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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."
phones will be phased out completely, to be replaced by web addresses
That might seem a little overly ambitious, but phone service itself for sure will probably go to something all digital. I use Vonage right now and would never switch back. POTS is a last great holdout on the analog to digital conversion.
Of course there are still a good many other poor countries who have such a dated infrastructure that will insure that POTS sticks around a while.
I understand the thought of dumping phone number and mapping them names in the future. I just don't think DNS or DNS like directory is what is needed.
As of right now, I just share my contact list between my phone and my pda. I think the future is convergence. I'm waiting for the ideas to make my life simpler now.
-- Bryan
I think Vint Cerf had a similar article to this a few months back, which dealt with the difference between computing now and in the future. His main point was similar in that all communication will be IP based and that IPv6 will accomodate for those spaces. Another interesting point was that he stated that computers would no longer rely on human to computer interaction, but more computer to computer reaction.
Personally, I think companies are already doing similar things like Apple's XGRID.
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"Searching and finding people are certainly the two areas that still need to develop further, according to Dr Mockapetris, and replacing numbers with web addresses will help that, he says."
Everybody has a little key-holder with a fingerprint reader. Just let somebody push his finger to add him to your contacts. Furter information about the person is stored online.
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..how everyone who ever had a hand in making the coffee that was drunk by the person who thought about submitting the RFC for anything vaguely related to the internet's inception seems to be lauded as some sort of oracle, all-knowing of all-things internet.
But this bloke does have some ideas. And did invent DNS. So I guess that makes it ok.
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Alot of the stuff you see on Sci-Fi usually end up influencing us in one way or another, when he said eliminating phones I think he meant more of regular phones you see today. either way, I wouldn't mind calling someone like this: votp://us.florida.1974.:12:12/crypticspawn
I still enter URL's into the address bar. Doesn't mean that I have to or that it is the easiest. I am just set in my ways and don't use bookmarks for everything.
No matter what happens there will always be the "first to adopt" and those that hang on to their set ways forever.
Addressbooks, bookmarks, speed-dial whatever you want to call it are already replacing the standard way of dialing phones. It's nothing "visionary" by putting numbers to names like DNS (something like adding lines to your hosts file rather than a world-wide DNS system).
The difference is that telephones are currently on a separate (although admittedly often concurrent) network from the internet. What he's predicting is that, rather than having area codes and phone numbers, people will have telephones that are simply computers connected to the internet with an IP (and perhaps DNS ;)) address. No long distance charges. No local telephone companies charging outrageous prices for using their network.
Just internet.
That is a *big* difference from what exists today. Sure, to the average consumer, it will work roughly the same way, but in actual fact, it will be an entirely different puppy.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
From the article:
Although advanced countries are at the point where most people have net access in one form or another, much still needs to be done so that every man, woman and child on the planet has it all of the time, he says.
One of the things that struck me about the media coverage about the war on Afghanistan is just how poor and primitive the majority of the people on the planet have it. There are arguably about 1-2 billion people in the G8 countries. How many other countries have running water? Indoor plumbing? Electricity? Look at the goat farmers in the middle east. Do you really think that everyone is going to have web access anytime soon?
The idea that the entire world has our standard of living is simply false.
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I believe we should all come out of the hype for a second and stop to think whether we are doing things the Right Way(TM). The Internet is not meant to replace everything else, including phones, TVs, light switches and fridges. It was designed with versatility in mind, sure, but the very philosophy behind it teaches us not to attempt to cover all conceivable tasks with a single tool. Talk about "monocultures"...
"One use, one protocol", remember that thing? It think it does apply to this situation, even though we're not talking simply about software anymore.
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VoIP anybody? Seriously, I would LOVE it if my broadband ISP was more like my phone company. for starters, I wouldn't have to pay an extra $25 just so I can get a friggin static IP. I mean, dynamic IP addys would disappear. ("hey, Jim, what's your phone number today?" "143.225.33.205 ... as long as my phone doesn't reboot.")
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" and phones will be phased out completely, to be replaced by web addresses."
Kinda funny that this article came up when it did. Just a couple of days ago I was looking for a cheap PocketPC/Palm that had built in wireless so I could use it for messaging at home and at work. I have fond hopes that it'll do voice chat one day.
To date, I haven't exactly phased out my phone. On the other hand, I rarely use it instead of ICQ or email to chat with my friends.
"Derp de derp."
(Not to say that DNS is a crap hack, but just that perhaps it is, and perhaps if the creator thought so, then perhaps something would change. I'll stop covering my ass now. :P)
Eventually, I bet you'll be able to pick up a "phone", say "New York City, Michael Joseph Smith and Mary Ellen Smith", and have it connect you.
It's not that the device you use will have a database itself. It will probably use something similar to DNS Servers to resolve your words to an address.
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Personally, I would like to see us continue to use phone numbers, but I'd like to see a standard for phones and other devices to load them from a web page. That way you could provide someone a URL, but we maintain backwards compatibility. It's would to be quite some time before the whole world would be ready to move away from phone numbers entirely.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So, we'll replace all this with web addresses so that if a big DNS host goes down like it did last week, then nothing will work.
GREAT!!
Maybe he is just predicting the future he wants, so that people will remember his name without having to say " - the inventor of DNS"
Anyone remember when they used words for the first couple letters of a given phone number?
So going to web addresses from digit-based phone numbers would actually have a retro flair to it, after a fashion...
Frankly, I'm not sure. If you mean VoIP, the big thing with that is that it's compatible with the current existing telephone network. Meaning that it will ring a telephone with a telephone number.
What I'm talking about (and Dr Mockapetris from the way I'm reading the article) is a telephone that is not on the existing telephone network and is instead a node on the Internet.
If there are companies out there making telephones that are connected to the internet, and not the telephone network, I would *really* love to know who they are.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
You know, after reading this something is pretty clear to me. I hate technology, in its current state.
...
When I'm in a face to face conversation, and one of my buddies 'Jim' says "just drop me an email", I cringe. Let's see... I've got only one email address listed under 'Jim' in my handheld's address book. Was that his home email, or his work email, or his personal-but-I-can-read-this-at-work email? Damn, I don't remember, and my handheld's software didn't provide space to make such a note.
Okay, I'll give him a call and ask... no, that's his home number.. where is his cell phone number? Crap, doesn't matter... no cell phone signal. Fine, I'll just wait until I get home...
Okay, my home address book has what I need... I send off that email. Now I wait two days for him to reply. With three email addresses, you can't expect 'Jim' to check them all constantly, right?
So two days later, 'Jim' replies... but I didn't see the message. I accidentally deleted it, instead of an advertisement for Cia.lis that was one line down.
I'll call 'Jim', and see why he hasn't written me back. Hmm, his phone service tells me that 'all circuits are currently occupied'. I'm sorry, but what the hell is that supposed to mean?
Oh, ok now his phone is ringing... hmm, poor connection, I can barely understand him. Jim says he replied to me... hmmm...
Oh, there it is, in my deleted messages folder. Ahh, but my email server stripped off the attachment, fearing that zip file of fake Olsen twin porn he sent me was a virus.
I give up.
As self-serving as it might seem (the creator of DNS, who works for a DNS company, is pitching DNS as a cure-all solution), maybe he has the right idea. Let's face it, the DNS system works. And it works well enough that there is just one of them in use. You don't hear "oh, you can't get to my website, because you are using the wrong DNS system."
A single, elegant system for uniquely identifying a human being, and then routing all communications to them (phone calls, emails, instant messages), independant of the devices being used to communicate, would be great. I, for one, would welcome that.
Obviously, though, the physical and socal infrastructure is not there yet (spotty cell phone coverage, unsolicited calls and emails, unproductive business competition). We've got a long way to go.
Not even if it comes back with a list of streets that each possible answer would be on, like when you call directory assistance?
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isn't part of the people that use technology already on route to working without phones, but using the internet instead to stay in contact?
this might be becouse all my fellow students are IT students to, but when we arent face to face, we use instant messengers allot, where other people would use phones.
and most of us have only 1 or 2 e-mail adresses that they regulary check (and a few extra for the spam), but when we send a message, we know that we will either have a repply within minutes (when using IM) or within a day or 2 (when using mail).
with phones, the other person needs to be close to that phone to get a responce... with IM, you can send a message now and read the repply later...
All indicators show that the human race is selectively breeding itself for stupidity.
I think you don't understand what he is saying. He is talking about the elimination of the E.164 standard. There will be directory systems that underly systems like Mobile IP.
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.
The problem is the form factor of the cell phone. Cell phones typically have a numeric keypad to keep the size reasonable. The easiest way to input a phone number is to enter numbers.
Back in primitive times, I would agree with you.
I notice a lot of people using cell phones nowdays have different habits. They pick up their phone, and simply speak "Call my jerk off buddy", or perhaps "Call my mistress". Then after a few seconds, they are connected. Do dialing. No fumbling with small keypads.
There is also something called "predictive typing" that seems to work well on cell keypads. Imagine a predictive typing system that was real-time connected into the DNS system so that it could correctly predict the spellings of correct domain names.
For the uninitiated... predictive typing means that I press 43556 36753 on the keypad, and the phone figures out that the only thing I could possibly have meant was "Hello World".
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We already have a lot of younger people who (from what I have read anyway) can't read an analog clock or write cursive easily. Digital clocks and representations are the norm, along with only reading text and typing more than writing. I also think-can't prove it but think-that calculators are making the ability to do simple math with pencil and paper a lost art as well in the general population.
I can remember when the teachers made us turn in our slide rules before tests.
Man, I wish I still had mine, along with the leather holster. It was sort of the geek badge around school, even moreso than a pocket protector (had one of those, too). You had to have a mechanical pencil for drafting, a black warrior #2 for math and taking notes, and a black ink pen for taking tests (so you couldn't change your answer). You could use blue for taking notes if you wanted to. Written papers had to be either legible cursive, or typed, double spaced, with correct punctuation and paragraphing. Form/appearance and content were equally graded, because it was explained this was important later on in the academic and business world.
Good and bad. I wonder what bits of technology I would give up to have a simpler and politer society. Back then we didn't have school massacres, the kids weren't forced drugged (or voluntarily drugged), we didn't have JBT "officers" roaming the halls, no one cared if you carried a gun to school and put it in your locker for target practice or hunting after school, and you just didn't see teachers scared like they apparently are now. Any "acting up" in class got swift retribution, it didn't de-evolve into focus group studies and child protective services seizing the kids or any of that nonsense, and the parents went along with it, granting parental like priveleges to the teachers as a default while the kids were in school. You acted decent and within some normal bounds of politness and respect, or ya got it, usually a sneaker wrapped with tape or a paddle. I think I got it three times total my entire grade school career, near as I can recall, most likely deserved I might add.
Nowadays the kid acting up would be drugged with some sort of speed and downers mixed most likely,because he obviously must be suffering from a plethora of long named psychological "conditions", then have a life-long record, the teacher would get suspended and incarcerated as a terrorist, and the kid might be taken from his parents and put in some pervo scam foster care money mill.
Times change.
What would I swap??--hmm, big screen sensurround plasma TVs for a start, to get that innocence back.
Interesting. On a whim, I scrolled back the /. calendar 6 years: 1998-06-23.
The headlines were instantly familiar: Linux will rule the world! Star Wars! Oh, and Debian 2.0.
Check it out, it's pretty interesting.
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I don't know about this, but having an algorithmic mapping between phone numbers and IP addresses (prolly IPv6) seems sensible. That way, all the communications technology can converge on a single nomenclature for addressing endpoints. At least this way, DNS becoms the equivalant of a phone directory, put in name to get the IP address/phone number or visa versa.
Come to think about it, the same could be said for street addresses. Probably want to wait for IPv8 or IPv12 or something like that before that made sense though.
Welcome to the net of 1000 lies. Upgrades are scheduled soon that should bring us to the 10,000 lies mark.
I was lucky to have Paul Mockapetris as a professor in the early 80's before the widespread use of networks (UUCP was hot stuff at that point in time.)
One of the things I remember most, was his acronym for the OSI model: "All Professors Should Teach Networking Like Paul" so your could remember this. Of course, a lot has changed since then, but I was lucky to get a head start on it all -- thanks Paul!
Another cool thing about this class was that Marshall Rose was a fellow student. He's written a few RFCs since then.
-ch