over it.

Bullshit. Vinton Cerf himself has gone on record stating that Gore was heavily involved in promoting the technology in Congress and often consulted with the real inventors of the Internet for their advice on how to promote it. I remember reading an article at the time where a government employee told how Gore would bring people in from different agencies and show them the information that was available and ask them why their stuff wasn't also available on the network.

Gore's statement was somewhat ambiguous and completely self-serving. But it is accurate.

Okay, yes, I fully admit that it's cool to map the internet in one day. Regardless...I think I hear about some internet every other day.

There's John Quarterman who's been doing it for years, and then the CAIDA visualization tools, and Cybergeography and the Internet weather report and damn maps and more maps.

Note to everyone: please stop mapping the internet.

Their Internet Weather> animations would also be interesting

Graphics on the Sorcerer sound impressive, with a resolution of 512 x 240, when most machines of the era supported a maximum of 320 x 200.
...
The Sorcerer instead chose another method entirely, which was to not really to have graphics at all. Instead they allowed the user to re-define the character set (the shapes of the letters on screen) and used these in lieu of pixel-addressable graphics.

A more surprising limitation, given the machine's genesis, is the lack of sound output. Enterprising developers then standardized on attaching a speaker to two pins of the parallel port

I think it's a case of being right too early. The same thing happened in the US with cell phones. The early adoption led to a puzzle of incompatible standards and huge investment in obsolete networkds slowing down the adoption of modern, high-speed wireless telecom.

Fred Mora

IP localization is an interesting problem. At one time, MIDS (later Matrix.Net, later Matrix NetSystems, current status unknown) had a nice page which would provide you with a mapped traceroute. However, it doesn't appear to be available anymore. If anyone knows of a functionally equivalent service being offered by a competitor, that would be useful to know.

IP localization is an interesting problem. At one time, MIDS (later Matrix.Net, later Matrix NetSystems, current status unknown) had a nice page which would provide you with a mapped traceroute. However, it doesn't appear to be available anymore. If anyone knows of a functionally equivalent service being offered by a competitor, that would be useful to know.

This domain was used by a spammer, they sued and won. http://www.mids.org/mn/803/spamset.html

During his service in the U.S. Congress, Al Gore did take the initiative in transforming a private network of military and scientific institutions into the commercial Internet. Even Vint Cerf has acknowledged the former Vice President's contribution.

"I invented the Internet" debunked

But one of Thomas Crapper's employees did invent an improved flush toilet.

While it is not accurate to say that VP Gore invented Internet, he has played a powerful role in policy terms that has supported its continued growth and application, for which we should be thankful.

We're fortunate to have senior level members of Congress and the Administration who embrace new technology and have the vision to see how it can be put to work for national and global benefit.

1. http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctg000.htm
   "I think that the old arguments that will come up at the (UCLA) conference and have come up over and over is everybody is claiming responsibility for everything at this point," says [Lawrence] Roberts, who was the designer and developer of ARPANET.
   
   But one thing all agree on is that the Internet was not conceived as a fail-safe communications tool in case of nuclear war, a much-promulgated myth over the years. The Rand Research Institute was developing a study shortly after ARPANET's birth that has been confused with the research-oriented ARPANET and subsequent developments.
   
   Nuclear war "wasn't the reason we did anything," Roberts says. "That story is just wrong."
   
2. http://www2.aus.us.mids.org/mn/1002/myth.html[In 1999], Alex McKenzie (BBN 1967-1976) posted the following:
   
   While it is true that the design of the ARPANET was not at all influenced by concerns about surviving a nuclear attack, it is also true that the designers of the ARPANET and other ARPA-sponsored networks were always concerned about "robustness", which means the ability to keep operating in spite of failures in individual nodes or the circuits connecting them.
   
3. http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/
   The architecture of the ARPANET relied heavily on the ideas of Paul Baran who co-invented a new system known as packet-switching.( A British computer scientist, Donald Davies, independently came up with his own theories of packet-switching). Baran also suggested that the network be designed as a distributed network. This design, which included a high level of redundancy, would make the network more robust in the case of a nuclear attack. This is probably where the myth that the Internet was created as a communications network for the event of a nuclear war comes from. As a distributed network the ARPANET definitely was robust, and possibly could have withstood a nuclear attack, but the chief goal of its creators was to facilitate normal communications between researchers.

I always wondered how long it would be before someone tried to give a "weather report" for the Internet

You mean like this?

Let's ask Vint Cerf:
"While it is not accurate to say that VP Gore invented Internet, he has played a powerful role in policy terms that has supported its continued growth and application, for which we should be thankful."

(Remember, only the Republican party and the Corporate media says Gore "invented the Internet.")

I hope it doesn't fail like when the Internet completely collapsed back in '96.

[sigh]

http://www.snopes2.com/quotes/internet.htm

http://www.mids.org/mn/904/vcerf.html

Will you please shut up now?

If you are in the US of A, there is legal precedent that such forging of From: headers is damaging to the forged domain. You might want to look at The flowers.com case for more info.

Essentially they argued that they had to spend time dealing with complaints and calculated the cost of that lost time. They didn't even argue for damage to their reputation, which I think could have lead to an even bigger penalty.

Personally, I've been hearing ``Imminent Death of the Net Predicted'' since ARPANET days. Back in 1977 or thereabouts there was a failure of the old ARPANET routing algorithm that shut the whole net down. As late as 1987 I was still hearing people (mostly OSI backers, it's true) cite that incident as proof that packet switching was not viable, and only circuit switching (as in X.25) could possibly support massive amounts of traffic. ...

Computing is the only field in which we consider adding a wing to the building to be maintenance.

Here are a few links for those that wish to monitor Internet Usage durring the election.

Intenet Health Report

Internet Traffic Report

Internet Weather Report

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet

The full phrasing is important because the statement clearly is talking about what he did as a congressperson. He took the initiative over other Congresspeople to create the internet. (I never stated that he the quote meant a legistlative "initiative". Just that he took the Congressional initiative in creating the internet). There may have been many other people who had taken initiative to create the internet, but Gore took the inititive as a congress person.

According to the Internet Timeline, in 1986 the NSFNET was just created with a backbone of 56Kbps, but Vint Cerf acknowledged that "As far back as 1986, [Gore] was holding hearings on this subject (supercomputing, fiber networks...) and asking about their promise and what could be done to realize them. Bob Kahn, with whom I worked to develop the Internet design in 1973, participated in several hearings held by then-Senator Gore". In 1986, the internet was far from done. It was still being created. It can be said that it is still being created, but it can eaily be said that Al Gore played an important part in creating the internet. Not the first internet, but the internet, the one you are using right now.

I'll probably be moderated down again for stating this opinion, but I really don't care. I am rather sick of the media falsifying and cut quoting statements by Gore. For a longer disection of many Gore "lies," there is another good article on snopes.

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet

One important difference is the phrasing implies "Congressional inititive," not that he was the first ever to take the initiative in creating the internet.

An even more important aspect of this phrasing is that he used the word "creating", not "inventing". The phrasing implies that s a congressman, he promoted and passed bills that allocated budgets needed for the implementation of such a network. As Vint Cerf (often referred to as "the Father of the Internet") stated in an email to MSNBC:

VP Gore was the first or surely among the first of the members of Congress to become a strong supporter of advanced networking while he served as Senator.

The article also states that they have in certain case excluded networks, but from the discussions I have seen on security lists, thie type response is more like go f--- yourself.

They claim to be using propietary technology to make performace maps of the Internet, but ICMP from one network to the rest of the Internet hardly provides useful data.

MIDS has been mapping/monitoring the Internet for some time now without pissing everyone off.

When Davies was working on his ideas about pakets it came to his attention that another researcher, Paul Baran, had the same ideas. Baran had published a number of reports working for RAND on this topic.

It is often stated that Internet was built like it is to withstand a nuclear attack. This was not a concern for Davies and this team, but was indeed one of the reasons Baran was trying to come up with a new architecture. So Internet as we know it today has nothing much to do with nuclears, but it makes a good story I guess. :)

This is all described in the book Where Wizards Stay up Late. A fine read for anyone who is interested in the history of Internet and the people that made it happen.

/bootsy

here's some info on the case.

We have now put up a press release. Also, we have created a static copy of The MIDS Internet Average front page showing the period of the outage.

i'm surprised no one has mentioned MIDS (Matrix Information and Directory Services) yet. They have been mapping and gathering statistics on the net for years. Of course, most of their stuff isn't free.

They have all kinds of interesting matrix maps containing demographic and geographic data about internet hosts and users. I have one of these on my wall in my office -- it is a great conversation piece if nothing else. Much better than all of those posters with "success/team" oriented drivel.

i'm surprised no one has mentioned MIDS (Matrix Information and Directory Services) yet. They have been mapping and gathering statistics on the net for years. Of course, most of their stuff isn't free.

They have all kinds of interesting matrix maps containing demographic and geographic data about internet hosts and users. I have one of these on my wall in my office -- it is a great conversation piece if nothing else. Much better than all of those posters with "success/team" oriented drivel.

i'm surprised no one has mentioned MIDS (Matrix Information and Directory Services) yet. They have been mapping and gathering statistics on the net for years. Of course, most of their stuff isn't free.

They have all kinds of interesting matrix maps containing demographic and geographic data about internet hosts and users. I have one of these on my wall in my office -- it is a great conversation piece if nothing else. Much better than all of those posters with "success/team" oriented drivel.

So how does USPS's 198 billion snail mails compare to the volume of Internet email? This would be a good pointer to obsolence or relevance. Barring exact statistics (pointers anyone?), let's do a back-of-the-envelope estimate...

AOL has actually made public some figures for its corner of the Internet; I haven't seen much from other providers, so lets start with that.

AOL is currently claiming to deliver 200 million pieces of email a day. Grossly simplifying, that multiplies out to 73 billion emails a year.

The number of AOL users is 17 million. The number of Internet users, (in the U.S. only, since we're comparing against the US Postal service.) is around 100 million according to figures from Neilsen or MIDS. So AOL has 17% of the US Internet users.

Extrapolating, that implies that the total amount of email being sent is 429 billion pieces. So the Internet has doubled USPS traffic and is still growing, and at a fair pace faster than 3.7%.

USPS for messages is obsolete; for goods, it'll remain relevant.

--LP

The main reason spammers aren't sued more often is that, their claims of wealth through pyramid scams notwithstanding, their seizable assets usually consist of an old 386 and a pile of chicken bones.
/.

Look at all the class A's IANA has NOT assigned! And all the "reserved" addresses? I suspect this is just a bit of noise-mongering to get the new ICANN (IANA's replacement) jumping. Or maybe it's when people look at those growth numbers with the internet doubling every year that they think we're going to run out shortly. But actually internet growth has slowed especially in the last year or so - check out John Quarterman's latest analysis at www.mids.org.

-- Arthur