Vint Cerf Talks About The "Interplanetary Internet"

Uncle Humph1 writes "There's an interesting article at NewsForge by Robin (Roblimo)Miller about Vint Cerf giving a presentation to NOVALUG about the Interplanetary Internet and having lunch with them afterward. An interesting read. One of the quotables by Vint with regard to security reads 'We're building in security from end to end,' he says, 'because we don't need headlines saying, '15-year-old takes over Mars.'" Here is some more information about the interplanetary Internet.

Comments

Not really the interplanetary internet

[Rupert]

This is more a mechanism to get a packet to pay its own way across a network. You can see why Worldcom, and its employee, Mr. Cerf, would be interested in this.

For all he invented the internet, Vint, whether making proposals of this kind or wielding a knife in the draughty halls of ICANN, shows no signs of putting its well-being over that of his employer.

Re:Sheesh!

[Pius II.]

In net/ipv4/tcp_timer.c:tcp_retransmit_timer in Linux 2.3.99pre6,
there's a comment lines 590-604 saying:
/* Increase the timeout each time we retransmit. Note that
* we do not increase the rtt estimate. rto is initialized
* from rtt, but increases here. Jacobson (SIGCOMM 88) suggests
* that doubling rto each time is the least we can get away with.
* In KA9Q, Karn uses this for the first few times, and then
* goes to quadratic. netBSD doubles, but only goes up to *64,
* and clamps at 1 to 64 sec afterwards. Note that 120 sec is
* defined in the protocol as the maximum possible RTT. I guess
* we'll have to use something other than TCP to talk to the
* University of Mars.
*
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once
* implemented ftp to mars will work nicely. We will have to fix
* the 120 second clamps though!
*/

Found on http://www.wcug.wwu.edu/lists/netdev/200005/msg000 34.html

The guy in the post proposes a 240 second clamp as upper limit, but I guess that wouldn't really help with this special problem... :-)

Two small, minor issues

[guttentag]

I have two minor issues with this:

1. There are no people on Mars yet. We haven't figured out how to get them there (in terms of ensuring their health and safety; in terms of how we're going to bring them back; in terms of financing the project). There's no timetable for sending people to Mars, so one can neither say "we'd better prepare for this" nor "we're nowhere near needing to prepare for this."
2. Less than one percent of the people on this planet have Internet access, yet we're talking about plugging in a place where man probably won't set foot in the next 50 years?

I'm not saying it's not worth discussing the theoretical implications of an interplanetary Internet, especially since it probably won't be built in the lifetime of pioneers like Vint Cerf, and then we'll be saying "if only we could go back and ask Cerf what he thought about this." However, I think we need to note that for the forseeable future, this is just theory.