Ask Internet Visionary and Pioneer Vint Cerf

As co-designer of TCP/IP (along with Robert E. Kahn), and former chairman of ICANN, it is no exaggeration to say that Vint Cerf is certainly one of the fathers of the internet, and is often referred to as simply the father. His lifetime of network engineering accomplishments — meriting, among many other laurels, the Turing Award — leaves little doubt as to why he's now a full-time internet visionary for Google (and formerly with WorldCom) as well as a Google VP. Now, Cerf has graciously agreed to answer Slashdot readers' inquiries about the past and future of this little thing called the Internet, and his role in it thus far. This short call for questions is inadequate to sum up his contributions to engineering the data flows that entangle and enlighten us in 2011, but read through a few of these capsule descriptions to get a sense of them. In accord with the interview guidelines, please try not to lump together unrelated questions. (You may find that your questions are moderated downward if they aren't concise; if you have several distinct questions, simply submit separately as many as you'd like.)

Comments

Great expectations

[suso]

Can you talk about any time when you felt that the direction of Internet development was not going in the way that you hoped it would?

Did you know Dennis Ritchie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything you can tell us about Dennis Ritchie?

He was like a hermit... that's why I would like to know more about him.

And what are you doing for a living?

32 bit as numbers

[vlm]

Two extremely closely related questions:

1) Conversion from 16 bit to 32 bit BGP AS numbers half a decade ago or so: Went smoother or rougher than you personally expected? Or just right?

2) How does the answer to #1 above modify your view of whats likely to happen with the ipv4 to ipv6 transition?

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Hatta]

IPv6 could easily run short of address space if we're careless with the bits. 128 bits is not much if they're parceled out in ways similar to IPv4.

Nonsense. IPv6 provides enough addresses that each person on earth could have their own IPv4 internet, which would only account for only about .000000000000000005% of the available addresses.