Vint Cerf on Net Security, Hacking, and Acting

ancientribe writes "Father of the Internet Vint Cerf talks candidly in an article on Dark Reading about his being a Googler, and the biggest problems with Internet security and what he sees as the most promising solutions. He says that he's only done a little casual hacking, and that the term 'hacker' no longer comes with the honor it once did. Cerf also reveals in this personal look at the Internet icon that his real dream was to be an actor."

Comments

With the right definition...

[Spazntwich]

I'd say he's been a fairly significant actor on the international stage.

Now he's just strutting and fretting his last few minutes on it though.

Music

[Metasquares]

From TFA:

"I used to play the cello -- and regret that I gave it up so entirely in pursuit of science and math"

I would say this is good advice for others doing intense study in science and math: don't give up everything else that you love or you will regret it for the rest of your life, even if you do become famous in your field.

Re:Music

[ch-chuck]

That is good advice indeed.

Re:Music

[SnippyHolloW]

Often hard when you have to focus both on your studies and passions (guitar, sports) ...

The Architect

[MythMoth]

I like his comment about The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded as a candidate for playing him in a movie. The analogy is neat and there really is a more than passing resemblance!

Vint

It's nice to see an eminent man with a proper sense of humour.

Re:The Architect

[MythMoth]

And here's someone's blog entry making the point better than I did.

Re:The Architect

[thoughtlover]

He does look like the Architect with the glasses on, but I thought he was referring to 'acting' as 'hacking'. I remember hearing that the most high-profile hacks were socially-engineered, thus allowing someone to gain access to unsecured, or lesser secured, computers within a company, rather than using a computer to hack inside.

DARPA Trilogy?

[skoaldipper]

Actor who would play Cerf in a movie: "Well, how about that guy in 'Matrix' who played 'the Architect?'"

DARPA Revolutions

The Architect - Hello, Al.
Al - Who are you?
Architect - I created the Internet.
Al - Bullshit.
The Architect - Humph. Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.
Al - If I were you, I would hope that we don't meet again.
The Architect - We won't.

Re:DARPA Trilogy?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

How about Courtney Love to play Esther Dyson?

Re:DARPA Trilogy?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

They're hardly rivals.

http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html

"By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."

Re:hackers given a bad name?

[e-scetic]

By the same token, who gives a shit what YOU think, and why are you whining and wasting my bandwidth?

I happen to like and admire Cerf and enjoyed the minor update. I appreciate the poster having posted it and think it qualifies as "geek" news.

He did do a brief acting stint

[koreth]

I remember seeing him in a bit part on "Earth: Final Conflict" as a presidential science advisor or somesuch.

Ah, yes, he has an IMDB page detailing his appearances. So it looks like he got to live at least a tiny bit of that particular dream. Good for him!

Re:He did do a brief acting stint

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Maybe something was left out of that entry. To me, it reads like a production adviser, not an on-screen role.

Does not mention M$ by name, what a let down.

[twitter]

The security quote:

Cerf says the biggest threats are the proliferation of spam, botnets, malware, and denial-of-service attacks. "Much work is needed to increase the security of the Internet and its connected computers," he says, "and to make the environment more reliable for everyone."

"And use of IPSec would foil some higher-level protocol attacks, and digital signing of IP address assignment records could reduce some routing/spoofing risks," he says. OSes need to be more airtight, too, and two-factor authentication should be more the norm than plain old passwords, he says.

But Cerf knows securing his baby won't be easy. "Security is a mesh of actions and features and mechanisms," he says. "No one thing makes you secure."

It's too bad the reporter injected so much of their own opinion into the article. I'd much rather have heard Cert's own words than interpretations. The result is that it looks like the reporter did not ask the right questions at the time to get clear answers.

Reading and rereading the above, it looks like he's thinking of ways to make the network work without having to trust the clients attached. That would be a neat trick.

Re:Does not mention M$ by name, what a let down.

[StikyPad]

it looks like he's thinking of ways to make the network work without having to trust the clients attached. That would be a neat trick.

We could call it an internet.

Re:Father of the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Father of the Internet Vint Cerf WHAT not Al Gore!?

No... they're both the father of the internet, they just can't get legally married yet.

You can call me A.I.

[sbowles]

Did you mean A.I. or Al (as in Al Gore)?

Re:You can call me A.I.

[skoaldipper]

Al, as in Gore. But either A.I. or Al works though. What does A in A.I. stand for again? I keed! I keed! Uh oh. I sense a disturbance in the karma force.

Re:Father of the internet

[Dunbal]

Father of the Internet Vint Cerf WHAT not Al Gore!?

      I demand DNS testing!!!

Those were the days...

[fahrbot-bot]

He's probably one of the only people at Google who can remember the Arpanet or what the Internet was like before the Web.

Hell, *I* remember ARPAnet and the Internet before the Web! BSD 4.2/3 on a VAX 785, Sun 3 and diskless clients, routing email using "host!host!user", ASCII terminals, Xerox LISP workstations and the days before EMACS... [ That last one can be used as either the beginning or end of a camp-fire horror story :-) ]

I'm getting old.

Re:Those were the days...

[leshert]

I was about to post the same thing. Hell, I'm almost exactly half his age, and I remember that. Either the author is too young or too careless to have a clue when these things happened, or else he thinks Google is populated mostly by 20-somethings with only an occasional Elder Statesman like Mr. Cerf (hint: it's not).

Seeing such an obvious error in the first sentence rather soured me on the whole article.

Is it just me or

[Malakusen]

Does hacking have less of the mystique it used to? I remember back in the 90s, when everybody was still pretty much new to the whole computers and internet thing, society as a whole was just waking up to what could be done on the internet and how much of it. Seems like there's too many people on the internet now, it's gotten common and ordinary. Every jackass has a Myspace page these days, whereas back in the 90s people who could use the internet were smart enough not to put info about their personal life up there.

And yes, I realize that true old school is using an Atari or a Commodore to connect to a BBS with a 14.4 dialup like I've got in the back room, but the 90s were when the internet was accessible for anybody interested, and yet still uncommon enough that everybody and his brother weren't online.

Re:Is it just me or

[dedazo]

I think it also has to do with the inevitable negative connotations of the term "hacking" that the mainstream media has perpetuated. "Hacker" has become a synonim for "criminal", unfortunately.

Re:Is it just me or

[Bender0x7D1]

14.4?!? I wish! I was happy with 1200 on my Commodore and I didn't get up to 9600 until I bought my 386.

Re:Is it just me or

[chris.evans]

True old school is a Commodore vic-20 with a 1200bps modem :)

educate yourself

[dedazo]

I'm sure it's a huge disappointment to you that "M$" was not mentioned by name - that's probably because Cerf knows the problem can hardly be blamed on Microsoft, and there are a lot of *nix boxes out there that are also part of "big iron" botnets. You might want to look through this. Or Google a bit, if you're interested. You'll find lots of studies by people generally smarter than yourself that do not exonerate "M$" but don't stick them exclusively with the blame either, because it would be disingenuous to do so. I find that even people on Slashdot tend to be a bit more intelligent than to just blame everything on "M$" and be on their merry way.

People like yourself that live in Linux la-la land where everything is Microsoft's fault are going to be the most problematic when/if desktop Linux actually gains any traction among home users. The same group of people who can't be bothered to buy a $25 NAT router and keep their machines patched. What, do you figure botnets just take machines over by osmosis?

Of course it would be ridiculous to claim that Windows is not part of the problem here, but the problem is not as simplistic as you like to portray it.

It soured me too

[Wee]

I was soured on the rest of it as well, so much so that I wrote them an email.

The author was (I think) trying to set up Google as young company, with Vint as a senior benefactor, juxtaposing his age with the myth of everyone here being 24 years old. Or something. But I can name 5 people here off the top of my head (myself included) whose experience predates the web, or who worked with/on/over ARPAnet in some way. If I stand up and look around, I'll spot no less than 8 people with grey hair. Not everyone is fresh out of college.

I was just very puzzled as to why they chose that sentence to start off the article. But the rest of the piece turned out to be mostly fluff, so I saw it for what it was in the end.

-B

What, nothing?

[dedazo]

So twit, are you going to honor me with your incisive rebuttal? I found your supposedly non-existent "gnu/linux" botnet well enough - how about some actual discussion instead of your infantile "oh you must work for M$ and I hate you" bullshit?