Slashdot Mirror
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."
If this is the bronze age of the Intarweb, Slashdotters represent the Beaker People.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Now, as head scientist and chairman of Nominum, a DNS management company, he has been reflecting on how the net has grown up.
The father of DNS and a scientist working at a DNS management company believes that everything will be controlled by a DNS-like system, absolutely unbelievable!
We have these things called bookmarks... People rarely remember web-addresses as it is. I know that entirely too many people believe their entire "Internet" is their homepage (while working for ATTBI during the @Home changeover I *personally* received several calls from concerned people that their Internet was gone and replaced by this "ATT BY" thing as their homepage had changed from home.excite.com to www.attbi.com). I would venture to say that most people get their information from a handful of sites and don't bother to remember much other than google.com or yahoo.com. I know that I get most of my information from a handful of remembered sites and I consider myself a bit more Internet savvy than the average user.
"It is quite possible that phone numbers will have disappeared and people will just use menus off their phone. I don't think there is particular value in having them."
He theorizes something that already exists! So instead of bookmarks for phone numbers we have these things called address books. You look up someone's name in there and you click on it. It dials. Absolutely brilliant. Thanks for showing us the way!
He's no longer a visionary. He's just pretending to be one. What he did for us changed the Internet from the start. This article on the other hand means nothing as it already exists in popular form.
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.
Prediction 1: He wants web addresses to replace phone numbers.
Isn't this pretty much already happening now? With the advent of cell phones and even home phones that allow phone book storage, this already happens. There are people that don't even remember their HOME phone number because they always pull it from the menu on their cell phone, or use voice-activated dialing.
I'm not so sure I follow. Google has become so successful because of their search technology. With billions of webpages and websites, and probably even more billions of phone numbers, how is that going to help? It's still tough to find web addresses with easy to remember names these days. Atleast with Google it makes it much easier.
Prediction 2: Access for all, Security
Wasn't this already introduced a couple years ago? Since the advent of broadband, it has been the goal of changinging everything over to that and giving access to all. However, I think it's something that is going to happen a lot sooner than we think, thanks in part to wi-fi. Wi-fi is becoming increasingly popular with everyone these days from hotels, cafes, even in parks. Thankfully, he did point out that security needs to be tightened up before a lot of this goes mainstream.
Correct... This is more than likely going to be the next big explosion on the net (behind searching of course). But I just wish it would actually happen in the right order. Get the security practices down, then introduce access for all, but make sure they can understand it first.
Hmmm.
But seriously, isn't it already that way? I only know two phone numbers: my cellphone and my normal phone. If I want to call someone I just look up their name in my "phonebook" on my cell or phone and I click "call". So in some way we already have the thing he talks about. You could consider the phonebook function in modern phones as an equivalent to a local "hosts" file.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
GroupShares Inc. - A Free and Interactive Stock Market Community
-------
artlu.net
The internet will replace your telephone, television, electricity, water, gas, and sewer. Rather, everything will come and go to and from your house through a single "big pipe". It will be a marvelous future...
Unknown host pong.
Phony McRingRing: I'm here to explain why the convenience of one area code in Man's Voice: -Your Town- has been replaced by the convenience of two area codes! ... Scientists have discovered that even monkeys can memorize 10 numbers. Are you stupider than a monkey?
Wiggum: How big of a monkey?
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
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.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
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.")
Lagito ergo expectabo
Paper, snail mail, hiking boots and such will always exist as needed elements of human life. Thesse predictions are not only short sighted of how it deepens the gap between the have and have nots, but the driving forces in evolution of computer technology are Military and Gaming IMHO. The driving force in real world implementation is probably the online porn industry. And as always the prime force against most of what Dr. Mockapetris states is privacy concerns. Otherwise projects like this April Fools note would already be underway. Note that my information is just as scientific as his predictions :)
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
If you have to call the goatse.cx guy, for goodness sake don't be looking at your cell phone screen when he answers.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
This is a step in the direction that I have been asserting (much to the chagrin of those who have to listen to my nerd-like ramblings) to all my friends and co-workers: "Soon, we will all be assigned IP addresses at birth". Now that, my friends, IS the future!
Sig? - yeah, whatever.
"What's your phone address?"
"Oh, it's vee oh tee pee colon slash slash U S dot florida dot 1974 dot colon twelve colong twelve slash cryptic spawn, all one word."
"Uhh... ok, nevermind."
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
"In the future, the Internet will be twice as fast, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive only the five richest kings in Europe will own it!"
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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.
The biggest current trend is that everyone is switching to wireless phones. Most people don't want to carry around a phone large enough to contain a keyboard. Voice recognition works well only for words that are commonly used. For weird IP addresses, you would have to say each letter one at a time.
Imagine you meet somebody. You want to store his/her phone number your phone book on your cell phone. Which is easier? Typing 820-833-5214 or typing a 16 letter word into your 10 button keypad?
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"
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.
I only R part of TFA, but I noticed this quote immediately. This doesn't seem like much of an insight to me. Of course we'll look back on it and laugh, isn't that how it always goes? We used to drive covered wagons pulled by horses on dirt roads. It's quaint now, but back then they were at the edge of technology. All (er... most) of us here know that the network infrastructure is weak and likely won't carry us much further in its existing state, but rest assured, we'll get there. One step at a time, that's the way it's always been.
And we should respect his opinion why?
I suppose you'd gouge your eyes out with a plastic fork and bathe in acid if you were Eric Allman--and I perish to think of what you'd do if you were Tim Berners-Lee. After all, these guys are ultimately responsible for creating the systems that are so horribly abused by spammers, scammers, and pornographers, right? What weight could their words possibly carry today?
Heck, why respect Donald Knuth's opinion? After all, many of the topics covered in The Art of Computer Programming are essential to address harvesters, zombie DDoS applications, and every single worm and virus ever written. Or Alan Turing--that man has, like, zero credibility, seeing as if it wasn't for him, we probably wouldn't even have ICANN, k1dd13s, spam, hackers, et cetera!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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 really. Many people in the world are certainly very poor (though I'm still not sure if they've got it as bad as those living 2000 years ago), but modern technology has an influence even in the poorest countries. WHO vaccines for polio, malaria etc have reached even the most godforsaken countries of Africa, resulting in a considerable increase (something close to doubling, IIRC) in life expectancy in poor countries over the past hundred years. Poor people also often have access to modern materials to build their shacks, modern crossbred seeds for their little farms, etc. Of course, the influence of technology is not entirely positive --- it would be better if the warlords didn't have machine guns --- but I'm just saying that comparing today's poor countries with the Bronze Age isn't accurate.
What good is ubiquitous Internet connectivity to a people that are comparatively primitive?
It does sound silly at first sight to give wireless Internet access to people in abject poverty, but I think it would actually do them a lot of good. Imagine if we could distribute cheap Internet access stations to the poor --- they would have instant access to a giant wealth of information and education. Many people in poor countries have not had any primary education, and don't even know things that we consider incredibly basic and obvious. For example, they might not know that boiling water helps to kill germs and prevent disease, or that sex communicates AIDS. One of the most popular and important books in the world is a little UN booklet distributed in Africa that explains such basic concepts (I don't remember what it was called); it's been said that that booklet has saved thousands of lives.
The Internet would also help them to read about such things as politics and democracy, which would help reform the bad regimes in the poor parts of the world (which are a primary cause of poverty). Finally, better communication systems would assist them with making their own businesses. I think that one of the best things we can do for the poor is to provide them with access to more information.
While Dr. Mockapetris believes that de-numberizing the way we remember/contact people is the way of the future, I believe this does nothing to further help the much needed cause of finding people, places, things. THAT, I believe, is the way of the future, and "doing away with phone numbers" simply does not help that.
"It is quite possible that phone numbers will have disappeared and people will just use menus off their phone. I don't think there is particular value in having them."
Did he forget what his DNS is even based on? no matter how many layers of indirection he places on top of the current system, you can't replace the fact that people need to be identified uniquely in one way or another. If he believes a person can be remembered more easily by myphone@whatever.com (or whatever other convention he uses other than phone numbers) he still misses the point on how we obtain these names/numbers in the first place.
When reading this article, i've tried to forget the fact that he has his own DNS management company now, yet his inisistence on building an "alternative" phone-numbering infrastructure and using his clout of being "the father of DNS" only hints that he really has no new "vision" of the future and is trying to profit on whatever soon-to-be-outdated technology he happened to invent.
DNS certainly helped the internet grow enourmously.. but if you think about it now, its really not needed as much any more other than advertising.
Alternative forms of gathering your bookmarks/phone contacts/unknowns is the future.
> He states that currently, we are in the Bronze Age of the Internet
We are? Well, *somebody* needs to pony up 1000 food and 800 gold to get us into the Iron Age. I wanna build a Wonder, here!
Chris Mattern