Mother of Internet Speaks Out

Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that Radia Perlman, sometimes called the "Mother of the Internet" for her invention of the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges and switches, recently gave a very candid interview with NetworkWorld. From the interview: "The taste of whoever is in the funding agencies tends to cause everyone to look at the same stuff at the same time. Often technologies get hot then go away. There was active networking for a while, which always mystified me and has now died. In security the money is behind digital rights management, which I think ultimately is a bad thing -- not that we need to preserve the right to pirate music, but because the solutions are things that don't solve the real problems in terms of security."

Comments

Mother of the Internet?

[parasonic]

I thought that Tipper Gore is the Mother of the Internet...

Government Take Over of Research

[mulhollandj]

I find it interesting that all real R&D is now done by the government. Professors get funding almost exclusively through DARPA, NSF, military branches, etc. It used to be research was done primarily by private industry. Where did we get the transistor from? But now industry R&D is really just product development because they don't fund things that will not be profitable in a few years. So perhaps that is why we are seeing things disappear. The new general/funder isn't interested and there is no quick turn around for the company.

Re:Government Take Over of Research

[corellon13]

"It used to be research was done primarily by private industry."

I think it's safe to say that most research throughout history has always been driven by government and specificially the military. The vast majority of inventions and innovations come from the military and government. So, I'm not sure what you are basing this on, but I don't think that having government involvement in funding research is a new thing or a bad thing.

Re:Government Take Over of Research

[TrappedByMyself]

It used to be research was done primarily by private industry. Where did we get the transistor from?

My first instinct in reading your post is that you don't know what you're talking about. I think since WWII, the government, and specifically military has always been a big funder of academic and industry research.
So... I decided to take 2 seconds and look up the history of the transitor. Now I know its a stretch sometimes looking to Wikipedia, but from here I see

"On 22 December 1947 William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeded in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs. This work followed from their war-time efforts to produce extremely pure germanium "crystal" mixer diodes, used in radar units as a frequency mixer element in microwave radar receivers."

Seriously dude, I know blaming the government for everything is cool and all, but at least try.

Why don't the DRM Nazis understand this

[bensafrickingenius]

Momma says " the solutions are things that don't solve the real problems in terms of security."

And she's exactly right. Pirates aren't defeated by DRM, but land lubbers trying to exercise their fair use rights are. Just as a f'rinstance, I just this weekend had to order a fresh copy of my favorite game (No One Lives Forever 2) because the CD got damaged. As an informed end user, I had long ago tried making a backup disk to use so as not to damage the original, but the backup disk didn't work. As a lilly-livered non-pirate type, I did not use a "no-cd" crack to circumvent the publishers wishes and violate DMCA. You can bet I will this next time around, though. What has the game publisher accomplished? They've turned an honest, paying customer into someone willing to download and use illegal cracks. Good job, guys.

"don't solve"

[l3v1]

because the solutions are things that don't solve the real problems in terms of security

Of course they don't solve security problems, but they create new problems for which they can "sell" these as solutions. This technique (create a solution then convince people they have a problem) has greatly "evolved" recently. However, besides not solving security problems, they create new meaning for "rights management", "trusted computing", etc. We could just probably get to live the day when pirate will mean police and stealing will mean giving. We will have to solve the same problems but by calling them differently they will make us believe the old problems are gone and these are new problems to be solved.

Do I make sense ? No, not really. But I'm too lazy to delete :)

If we are done picking TFS apart letter by letter.

[GundamFan]

...Her point is very true.

I like to think of all security as a battle of will, your willingnes to keep your stuff and a thiefs willingness to take your stuff. When you are trying ot sell somethig ad secure it thinks get tricky because you need to make it avalable to your customers but not those who would take it without alienating your potental customers.

In the end I see the RIAA and MPAA making there products so bloated with DRM and low quality because of it that eventualy companies will wake up to the true causes of there shrinking profits and move away from the cartels.

I see the same thing hapening in quite a few industrys in the next couple of years actualy.

Why the EULA

[lon3st4r]

But in the software industry, when you install something there is this 9,000-page legalese that basically says: "We have no idea what this thing does, we're not claiming it does anything, if it remotely does anything useful you should be grateful to us, but you shouldn't blame us if it doesn't do what you expect." And they get away with it!

So true. So true! I really wonder how this trend started? And it looks like there's no going back. Are there alternates to this kind of EULA. Something like more responsible EULA. Why are the customers paying through their noses when the manufacturers accept *no responsibility*!?

Re:Wrong anchortext: Mother of Internet

[patio11]

Doesn't Google use link text to heavily bias what it perceives as the content of an article? For example, if I were to do something malicious like say some politician I don't care for is a miserable failure that primes a Google bomb for the search term "miserable failure" even if the target page doesn't have miserable or failure on it. Given that Slashdot is a high PR site (PR9?), its link text swings around quite a lot of weight. But who searches for things like "article" or "interview"?

This might be a quite radical conception about the hyperlink, but I think that the overwhelming majority of human users are using a browser which shows context around the link so it doesn't matter whether you say click here or link or "I found the most interesting description of how to build a Beowolf cluster of hot grits while I was browsing Slashdot earlier today", the user will be able to know what the link pertains to regardless. The only major group of users who really need that extra reinforcement in the link text are spiders (and, because I should make at least a token effort to recognize that usability is important, folks with clients which have an extremely small "field of vision" whether thats because of their client not being on a traditional PC or because their client is non-visual). Both of these user groups benefit a heck of a lot more from "Mother of the Internet" than they do from "article".

Radia Perlman's book of numbers

[ortholattice]

Ah, Radia Perlman. I remember her at MIT in the 70s. She was nuts. She sold a self-published book (made from Xerox copies of a computer printout, folded in the middle and stapled) with a table of all the Roman numerals from 1 to 1000 or something, sorted in alphabetical order, to make them easier to look up. Another chapter had the numbers from 1 to 1000 spelled out in English and also sorted in alphabetical order. I guess I was nuts too, because I actually bought a copy which I probably still have around somewhere. I wonder if it is worth anything - is there a "nerd" section on eBay?

Hi, Radia.