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Vint Cerf Wants Help Figuring Out the Future of the Internet and Communications
dkatana writes: Vint Cerf, one of the original creators of today's internet, wrote a letter asking everyone to participate to create the foundation of the next internet. He said, "As communication forms evolve, it will be important to preserve one of the oldest: the letter, which has been critical in building relationships, conducting business and governmental affairs, and preserving history. Rather than sounding the death knell for meaningful, written correspondence, Internet technology has the power to enhance it." Cerf cites Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln as a perfect example of what might not be possible for historians of the next generation. Goodwin pieced together letters written by President Lincoln and his cabinet to write a book about how they interacted. "In the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the letters were 140 years old, and I would guess that digital content that was created 10 years ago won't be accessible 10 years from now," said Cerf. "We have the media around, but you may not be able to read it."
The biggest impediment however is the fact that *EVERYTHING* is protected by copyright, so historical preservation risks getting you hit by a lawsuit.
To help secure our freedom in these trying times.
this might take a while.
Damn I guess all these Scriptsit files that are 35 years old shouldn't be readable
Wait they are readable
Oh maybe I need to toss these word perfect files
Nope still readable
Corel Draw files ? Still readable
Vellum files ? nope still readable
SPICE simulation files ? Still work
P-Cap still works.
Seems crying doom is getting to be more and more popular all the time.
end-to-end encryption that is transparent to the user.
Encryption right now is in a shambles from the user's POV - a bewildering array of tools and standards, and if you want everything encrypted, you have to cobble all this together from different sources. Encryption before transport that is invisible to the user (much like https, but more - email, files, everything) is the key to keeping good intentioned government (on the paved road to hell) and oppressive regimes both from fucking up communications and privacy.
Basically what Bruce Schneier has been preaching for over a decade.
Vint should talk to Bruce.
--
BMO
It isn't just about the technical problem of how to preserve/read digital information.
Back in the day (get off my lawn!) it took a lot more thought and planning to create a document, without instant digital editing etc. Those old letters, books, et. al., took a lot more time and effort to create, and were considerably more difficult to edit and modify, and as a result, tended to have more forethought and planning before putting words down.
As a result, penning a few paragraphs or an essay or two wasn't such a casual endeavor as it is today.
Now that any monkey with a keyboard (and a little cut-and-paste ability) can create volumes of prose, the signal to noise ratio is a lot lower. IMHO, we don't want or need to preserve every piece of text (or image) ever created. The problem is, how do we tell the signal from the noise?
Even if we were able to preserve all digital information across time, nimbly leaping from one format or platform to another, would we want to? And if we did, what a vast amount of garbage! Might as well preserve all our landfills, in case future historians have a desperate need to pick thru them...
Of course, the NSA is probably already doing this, and has just the search algorithm to target YOU, citizen!
"Vint Cerf ... wrote a letter ..."
No he didn't, he wrote a lettr. I'd never seen one of those things before now but it appears to be another Twattr, Wankr or Tossr style meeja platform but with nicer fonts.
A letter is not broadcast across the world but is a slow, expensive point to point medium. It also requires effort, paper, pens (or possibly crayons), some saliva, an envelope, a stamp and some legwork to post it. I used to be a prolific letter writer and loved to send and receive them many years ago.
Those days are past now. Shame really. The world turns.
The single biggest problem with the current internet, beside the technical things is this protocol has been designed for peer to peer networking and the Internet has been build as a server centric IBM mainframe SNA network.The fear to really democratize the internet and empower the users has result into this lame architecture where almost everything in this world converge into two dozen datacenters. The data has been made the property of a bunch of happy fews and made them immensely riches. The Internet has not played its role as it should have.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Much of what people communicated in the 19th century wasn't preserved. All those telegrams that should have been filed away neatly! And very little of Oral History was ever recorded.
There's this conceited notion that we can sum up and figure out the world by studying the past. The notion some people have of 'history' presumes that what we have here and now has a permanence. The concept that history has ended and we're just supposed to document everything.
Maybe everything we 'figure out' by digging through the historical record will be forgotten or discarded.
An anecdote: when the Egyptian kings were entombed, they were buried with a lot of mummified cats. In the late 19th century when the British colonialists were excavating the tombs, the remains of the cats were sold as fertilizer.
What you think is important to preserve might not be at all important to anybody in the future.
...that old fart may have invented or had dealings that caused what we now refer to as "the internet", but his recent ramblings don't inspire much optimism. No thanks.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
There have been several other outbreaks recently. As you say: Bloody odd.
Wait till the cows come out. They are due any moment now ....
MOOOOOOO and all that bollocks.
Start by replacing the broken CA model and push much harder for alternatives like DANE and the EFF Sovereign Keys proposal.
Stop the NSA or the Chinese Government (or hackers who steal the master keys for a CA ala DigiNotar) from being able to generate a certificate for a domain and perform MITM attacks with it.
Replace TLS with something designed from the ground up to be as simple as possible. Any "optional" features in the protocol that could be turned on by the server or client are extra vectors for attack.
Mandate forward-secrecy (via Ephemeral Diffie-Helman or similar) to prevent bad guys who later obtain private keys from decrypting previous traffic. Support only the strongest algorithms (RSA with at least 2048 bits, AES, SHA2/SHA3) and dont support obsolete algorithms like RC4, SHA1, MD5, DES or 3DES.
Make email encryption so easy anyone can do it. And build it into all the popular email clients (with encryption turned on by default) so that encrypted email becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Invent open-standard open-protocol chat programs (for voice, video, text and file transfer) with end-to-end encryption (including some sort of forward secrecy so that once the session is over, it becomes impossible for anyone to decrypt the conversations and get the data back)
"In the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the letters were 140 years old, and I would guess that digital content that was created 10 years ago won't be accessible 10 years from now," said Cerf. "We have the media around, but you may not be able to read it."
Honestly, I can't think of any format used in 2005 that's not readable in 2015. Anyone? Sure there were a few really odd and obscure formats used in the first years of computing that was heavily tied to playback hardware or media, but that is all. As long as you can dig up a binary to run in a VM most anything should be readable. And purely for reading documents this is beating down open doors, PDF/A already exists and is an extremely well documented standard for long term document preservation.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I too have some files from almost 20 years ago that I can still read. I save most things as ASCII text.
On the other hand, we can still read President Lincoln's letters to his wife. I WISH I could read the messages I sent my wife just eight years ago.
Well, that thought is a hoot and a half . . . the former President of the USA fiddling around with LU 6.2, while the "Monitor" (TCP/IP) slugs it out with the Merrimac (ISO/OSI) . . .
I'm sorry for trolling your dinner . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
End to end encryption is fundamentally incompatible with historical archives. Copyright and DRM will eventually lead to some, easily duplicable works of art being lost forever because the servers are shutdown and encryption keys not released.
E2E encryption is the same - it working is *fundamentally* about the death of archival.
It's worse on mobile, the entire message is shown in its entirety without having a click to show the rest of the post option. I started to click on report this post, but it wanted a description and messages this bizarre defy description, at least for me.
I guess even the NSA posts as AC.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I think he upgraded his auto-generation script to throw in returns finally.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Thank You God - Tim Minchin
The innovators of the next generation of digital media storage already exist! It's called "Google" and is operated by a philanthropic corporation named "Alphabet" and they have the means to preserve, transform, index, and search the media assets to better develop patterns and similarities between various generations' communication choices.
Seriously, though, we cannot undo the decisions and mistakes from all past generations who have communicated in any modern or dead language... yet chose to not preserve their copies (or had them destroyed by ISIS/ISIL or some-such groups). Information is not meant to exist forever; the Internet is a means of communication and not preservation.
And what if we do manage to preserve an entire generation's worth of media -- what value could such rough add? It simply becomes a massive corpus of junk by the next generation's digital archeologists. They'll surely find their diamond, but it'll come at great expense.
THE most effective organ critical to the development of INTERNET is missing. Resurrect and revive it.
It's quite old-skool, actually.
Looks like he put some real effort into it, too.
I'm actually kinda almost just about very nearly sort of borderline impressed.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I have plenty (a majority I would say) of 30+ year old Apple II disks that are still readable.
no address to reply? my internet design change .... ALL communications must be replyable.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I read at -1. Surely I'm not the only one.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Why is the letter dated September 10, 2014?
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Letter was dated 2014, did anyone notice? But it reads like "2014" is just a typo, and it should have been 2015. Had me wondering if we were being fed old news.
He wants some futurism? Hmm. The first question is whether any small group will take over control of our networking, or is that impossible? I think it is impossible, but that won't stop control freaks from trying. Since it is impossible, copyright as we know it will wither. Next, one of the things that divides people into nations is language barriers. Advances in automatic translation will erase that barrier. Also, the dominance of English will grow. The nation state will weaken further. Nations used to be much more jealous about citizenship, insisting that anyone who emigrated was practically a traitor, and never allowing dual citizenship. Now, the attitude is more relaxed and dual citizenship is fairly common. Right now, we're in a minor backlash against science and merit, with the Republicans in particular encouraging this backlash as it makes propaganda easier to pull off. I don't think it will last as information becomes ever easier to store and retrieve, and with increasingly sophisticated educational aides, everyone will get smarter.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I found this free/open source new protocol that aims at filling the gaps that HTTP has in terms of permanence and security of data. Loosely based on DHT and Coin mining, it allows for website to become P2P instead of centrally served.
The protocol is called IPFS and the site where you can get more information is http://ipfs.io/
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang