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DNS Inventor Predicts Future of the Internet
afra242 writes "BBC News has an interesting article which discusses what Dr Paul Mockapetris, the creator of DNS, thinks about what the Internet will be in the near future. He states that currently, we are in the Bronze Age of the Internet and phones will be phased out completely, to be replaced by web addresses."
Time for a little history lesson. Before DNS, everyone had to submit a request to the ARPA NIC at SRI in order to get their host added to the HOSTS.TXT file. Sometimes it took weeks for the request to make it through the bureaucracy. After DNS, control of the namespace is distributed and each organization controls its own chunk without hardly ever having to deal with a central bureaucracy. Somehow you see this as a bad thing? True, there continues to be some bureaucracy (and therefore politics) surrounding the apex of the namespace (the root zone and TLDs), but DNS was still a revolutionary improvement over what preceded it, and Dr. Mockapetris has much to be proud of.
Actually, barely a Billion.
(source: wikipedia G8 for the list of countries, and each country page for population)
As for how you define wealth and poverty... I could trade indoor plumbing and running water as well as a grid connection for electricity for some of the living situations you can have in so-called "third-world" countries. Many are going to leapfrog us, going directly solar and wireless; in many countries more people have cell phones than land lines because they're damned cheaper.
Health outcomes in some of the so-called "developed" countries are abysmal, e.g. child mortality rates. In Canada, we have cases of rickets...
There aren't that many of us, and we sure as hell shouldn't be so smug about our accomplishment, or discount other countries.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
They claimed that they would be MORE IMPORTANT than DNS, and that getting the right "RealName" was key to having a successful website. They kept coming around to my employer at the time (a Big Media company) trying to convince them to pay top $$$ for RealName keywords before "someone else" did.
Thankfully, they went out of business, and DNS is still here!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Vonage provides you with a glorified router which translates the incoming packets containing voice information to an RJ-11 style plug you can plug your existing phone into. While not the ultimate "IP phone address", the phones in my house are now officially 100% disconnected from the local SBC loop, and all my calls get routed over the Internet, and if you're still on the old phone network, eventually through your provider and then to your phone.
So the grandparent poster was correct, all this tech already exists. 99% of the US just hasn't had the time to adopt it yet.
Going to the cell phone menu and hitting "Send Number" and point it at their phone, or send it to their phone with all your details. I'm sure they will be using bluetooth. Of course there still may be some kind of security code to enter, or a 4 digit one time thing so that no one sniffs your addy, nor has to deal with it on their phone. No one wants a keyboard, but entering numbers into a cell phone these days is becoming more and more outdated(definately necessary as it is today).
I think you fail to understand the kind of shift that will happen when international dialing codes and area codes simply go away. When you can rely on underlying systems like DynDNS married to a directory system that will allow you to plug a SIP phone anywhere, get a DHCP address - register to a directory server - and start taking calls immediately. Or what will happen when cellular providers go IP behind the scenes.
His insight that Domain Naming services tie it all together is quite important. Despite what you think.
You may very well be correct. That is one approach to locating services on the internet: Know the name of the service a priori. Curiously, it is also precisely the approach that Microsoft took with Active Directory.
There are other approaches, however. The world's oldest and largest directory provider, Novell, bet the farm on the Service Location Protocl, or SLP. Sun & IBM are also very prominent in the SLP community [as well as the closely aligned Project Liberty initiative].
Bottom line: There are multiple, competing approaches to the problem of finding resources on the internet. Heck, when you get right down to it, there's nothing wrong with the old Altavista PeopleSearch. Over time, one of these initiatives will win the greatest market share, and all of the survivors will almost certainly become "compatible" to some extent or another. And it may very well be that Microsoft's approach [DynDNS in conjunction with Kerberos] will be the winner. But there's been an awful lot of resistance to Redmond thus far, and their Passport initiative has, to date, been just shy of an utter and complete disaster.
However, there are two enormous stumbling blocks to further adoption of DNS: Classically, it is an unencrypted protocol with no proper sense of authentication whatsoever. If it is to move forward, the industry will have to move towards encrypted, authenticatible versions of it.
The second stumbling block is much more ominous, however: Against what database [i.e. directory] is DNS to be authenticated? Who will hold the master keys to the server-side authentication and who will hold the master keys to the client-side authentication? Once you require authentication, you give up every ounce of your anonymity on the internet. [Obviously Project Liberty suffers from the same fundamental flaw.] Once you lose anonymity, Big Brother knows who you are, where you are, and precisely what you are doing for the remainder of your life on the web.
Now you could argue that the telecomms already have that power over you when it comes to classical POTS, and that a court order [or "warrant"] is required for the telecomms to release your telephone dialing history, but in all truth: How many times have you used classical POTS to post a political tirade anonymously on a web bulletin board? Or download some pr0n, or place an off-shore bet on a sports team, or purchase a nice Mosel riesling from Wine Commune?