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National Projects Aim to Reboot the Internet
iron-kurton wrote with a link to an AP story about a national initiative to scrap the internet and start over. You may remember our discussion last month about Stanford's Clean Slate Design project; this article details similar projects across the country, all with the federal government's blessing and all with the end goal of revamping our current networking system. From the article: "No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes. Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was 'generally healthy' because the current technology 'does not satisfy all needs.'"
It's worse than that: It's one of those research projects created to justify Ph.D's.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
"What needs to happen is a profound change in protocols and in implementation," ISA Chairman Bill Hancock said in that 2004 interview. "Getting people to talk about it isn't hard. I've talked to the geeks, I've talked to the executives, I've talked to everyone. It's a total issue of money. The realistic approach is to look at the economic impetus. ... We need some strong, highly-secure protocols, and they've got to be able to last a long time. The problem is that we have 655 million or so users of the Internet right now. Deploying security enhancements to that many users at once is a non-trivial matter. The problem is complex, big and will take a while to solve"