ACM to Honor TCP/IP Creators with Turing Award

bth writes "The New York Times reports that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn will receive the ACM Turing Award. According to the ACM website: The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn the winners of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols." Commentary from Groklaw also available.

Comments

And the funny thing is...

[Anonymous Coward]

... if they were starting out now, slashdotters would be cursing their names because its clear that they were trying to foist a proprietary standard over the completely open, free-software friendly, OSI infrastructure, probably with a view to "Embrace and Extend"

Now a real question : If Baran and Davies had been granted a patent on packet switching networks in 1964, what would the internet look like now?

Nice to see

[dj_whitebread]

The Turing award is slowly starting to recognize people who have designed, built, and deployed systems. Up until recently, it had been given solely to people in theory.

Another argument against software patents

[KevinDean]

This part of the article jumped out at me:

"Dr. Cerf said part of the reason their protocols took hold quickly and widely was that he and Dr. Kahn made no intellectual property claims to their invention. They made no money from it, though it did help their careers. "It was an open standard that we would allow anyone to have access to without any constraints," he said."

What would the internet be today if they'd tried to squeeze every last cent out of this idea?

Vint Cerf - helping to destroy the net

[gorbachev]

http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=158

For a man that was so instrumental in creating the underlying technology the Internet is based on, he sure has come a long way since then.

He works for MCI, the only US network that refuses to terminate spammers, spamware peddlers and bulletproof hosting facilities. Vint Cerf is claiming they can't do that, because of 1st Amendment issues. For someone as smart as him, he sure can be clueless; 1st Amendment does not apply to anyone but the US Government.

This is what Steve Linford of spamhaus.org wrote on SPAM-L yesterday about Vint Cerf's role, among other things, in all this:

MCI, right up to Vint Cerf, are insisting that Send Safe is just ordinary software with no illegal features, and that it "could" be used for spamming only in the way a crowbar could be used for breaking and entering, or an innocent tobacco pipe could used for smoking dope. Our reply to these analogies is that if you sell pipes specifically designed for use with marijuana, with features only for marijuana use, and the pipe is designed to contact the pusher and download the marijuana into it's bowl, and designed to hijack innocent people (proxies) to pass the marijuana smoke through before inhaling to implicate them, while anonymising the smoker from the police by rotating the smoker's name, and even comes packaged with lists of innocent people pre-infected to be used for this purpose, you can bet you're going to jail.

I reminded Vint Cerf of his "spam is bad for the net" quote displayed on the CAUCE site, and asked for his help in getting the MCI spamware issue solved. He said he'd look into it, but got back to me saying the 1st Amendment made MCI not terminate spamware vendors no matter how illegal... so I gave him a link to the LINX BCP document and quoted the LINX text to him, he replied that the LINX BCP document was "probably illegal" in the USA (and hence MCI was ignoring it). Basically, MCI is trying every excuse under the sun to keep Send Safe and the many spam gangs they're servicing.

MCI says Send Safe is not the MCI customer, their customer 'MTI' is an "ISP" who is in turn reselling to Send Safe and it's therefore out of
their control. They know perfectly well (and are lying to the press that they don't) that ROKSO-listed MTI is Rusty Campbell's (DesktopServer) spamware outfit, not an ISP by any stretch of imagination, and that ISPs don't normally have only 6 IPs, and that the Send Safe website is directly on the end of the MCI line, one IP away from Rusty's router.

John St. Clair and the rest of the 'abuse' droids at MCI have known perfectly well for over a year that MTI's sole business is spamming and that the sole things hosted on Rusty Campbell's web server at 65.210.168.34 are 25 web sites, which are:

1 0-BULKEMAIL.COM.
2 ADOGWITHOUTWARNING.COM.
3 AMAZING-BULK-EMAIL.COM.
4 AMAZINGBULKEMAIL.COM.
5 BULK-EMAIL-WORLDWIDE.COM.
6 BULKEMAILREVIEW.COM.
7 BULKEMAILREVIEWS.COM.
8 DESKTOP-SERVER.COM.
9 DESKTOPSERVER.BIZ.
10 DESKTOPSERVER.COM.
11 DESKTOPSERVERPRO.COM.
12 DESKTOPSERVERSALES.COM.
13 DESKTOPSERVERSHOP.COM.
14 EASYBIZ.COM.
15 EMAILBROADCASTER.COM.
16 EMAILEMAILEMAIL.COM.
17 EMAILTOOLS.COM.
18 MONEYFUN.COM.
19 MTICD.COM.
20 MTIDEALER.COM.
21 MTIHELP.COM.
22 MTILAB.NET.
23 MTISOFTWARE.COM.
24 SEND-SAFE.COM.
25 THEINTERNETBIZ.COM.

MCI says these are all normal customers of the "ISP" Rusty Campbell who just happens to be the author of DesktopServer and to MCI it's all good paying business and nobody's going to stop them, least of all those darn anti-spammers.

Amazingly, in 2003 we had kicked Send-safe.com off 4 Chinese "bullet-proof hosts" before they found safe haven at MCI in the US. MCI makes even the worst Chinese network look clean.

Steve Linford
The Spamhaus Project
http://www.spamhaus.org