Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Internet Visionary and Pioneer Vint Cerf

Posted by timothy on from the touch-the-hem-of-his-garment dept.

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.)

33 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Hindsight is 20/20 by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If there was one thing you could go back and change about TCP/IP -- something that is far too entrenched to change now -- what would it be?

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Hindsight is 20/20 by Hatta · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    2. Re:Hindsight is 20/20 by kasperd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If there was one thing you could go back and change about TCP/IP -- something that is far too entrenched to change now -- what would it be?

      I think Vint Cerf has already on multiple occasions mentioned the two things he would have liked to have done differently when designing IPv4 and TCPv4. The two things were the size of the addresses and mobility support. At the time there was discussion about the size of the addresses, some people wanted 32 bits, some people wanted 64 bits (and AFAIR some people wanted variable size). Vint was responsible for ending the discussion and deciding on 32 bits. He has publicly admitted that turned out to be an unfortunate decision.

      If IPv4 had been designed with 64 bit addresses, chances are we would never have gotten IPv6 with the additional improvements it offers.

      Vint Cerf has explained that leaving out mobility from IPv4 was due to it being considered appropriate for a lower level in the stack. And to some extent mobility can be handled by WIFI or cell phone networks. But it turned out that in some cases that isn't sufficient, and mobility at a higher level in the protocol stack would have been better.

      I don't think there is anything wrong with the question, but I think that apart from the above two points, what answers you will get is mostly what got changed between IPv4 and IPv6 anyway. Maybe he would also have wanted something designed differently in TCP to begin with (such as knowledge of mobility). The upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6 didn't really change TCP, so TCP still does carry around some stuff that could have benefited from a redesign.

      I seem to recall that Vint Cerf also at some point pointed out authenticity as a point that would have been a good idea to have in the protocol from the start. However at the time when IPv4 was designed public key cryptography was still too young to be properly understood, and any authenticity put into the protocol at the time would likely have turned out to be flawed.

      Considering how much I can write from recollection of what Vint Cerf has said about that question in the past, maybe it is worthwhile having him repeat it again in his own words.

      But there is another question that I would really like to see answered. It is about the IPv4 to IPv6 transition. If IPv4 had been designed differently to begin with, we might not have had to go through this transition. But you never have the necessary experience to design something right the first time, so that is not really a worthwhile discussion. And I don't think discussing the specific design of IPv4 and IPv6 is really that interesting either. The changes from IPv4 to IPv6 all seem for the better, and with the requirement for larger addresses they couldn't have been made much more compatible anyway, so some transition mechanism would be required.

      My question is: What could have been done differently to ease the transition. In other words, if you could go back to the point where the design of the IPv6 protocol as it looks today was available, how would you have designed the transition plan? We all know that there was a transition plan, and nobody executed it fast enough to make it work out. How could the transition mechanisms have been done differently to ensure that the transitioning had happened fast enough to make IPv4 obsolete before the addresses ran out and we had to resort to hacky workarounds like NAT?

      --

      Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
  2. Great expectations by suso · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

  3. A Simple Pogonological Question by eldavojohn · · Score: 3, Funny

    What level of success does TCP/IP owe to your glorious beard?

    --
    My work here is dung.
  4. Best and Worst of Communications Protocols? by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm wagering you've studied many communications protocols -- is there any protocols that you feel was terribly designed and implemented? Any modern day elegant/simple/innovative protocols that you've admired?

    --
    My work here is dung.
  5. What would you like to see developed next? by techmuse · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm curious what technologies you would like to see developed next, or what you think would be most important to develop next. In other words, what do you think researchers should work on now that would be most significant?

    Oh, and thank you for changing my life!

  6. IPV6 by pedestrian+crossing · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In your opinion, what is it going to take to get the Internet switched over to IPV6?

    --
    A house divided against itself cannot stand.
    1. Re:IPV6 by slimjim8094 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Engineering for an unpredictable future just means you waste a huge amount of time and often it means your idea won't get off the ground at all. The internet wasn't ever expected to get as big as it is, because it was essentially a research network. Perhaps analogously, our phone numbering system isn't designed to allow direct-dialing nearby galaxies.

      2^32 was - and is - a huge number. 4 billion addresses was unthinkably high, when there were only a few thousand machines who could even use one. It was more than sufficient until a majority of the world needed their own address, or several.

      And it wasn't an arbitrary number, either. It's 32 bits, or 4 bytes. Hardware at the time couldn't easily handle addresses larger than that, so if we'd started out with 128-bit addresses, nobody would ever use it because it would be impossible to implement, or far too slow. Hardware has gotten faster/cheaper/better and now it's no longer an issue. So now we're doing it.

      --
      I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
    2. Re:IPV6 by vlm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Or, better question, why wasn't IPv4 ever designed to be extensible? Are we ever going to learn that upper bounds are problematic if they are hard coded? Things that seem improbable now, are likely to become reality later, from 640K, to Fat16/32 to NTFS's 2 TB boot drive limit to 3.64TB Ram to ... the impending doom of Unix epoch time in 25 years (or so). ... But wouldn't it be easier to have the solution to running into upper bounds built into the spec before we implement it in the first place?

      Awesome. "Mr Vint Cerf my question to you is, are you aware of any routing protocols implemented using floating point endpoint addressing, and if so how are rounding errors dealt with?"

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    3. Re:IPV6 by slimjim8094 · · Score: 2

      You're missing the point.

      Perhaps analogously, our phone numbering system isn't designed to allow direct-dialing nearby galaxies

      "It should have been easily seen" is a hindsight argument. Were you there? Did you see it coming? Can you provide a compelling case that they had any suspicion that everybody and their dog in the middle of Africa would need an IP? You couldn't even fit a computer on an average desktop, let alone your pocket.

      You also neglect the added hardship of managing the extra bits. Keeping with the analogy, imagine a 25 digit phone number - it's 'easy to see' that we might need one some day, if intergalactic telephony takes off and we merge our phone system with the phone systems of a few alien species. Should we have done this back in the 60s when direct-dial came around, because it'll be a hassle to change when it's a problem?

      --
      I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
    4. Re:IPV6 by isorox · · Score: 2

      You also neglect the added hardship of managing the extra bits. Keeping with the analogy, imagine a 25 digit phone number - it's 'easy to see' that we might need one some day, if intergalactic telephony takes off and we merge our phone system with the phone systems of a few alien species. Should we have done this back in the 60s when direct-dial came around, because it'll be a hassle to change when it's a problem?

      No hassle, the direct dial phone system is infinitely flexible.

      From the UK
      I can dial my local takeaway with "654433"
      I can dial my a takeway on the other side of the UK with "01768 654433"
      I can dial a takeaway in Libya by dialing "00 218 21 654 433"

      If we take an unused country code (say 990) for
      I can dial a takeaway on Mars, in the country of "New UK", by dialing "00 990 40 44 1768 654433"
      I can dial a takeaway in Andromeda by dialing "00 990 9 939 483 343 342 459 1768 654433"

      00 (international access code)
      990 (interplanetary access code)
      40 (code for mars)
      44 (code for New UK)
      1768 (code for New Carlisle, in New UK, on Mars)
      654433 (number for takeaway)

      Or
      00 990 (interplanetary)
      9 (code for intergalactic)
      939 (code for andromeda)
      483 343 342 (code for a specific star system in andromeda)
      459 1768 654433 (code for the country, town and phone in that system)

  7. Interplanetary Internet by immakiku · · Score: 4, Interesting

    TCP/IP started as a military project but has been adapted for all the Internet applications we see today. What sort of applications do you foresee/imagine for the Interplanetary Internet, aside from the stated purpose of coordinating NASA devices?

  8. Was college worth it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What impact did your college experience have on you? Do you feel it set the foundation for your future or not?

  9. Privacy and the Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What is you opinion regarding Internet privacy?
    Do you think anything should be changed?

  10. how do we get to 1000Gps in the home? by peter303 · · Score: 2

    Google and the University Internet-2.5 consortium are experimenting with it. Other forward-looking countries have 10x broadband speed at lower cost than US.

  11. Future of the Internet by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do you think governments and corporations world-wide will be able to kill the Internet as we know it?

  12. What's next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Could you see a protocol ever supplanting TCP/IP?

  13. Postel and Crocker by vlm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So you went to high school with Postel and Crocker according to wikipedia? Did you guys hang out all along or meet up decades later?

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  14. ARIN ip address exhaustion by vlm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So you're on the board at ARIN. Anything public you want to say about how ARIN is handling ip address exhaustion other than the "company line"?

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  15. Future of the Internet by H0bb3z · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My question: Do you feel the security concerns over collected information will trump the leveraging of information in future Internet technologies? Will there be a separate "opt-in" or "opt-out" web to cater to each preference?

    Context: There have been many controversies recently regarding the collection of data and the privacy of individual information. As we move forward, I've heard a mixed set of messages regarding the direction we should expect to see.

    Consumerism is indeed driving innovation and everything is going mobile these days (there's an app for that I think). One example I heard recently of the benefit of the convergence of information and mobility: a consumer can point their mobile phone at a shelf of groceries, get an active "overlay" of information regarding the products and determine which best suits the customer needs. On the flip side, sensors that track customer behavior are installed at the grocery shelf and based on detected behavior (like stopping for a moment to reminisce about Coco-Puffs even though you know they are bad for you) initiates a coupon for whatever the vendor may feel would provide enough motivation to purchase their product -- in the example a $1 off coupon to the mobile phone of a shopper.

    Will this become reality in the future? I think there are benefits to be had, but also am fiercely protective of my personal information and preferences.

    --
    "There *IS* no patch for stupidity" -www.sqlsecurity.com
  16. SMTP, DNS, US Customs by molo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It seems that it is getting more and more difficult to successfully run your own SMTP server. See, for example, this post responding to the idea that a user was going to move off gmail to their own server. Are there any prospects for meaningful SMTP reform that would lower the barrier to entry for legitimate emailers?

    DNS has been often criticized as a centralized single point of failure / censorship. Have you been following the development of namecoin and P2P DNS? Are these systems viable in your estimation? How would you improve them or encourage their adoption?

    The US Customs department recently created headlines in seizing domains. These seizures appear to be extra-legal (not founded in law), but ICANN has gone along with them. Are those fair statements? Should ICANN's trustworthiness be suspect as a result of this process?

    Thanks and cheers.
    -molo

    --
    Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
  17. 32 bit as numbers by vlm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  18. IPv6 once again... by Ransak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Greetings. Once upon a time I was fortunate enough to ask you about IPv6, way back in 2002. The phrase '6 by 6' (for IPv6 by 2006) was the goal, but it seems we've missed that target. Do you ever foresee mandatory widespread adoption of IPv6 happening? Should IPv6 have been designed to be interoperable with IPv4?

    --
    "Powers. I have them."
  19. Would you have come up with TCP/IP today. by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The key advantage of TCP/IP is how it handles for Loss packets, going across an unknown network and far more failure prone hardware. However today as the internet is now running on much more reliable hardware and the path goes threw some well maintained backbone. Would you have come with TCP/IP today if you had access to modern technology/infrastructure?
    Or do you think you would have a different design all together?

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  20. what are you working on?? by vinitagrawal · · Score: 2

    The technical project that is most close to you, right now.

  21. .here TLD by TheLink · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do you think there should be a .here TLD, reserved officially for local use in an analogous way to the way that the RFC1918 IP addresses are reserved officially for private use?

    Currently many are coming up with their own adhoc TLDs for local use. In my opinion this is suboptimal. Having a standard official TLD would allow more interesting things to "organically grow" on it.

    See also: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yeoh-tldhere-01

    --
  22. What can we do to get ISPs to switch on IPv6? by jandrese · · Score: 2

    One of the biggest hurdles to IPv6 adoption today is that the average home user simply cannot get an IPv6 address from their ISP. Tunnels are hacker toys, and completely impractical/impossible for people who are using their ISP's "home router". What do you think we can do to convince ISPs to start rolling out IPv6 [i]before[/i] there is a crisis? Everybody agrees that the transition will go smoother if we take it slow and easy, but nobody is willing to make the first step, and IPv4 addresses aren't still being inexorably depleted the world over.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  23. Statutory Internet by ElitistWhiner · · Score: 2

    Hello Vint

    I've enjoyed since com-priv days, the rise of the Internet - Thank you. 20/20 hindsight shows the Internet grew without statutory jurispudence. Is that statutory blackhole in which the Internet now lives responsible for holding back growth and development of Internet economies, digital cash and cyber laws that are truly global w/o jurisdictional boundary?

    If a global medium is not able to support global economy, however does the world escape market constraints bounded by juridictional rules, regs, statutes and accords to enable freedom of exchange, trade, commerce and rising World-wide economic tide?

    RexRiley

  24. Dress by jrivar59 · · Score: 2

    Few human's can attributed to be both communications protocol inventers and well.. dapper.

    Can you speak to the importance of being well dressed, groomed, etc. when interacting with non-technical people? Do you attribute your stylistic dress to your overall success in anyway?

  25. Ooh! Settle An Argument For Me! by Greyfox · · Score: 2
    Though my deep and thoughtful meditation on IP addressing, I have realized that an IP address is simply a number. We canonically break it up into 4 smaller numbers that are presumably easier to remember. However if you stack all the bits of those smaller numbers together, you get a bigger number, and that number is actually the address.

    Moreover, every C standard library that I have ever tried is able to resolve this bigger number to the correct address. If I ping a 10 digit number in that address range, the C standard library will figure it out. It is my position that this is a feature and not a bug.

    It seems that the OSX Firefox Guys don't agree with me. Admittedly they do have an RFC on the subject, but their browser breaks a known behavior that every other TCP/IP client program on the planet exhibits, including other operating system versions of Firefox!

    Would you kindly bludgeon one of us into submission? I don't really care which side of the argument you come down on, but one of us has to be able to say "Because Vint Cerf said so!"

    Oh, and while I've got you, I'm sick of writing stateless http applications. May I have your permission to go back to writing plain old socket servers on other ports, providing data based on whatever query format I feel like implementing? It kind of looks like REST, I suppose, except that I don't have to load 14 layers of frameworks to get to that point.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  26. Smart Grid by kiwimate · · Score: 2

    You're currently on the Governing Board of the NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Panel. What is the state of standards development, and how big an impact does it have to move national infrastructure communications into the public IP arena so far as our ability to strengthen and expand our infrastructure? Conversely, how big are the threats in this new world?

  27. How can we bring trust back to the internet? by Madman · · Score: 2

    One of the secrets of the internet's massive success is the lack of controls over it; if there had been strict security and processes in place it would likely not have come about. One of the downsides is that all our security measures are tacked-on, there is no built-in security to the protocols used on the internet and as a result security is a massive problem. How do we go from the wild west to having at least a reasonable level of trusted computing?