Vint took what could have been a prestige emeritus position at Google and turned it into a platform to champion accessibility and “Greyglers”. The man has more class than his suits.
I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right.
One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.".
There are lots of brilliant people at Google who do no evil.
The fact that the company makes evil decisions about the direction of the web, privacy, and performs blatantly monopolistic actions does not outweigh the good things people at Google have done. At least not yet.
You can hate the company but love the brilliant work the engineers have done. The same can be said of lots of companies: Apple, Anthropic, ...
Meta, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. It's less of an overt monopoly, but some of its actions are heinously amoral.
And this folks is exactly the reason we need to remember that there are real costs to demanding transparency. There's a reason some things should have stayed redacted.
I may be biased since I interned at Google in 2013 and 2014, but Google in the 2000s and early 2010s felt downright magical as someone who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research. They made impressive technologies that still hold up today, like MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner. They hired many legends of computer science and software engineering, such as Rob Pike and Jeff Dean.
I’m concerned about the power that Google and other Big Tech companies have, but from a technical point of view Google has a lot of impressive technologies, and from a workplace standpoint, it seemed idyllic back in the early 2010s, though I’ve heard the work culture has changed in the past decade, and I may have rose-colored glasses from only being an intern there, never a full-timer.
> who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research
I interacted with many professors in OS research and other adjacent systems fields when touring grad schools and I heard or saw that some were extremely toxic or intense compared to other fields I saw. With OS at least, big tech companies seem to hold a lot of influence over research directions (eg. so much of it is specifically for AI datacenters, or for one company's AI datacenter problems), and I asked OS professors about this and got disheartened replies that there was nothing they could do because of the incentives in the field. I was quite disillusioned. I know that AI being a hot new topic makes leaves more stones unturned and might lead to more publishability, but it's still depressing.
I’m out of the loop these days in systems research since I largely focus on programming languages and AI these days (though I still love systems) and I treat research more as a side hobby rather than a full-fledged career. It’s disappointing to hear about toxic systems labs. There’s also the “funding-or-perish” and “publish-or-perish” pressures of academia. This is one of the reasons why I teach at a community college, where 8 months of the year I focus on teaching, leaving me 4 months of break per year where I could do research without having to worry about my tenure chances or about funding, though it would be nice to be able to pay some students to help with research projects, and it would also be nice to have the funds to buy expensive equipment such as GPUs with large amounts of RAM.
That seems like a great setup, and maybe something I'll think about after grad school (or maybe look into being a professor at LACs or less research oriented schools)! I'm already sort of nervous about doing the PhD because of the insane toxicity I've encountered and the pressure to do research in direct support of industry (which is probably exacerbated by NSF funding being impossible to get), but hopefully I'll find things to enjoy about it. The career prospects also seem tenuous, as a lot of outcomes seem to be "go through a brutal tenure process" or work for FAANG/adjacent (probably not even in research since places like MSR are difficult to get). But I would like the creative freedom a professorship might offer.
I met him briefly at the Internet Archive during my first trip to America, and asked for an autograph. He asked for $50 and so I sheepishly slinked away because at that time I was making 20k eur. Oh well.
All these layoffs, prepaid annual Gemini customers getting switched to credit-based quotas midway through their plans and there's still fat in the budget for a "a chief internet evangelist" since 2005 no wonder I feel so down on "big tech"
I'm reading "where the wizards stay up late", and I was thinking the same thing. It's difficult to keep track of who is who but I'm pretty certain Cerf has appeared yet. I'm not that far through.
The title of your second link is "The Fathers of the Internet" and Robert Kahn as co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol is also considered a father of the internet.
BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"
I know what the title says, of course ... but the title is descriptive, not a label, and only Cerf is referred to as the father, as quoted. And yes of course Kahn co-invented TCP/IP but no one ever calls him father of the Internet. And I already said what happens if you google "father of the Internet" -- what I said is actually true.
And none of this is really relevant because it's TFA that should determine HN titles. But for better or worse the mod has made his decision, so this is moot -- I won't comment on it further.
I characterize it as fulminating due to the use of capitalization (which is specifically against the guidelines), along with an overall belligerent tone.
It’s just not a cutthroat enough topic to get too insistent about. We can discuss these things in a conversational style, which is what HN is meant to be for.
Al Gore pushed for public funding to make the intenet what it is before the majority of computer professionals, let alone the public, had heard of it.
> Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called "the father of the Internet" for his part in designing the network's common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."
How amazing it must be to be called the 'father' of something that everyone uses... I'm envious. Could I ever create something like that? As a programmer, the dream is always to build something that others actually use properly.
I interviewed him a few times, when I was a tech journalist in the 90s - a very impressive man.
However I never forget my surprise, Idly flicking through TV one evening and coming across Earth Final Conflict - and there was Vint in a fairly substantial role
I still remember back in 2005 when I just joined a company, a coworker was quipping Google is not a real elite company, because it doesn't even have a Turing Award winner. I showed him the news that Vint Cerf joined Google recently.
I wonder if the transformer inventors will ever get a Turing (honestly proving to be one of the most transformative - no pun intended - technologies of the millennium so far). I know pretty much all of them left Google but they'd still be counted as alumni.
Yeah, some work from Google has had an outsize impact on the entire industry. Won't be surprising if they eventually get a nod from the Turing Award. Including the main authors of the Transformer work for driving the LLM revolution, and Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat for driving the big data movement.
Google's transformer paper was largely just stripping out parts of an earlier (now apparently largely forgotten) paper/model and running it on Google scale compute and data (which the original researchers obviously couldn't afford).
I wonder if he would have designed TCP/IP differently if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it.
Maybe having multiple streams within a single connection, like QUIC does, would have been a better choice. Also being able to demarcate message boundaries within the protocol itself, perhaps, instead of it being a simple byte stream.
I was at a talk where he brought up exactly this (I also once did a talk alongside him, but that's a different story). He said there would be two changes:
1. It would have 128-bit addresses.
2. It would have end-to-end encryption (or was it authentication, I forget).
IPv6 was supposed to fix both of these, with IPsec mandatory, but the latter demand sort of faded out into obscurity. We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.
Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.
> The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.
As someone who was there at the time, OSI certainly didn't fail by being "overcomplicated". It failed because a) they charged money to read the standards documents and b) TCP/IP already had so much deployment momentum that nothing was going to supplant it (we see proof of this in the fact that IPv6 also didn't achieve that). Edit: also c) there was no requirement (unlike RFCs) to have an interoperable reference implementation available. So the implementations that were created mostly didn't interoperate.
> In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now?
IPv8 solves precisely zero of the problems that is causing a 'slow' roll out of IPv6 / replacement of IPv4:
"""
So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:
You have to change the version number.
You have to add new code to handle the new version.
Furthermore, you don't want to split the Internet in two, so you must design a method of interworking between the old version and the new version. Annoyingly, you need to do that in a way that can be done completely in machines that know about the new version, because other machines don't know anything at all about the new version, by definition. So,
You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know nothing of the new protocol.
Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only two solutions:
(3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.
(3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses between the old and new protocols.
[…]
Incidentally, "IPv8" proponents often ask why IPv6 didn't simply stick some extra bits on the front of IPv4 addresses, instead of inventing a whole new format. Actually, we tried that: the "IPv4-Compatible IPv6 address" format was defined in [RFC3513] but deprecated by [RFC4291] because it turned out to be of no practical use for coexistence or transition. The related "IPv4-Mapped IPv6 address" format is still valid and has a role in the POSIX socket API. Mappings of this kind also figured in the moderately successful coexistence technologies known as 6to4 [RFC3056, RFC3068] and Teredo [RFC4380], which have now been overtaken by events.
I'm always fascinated by how many people think IPv6 adoption would have gone lightning-fast if we just used This One Weird Trick, where said trick has actually been tried and didn't help. They usually refuse to back down even after you tell them so.
> You don't actually own the IPv4-mapped-V6 address, as in packets don't get routed to you, they go to a relay that was notoriously flaky.
6to4 is exactly ownership:
> For any 32-bit global IPv4 address that is assigned to a host, a 48-bit 6to4 IPv6 prefix can be constructed for use by that host (and if applicable the network behind it) by appending the IPv4 address to 2002::/16.
> For example, the global IPv4 address 192.0.2.4 has the corresponding 6to4 prefix 2002:c000:0204::/48. This gives a prefix length of 48 bits, which leaves room for a 16-bit subnet field and 64 bit host addresses within the subnets.
> There's no way around it: a non-IPng-having node will have to go through a translation box of some kind.
Yes. Note that it doesn't need to be someone else's relay; anyone with IPv4 connectivity could easily route 2002::/16 into IPv4-land (without having to announce it in BGP for others to use). You could even announce 2002:aabb:ccdd::/48 as a more-specific in BGP if you wanted, although this was more exotic.
If I have 1.2.3.4 in ipv4 world, I want 1.2.3.4 in ipv6 world. I want another ipv6 host to be able to send dst=1.2.3.4 and have it go directly to my ipv6 host. 6to4 isn't comparable to that.
By having 1.2.3.4 you also got 2002:1.2.3.4::/48 'for free'. So if you want to send things to 1.2.3.4 / ::ffff:1.2.3.4, you tell your router to that it's available via 2002:1.2.3.4::/48.
Any idea that you think is clever and to 'just' do X and/or Y, and would work, has probably already been thought of and attempted in the last 20-30.
Having 1.2.3.4 in v4 doesn't make ::ffff:1.2.3.4 or 2002:1.2.3.4 route to me in v6. It would route to a relay that translates/resends to v4 1.2.3.4, then it reaches my router over v4. Nobody can use that address over pure v6.
There's no one clever trick to make the transition easy, the idea is to preserve the v4 address blocks in v6. That cascades down to a bunch of different decisions, some of which include keeping NAT around. They've most likely thought of that too, and turned it down because they wanted to start with a clean slate and maybe also had some other vision of pure P2P apps.
> Having 1.2.3.4 in v4 doesn't make ::ffff:1.2.3.4 or 2002:1.2.3.4 route to me in v6. It would route to a relay that translates/resends to v4 1.2.3.4, then it reaches my router over v4. Nobody can use that address over pure v6.*
Sure they could: if your ISP owns 1.2.0.0/16, it could advertise 2002:1.2::/24 via BGP. So if someone on the other side of the planet wants to send something to 2002:1.2.3.4::/48 they would know where to send it.
And just like how something sent to 1.2.0.0/16 globally is then handled internally via IS-IS/OSPF/etc so your ISP knows how to send something for 1.2.3.4 to your CPE, your ISP would know how to handle 2002:1.2.3.4::/48 to get it to your CPE.
Routers are told to map traffic for (::ffff:)a.b.c.d to 2002:a.b.c.d::/48. If you're sending from w.x.y.z, you can put the source address as from something in 2002:w.x.y.z::/48.
It has nothing to do with "clean slate" or not. There are two immovable facts:
"""
IPv4 implementations, in 1994 and still today, have the 32-bit address format built into their code. Whether you expand the address size to 33, 64 or 128 bits, all IPv4 implementations will discard the packets. So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:
1. You have to change the version number.
2. You have to add new code to handle the new version.
And this also includes 'accessory protocols': DNS A records are fixed at 32-bits, so if you want to use hostname with IPng you needed to upgrade the DNS infrastructure, including APIs to say "give me A and Ang", and then you perhaps need fallback mechanisms, in which case you're at:
Any IPng protocol, including 'just' adding bits, regardless of how you want to hand wave it as being 'just' an extension of IPv4 will be in same situation because you can't fit >32-bits in the 32-bits of the original code. You're rolling out new code in a rolling fashion, just like had to be done with IPv6.
Well yeah if you made your router use 2002:1.2.3.4, your ISP advertised 2002:1.2:: on BGP, and the other ISPs agreed your ISP owns that, that would work. They didn't do that, and the spec didn't say to.
I understand the limitation that you can never put a 128-bit address in a 32-bit field, and one way or another two hosts and everything in between have to understand the new packet format. That didn't force them to make ipv6 its whole separate network from v4 where almost no state is shared with v4. Having separate DHCP6 vs DHCP4 was a choice, likewise with DNS, NAT, and even the routing tables.
This IPv8 document is not a serious proposal. The entire family of documents was published by a single person without collaboration from anyone else at IETF, and there has not been any work to integrate feedback from other IERF contributors (last I was aware of).
Anyone can publish an IETF draft document, it doesn't mean it's a serious proposal under consideration or will ever actually be implemented.
> Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated.
We're slowly reinventing OSI, one step at a time: OSI had multiple sessions per transport connection (QUIC), 20 byte addresses (IPv6) and a directory system with public-key infrastructure (DANE, vCard, SSHFP, etc).
> We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.
The "solving" of encryption with TLS should not be celebrated.
Everything needs to go over TLS/HTTP-443 because of middleware boxes basically blocking everything else by default in many cases, and so application/protocol designs have to shoehorn / kludge everything into a round hole even if it's a square peg.
It would depend on whether the computers back then could handle that (along with all the crypto algorithms in their infancy) when A:\ and B:\ weren't even a thing.
I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.
I don't know if he had to do technical interviews (I'd imagine not) but what he described was Eric Schmidt approaching him and asking him to leave MCI to work at Google. They asked him what his title should be and he (I think he) jokingly suggested Internet Pope. They eventually settled on Chief Internet Evangelist.
When Google hired Guido van Rossumm, they put him through the same trials they require of every employee who is thinking of contributing Python code. Then they yelled at him for making Python inefficient.
Google hired Guido van Rossum around the same time. I worked down the hall from Rob Pike, they had already hired Peter Weinberger (the w from `awk`), and I shared a 4-person office with Gren Stein, who was then director of the Apache Software Foundation.
I worked on GFiber in the mid 2010s. We were having a debate about IPv6 support, which many people wanted to not do. I wrote a far-too-long essay on why it was important (at the time) and Vint picked it up to yell at the leadership team to get it prioritized. It was truly an "only at Google" experience to have someone who essentially invented the Internet reading your posts and acting on them.
(I guess a decade later, was IPv6 important? Still not sure about that one. But it seemed important at the time.)
I worked on the ARPANET project under Steve Crocker at UCLA and met his bud Vint there (with his ever-present 3 piece suit, briefcase, and hearing aids) ... what a great guy.
An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few times, and then collared me to ask me a couple of questions: 1) It seemed to know some of the words he entered but not all -- what was up with that? 2) What sort of AI algorithm was I using for the program to make guesses? (It usually beat the human player.)
Answers: 1) I didn't have a digitized dictionary (it was 1969!) so I hand-entered the five letter words from a pocket dictionary but got tired halfway through so it only knew words starting with a-l. 2) The program would eliminate any words that didn't fit the responses to its guesses so far and then pick a remaining word at random.
Upon hearing my answers Vint walked away in disgust! But years later he gave me a recommendation when I interviewed with Google (it didn't work out for other reasons).
He was disappointed in himself that he hadn't realized that the word recognition "algorithm" was just "every word starting with a-l" -- he had speculated that there was in fact some sort of linguistic algorithm to determine whether a word was valid, not just a built-in hemi-dictionary.
And he was disappointed in me or the program or the nature of reality that the play algorithm was so simple and dumb ... but it was a slow machine with limited memory, and doing better is actually quite hard and I hadn't invested the time to do so.
Vint Cert is #1 on Jeffrey Epstein's "List of Scientists" [1 pg6]:
JE's LIST OF SCIENTIST's
Vinton Cerf
Dennis S. Charney
James Fallon
Elaine Fuchs
Neil Gershenfeld
John Holdren-No
Petr Janata
Seth Lloyd- Yes
Maja Mataric
Lyman Page
David Spergel
Suzanne Staggs
Edward 0. Wilson- No
Adam Wilson
N.b. that Cerf was mentioned in the Epstein Files in a list of scientists Epstein wanted to invite to an event. There is no evidence Cerf actually accepted any such invitation.
Not everyone "in the files" is in the files. For instance, Rebecca Watson is "in the Epstein Files" because Lawrence Kraus and Richard Dawkins wrote to Epstein to complain about her.
The two that are most widely recognized are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for TCP/IP, but that's just the start of it. There's JCR Licklider, who first imagined a global network of computers. There's Leonard Kleinrock, first ARPANET nod and packet-switching theory. Larry Roberts, who led development of ARPANET. Paul Baran independently invented packet switching. Donald Davies coined the term "packet" and also developed packet switching. Louis Pouzin also worked on TCP/IP. Jon Postel managed the IP standards and address assignments for decades. Ray Tomlinson invented email and the @ sign. Of course, we can't forget Tim Berneres-Lee, to whom we credit the invention of the web (HTTP, HTML, URLS, the first web browser and server).
Ooh, hadn't heard of him. From Wikipedia, V. Bush is famous for, among other things, creating the NSF, the memex, an analog microfilm precusor to hypertext, and his essay "As We May Think" in 1945. Definitely influential in the creation of our world today!
I met Vint at the Kech Institute for Space Studies. He arrived to help us look at in-space data centers for planetary science throughout the solar system. He was a big proponent of delay-tolerant networking and other useful networking stacks, so he was the "rep" for that layer of problems.
Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He took the note-takers job during our breakouts, had beers with us after the session, and asked really good questions and never asserted anything the whole time.
true - my first reaction was this seems like a weird milestone, as people like Vint Cerf don't really retire and stop, just change how & where they contribute. This seems like a nothing story pushed by TC and Google PR, more than a real event.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 76.5 ms ] threadHad I coinvented TCP/IP, I’d gladly take a bullshit, cushy paying job in my latter half of my career as a ‘reward’
I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right.
One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.".
I hope he enjoys retirement, well deserved
No matter what you think of Google
There are lots of brilliant people at Google who do no evil.
The fact that the company makes evil decisions about the direction of the web, privacy, and performs blatantly monopolistic actions does not outweigh the good things people at Google have done. At least not yet.
You can hate the company but love the brilliant work the engineers have done. The same can be said of lots of companies: Apple, Anthropic, ...
Meta, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. It's less of an overt monopoly, but some of its actions are heinously amoral.
He worked for Worldcomm, before that. Bernie Ebbers went to jail, for that.
Ahh… the good ol’ days, when we actually jailed scumbag billionaires, instead of voting massive pay bumps…
Epstein files..
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA003070...
If you're eliminating, meta Google is the same and no better than Meta. You just don't see it as wide as Meta.
Any idea, innovation can take two routes but when you know you're working for the latter, you're not a good engineer, You're just an engineer.
It's as if someone was to poison a lake and then donate money to a charity. Does that make them a good person again?
I’m concerned about the power that Google and other Big Tech companies have, but from a technical point of view Google has a lot of impressive technologies, and from a workplace standpoint, it seemed idyllic back in the early 2010s, though I’ve heard the work culture has changed in the past decade, and I may have rose-colored glasses from only being an intern there, never a full-timer.
I interacted with many professors in OS research and other adjacent systems fields when touring grad schools and I heard or saw that some were extremely toxic or intense compared to other fields I saw. With OS at least, big tech companies seem to hold a lot of influence over research directions (eg. so much of it is specifically for AI datacenters, or for one company's AI datacenter problems), and I asked OS professors about this and got disheartened replies that there was nothing they could do because of the incentives in the field. I was quite disillusioned. I know that AI being a hot new topic makes leaves more stones unturned and might lead to more publishability, but it's still depressing.
What's that for?
The video probably shows a wide smile whilst saying it.
I wonder what he thought
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848...
(Well actually I'm listening to it not reading, maybe that's why I can't keep track of the protagonists!)
https://web.archive.org/web/20131104212006/http://deafness.a...
> He is routinely referred to as "the father of the internet,"
There is no one else who is referred to that way. If you google "father of the Internet", Vint pops up.
https://www.inmesol.com/blog/fathers-internet/
> Vinton Cerf (Connecticut, 1943) Considered to be the founding father of the Internet.
BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"
And none of this is really relevant because it's TFA that should determine HN titles. But for better or worse the mod has made his decision, so this is moot -- I won't comment on it further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
> Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,
https://www.internethalloffame.org/vint-cerf/
> Together with Vint Cerf, Kahn is known as "the father of the Internet." https://computerhistory.org/profile/robert-kahn/
So much for "but no one ever calls him father of the Internet."
It’s widely recognized that the internet has multiple fathers.
I took a cue from the Wikipedia page, which says, on the opening sentence that he is “recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet”.
I’ve changed the topic to be more ambiguous now, but, honestly!
> but, honesty!
Honestly I expect more maturity and less hostility from mods.
I characterize it as fulminating due to the use of capitalization (which is specifically against the guidelines), along with an overall belligerent tone.
It’s just not a cutthroat enough topic to get too insistent about. We can discuss these things in a conversational style, which is what HN is meant to be for.
> Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called "the father of the Internet" for his part in designing the network's common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."
However I never forget my surprise, Idly flicking through TV one evening and coming across Earth Final Conflict - and there was Vint in a fairly substantial role
That was almost nine years ago, and I actually increased my development work, with the caveat that no one pays me to do it, anymore.
Probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, but I didn’t think so, at the time.
I wish him luck.
Maybe having multiple streams within a single connection, like QUIC does, would have been a better choice. Also being able to demarcate message boundaries within the protocol itself, perhaps, instead of it being a simple byte stream.
In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.
1. It would have 128-bit addresses. 2. It would have end-to-end encryption (or was it authentication, I forget).
IPv6 was supposed to fix both of these, with IPsec mandatory, but the latter demand sort of faded out into obscurity. We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.
I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.
Or there is too much inertia for IPv8 to overcome to become a truly backwards compatible extension / superset of IPv4?
Part of the reasons for the slow adoption of IPv6 was that it was never designed to be backwards compatible unlike IPv8.
1: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html
IPv8 solves precisely zero of the problems that is causing a 'slow' roll out of IPv6 / replacement of IPv4:
"""
So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:
You have to change the version number.
You have to add new code to handle the new version.
Furthermore, you don't want to split the Internet in two, so you must design a method of interworking between the old version and the new version. Annoyingly, you need to do that in a way that can be done completely in machines that know about the new version, because other machines don't know anything at all about the new version, by definition. So,
You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know nothing of the new protocol. Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only two solutions:
(3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.
(3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses between the old and new protocols.
[…]
Incidentally, "IPv8" proponents often ask why IPv6 didn't simply stick some extra bits on the front of IPv4 addresses, instead of inventing a whole new format. Actually, we tried that: the "IPv4-Compatible IPv6 address" format was defined in [RFC3513] but deprecated by [RFC4291] because it turned out to be of no practical use for coexistence or transition. The related "IPv4-Mapped IPv6 address" format is still valid and has a role in the POSIX socket API. Mappings of this kind also figured in the moderately successful coexistence technologies known as 6to4 [RFC3056, RFC3068] and Teredo [RFC4380], which have now been overtaken by events.
"""
* https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/01.%20Introdu...
I'm always fascinated by how many people think IPv6 adoption would have gone lightning-fast if we just used This One Weird Trick, where said trick has actually been tried and didn't help. They usually refuse to back down even after you tell them so.
6to4 is exactly ownership:
> For any 32-bit global IPv4 address that is assigned to a host, a 48-bit 6to4 IPv6 prefix can be constructed for use by that host (and if applicable the network behind it) by appending the IPv4 address to 2002::/16.
> For example, the global IPv4 address 192.0.2.4 has the corresponding 6to4 prefix 2002:c000:0204::/48. This gives a prefix length of 48 bits, which leaves room for a 16-bit subnet field and 64 bit host addresses within the subnets.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4
The relaying is a necessity:
* https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/01.%20Introdu...There's no way around it: and non-IPng-having node will have to go through a translation box of some kind.
Yes. Note that it doesn't need to be someone else's relay; anyone with IPv4 connectivity could easily route 2002::/16 into IPv4-land (without having to announce it in BGP for others to use). You could even announce 2002:aabb:ccdd::/48 as a more-specific in BGP if you wanted, although this was more exotic.
::ffff:1.2.3.4
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresse...
By having 1.2.3.4 you also got 2002:1.2.3.4::/48 'for free'. So if you want to send things to 1.2.3.4 / ::ffff:1.2.3.4, you tell your router to that it's available via 2002:1.2.3.4::/48.
Any idea that you think is clever and to 'just' do X and/or Y, and would work, has probably already been thought of and attempted in the last 20-30.
There's no one clever trick to make the transition easy, the idea is to preserve the v4 address blocks in v6. That cascades down to a bunch of different decisions, some of which include keeping NAT around. They've most likely thought of that too, and turned it down because they wanted to start with a clean slate and maybe also had some other vision of pure P2P apps.
Sure they could: if your ISP owns 1.2.0.0/16, it could advertise 2002:1.2::/24 via BGP. So if someone on the other side of the planet wants to send something to 2002:1.2.3.4::/48 they would know where to send it.
And just like how something sent to 1.2.0.0/16 globally is then handled internally via IS-IS/OSPF/etc so your ISP knows how to send something for 1.2.3.4 to your CPE, your ISP would know how to handle 2002:1.2.3.4::/48 to get it to your CPE.
Routers are told to map traffic for (::ffff:)a.b.c.d to 2002:a.b.c.d::/48. If you're sending from w.x.y.z, you can put the source address as from something in 2002:w.x.y.z::/48.
It has nothing to do with "clean slate" or not. There are two immovable facts:
"""
IPv4 implementations, in 1994 and still today, have the 32-bit address format built into their code. Whether you expand the address size to 33, 64 or 128 bits, all IPv4 implementations will discard the packets. So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:
1. You have to change the version number.
2. You have to add new code to handle the new version.
""
* https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/01.%20Introdu...
And this also includes 'accessory protocols': DNS A records are fixed at 32-bits, so if you want to use hostname with IPng you needed to upgrade the DNS infrastructure, including APIs to say "give me A and Ang", and then you perhaps need fallback mechanisms, in which case you're at:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs
Any IPng protocol, including 'just' adding bits, regardless of how you want to hand wave it as being 'just' an extension of IPv4 will be in same situation because you can't fit >32-bits in the 32-bits of the original code. You're rolling out new code in a rolling fashion, just like had to be done with IPv6.
I understand the limitation that you can never put a 128-bit address in a 32-bit field, and one way or another two hosts and everything in between have to understand the new packet format. That didn't force them to make ipv6 its whole separate network from v4 where almost no state is shared with v4. Having separate DHCP6 vs DHCP4 was a choice, likewise with DNS, NAT, and even the routing tables.
Anyone can publish an IETF draft document, it doesn't mean it's a serious proposal under consideration or will ever actually be implemented.
We're slowly reinventing OSI, one step at a time: OSI had multiple sessions per transport connection (QUIC), 20 byte addresses (IPv6) and a directory system with public-key infrastructure (DANE, vCard, SSHFP, etc).
It's a shame TUBA (CLNP + TCP) failed.
See "The Recommendation for the IP Next Generation Protocol", §8.3 TUBA Reviews:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752
The document explains why SIPP was chosen (with the tweak of 128-bit addresses instead of 64b).
The "solving" of encryption with TLS should not be celebrated.
Everything needs to go over TLS/HTTP-443 because of middleware boxes basically blocking everything else by default in many cases, and so application/protocol designs have to shoehorn / kludge everything into a round hole even if it's a square peg.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes
Just know that my mentor was hand-holding the hiring process which basically prided itself on false negatives and still probably does.
And they were still in the era where's they'd just keep interviewing you until they "got enough signal" so people would be back 3 and 4 times.
Google hired Guido van Rossum around the same time. I worked down the hall from Rob Pike, they had already hired Peter Weinberger (the w from `awk`), and I shared a 4-person office with Gren Stein, who was then director of the Apache Software Foundation.
(I guess a decade later, was IPv6 important? Still not sure about that one. But it seemed important at the time.)
I eventually went full time at Google NYC in the early 2010s - I remember the internal uproar when Reader was sunsetted =)
An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few times, and then collared me to ask me a couple of questions: 1) It seemed to know some of the words he entered but not all -- what was up with that? 2) What sort of AI algorithm was I using for the program to make guesses? (It usually beat the human player.)
Answers: 1) I didn't have a digitized dictionary (it was 1969!) so I hand-entered the five letter words from a pocket dictionary but got tired halfway through so it only knew words starting with a-l. 2) The program would eliminate any words that didn't fit the responses to its guesses so far and then pick a remaining word at random.
Upon hearing my answers Vint walked away in disgust! But years later he gave me a recommendation when I interviewed with Google (it didn't work out for other reasons).
And he was disappointed in me or the program or the nature of reality that the play algorithm was so simple and dumb ... but it was a slow machine with limited memory, and doing better is actually quite hard and I hadn't invested the time to do so.
Kinda sad state of journalism if techcrunch writes article and doesn't do the basic "boomer VIP check" against the Epstein files.
So this "Robert Kahn" who he closely worked with might be related to Epstein's main accountant "Richard Kahn".Not everyone "in the files" is in the files. For instance, Rebecca Watson is "in the Epstein Files" because Lawrence Kraus and Richard Dawkins wrote to Epstein to complain about her.
So, eleven.
Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He took the note-takers job during our breakouts, had beers with us after the session, and asked really good questions and never asserted anything the whole time.
What an icon.