Vint Cerf

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“That Digital Snapshot Will Recreate The Past In The Future”

February 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Vint Cerf, father of cat photos (and the rest of the Internet), is concerned that this century’s history is being preserved mainly online in bits that could go bust. While it might be less embarrassing if it all went away, it’s important for posterity that our selfies and tweets be accessible to future generations who want to understand (and mock) us. Cerf has a plan for preservation. From Pallab Ghosh at the BBC:

Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete – just like what happens in a museum – but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.

If his idea works, the memories we hold so dear could be accessible for generations to come.

“The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future.”

A company would have to provide the service, and I suggested to Mr Cerf that few companies have lasted for hundreds of years. So how could we guarantee that both our personal memories and all human history would be safeguarded in the long run?

Even Google might not be around in the next millennium, I said.

“Plainly not,” Vint Cerf laughed. “But I think it is amusing to imagine that it is the year 3000 and you’ve done a Google search. The X-ray snapshot we are trying to capture should be transportable from one place to another. So, I should be able to move it from the Google cloud to some other cloud, or move it into a machine I have.

“The key here is when you move those bits from one place to another, that you still know how to unpack them to correctly interpret the different parts. That is all achievable if we standardise the descriptions.

“And that’s the key issue here – how do I ensure in the distant future that the standards are still known, and I can still interpret this carefully constructed X-ray snapshot?”•

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“It Will Be Increasingly Difficult For Us To Achieve Privacy”

November 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Vint Cerf, co-creator of the Internet, is saying what seems inarguable at this point–that technology has outpaced our capacity to control it, that privacy as we knew it isn’t coming back regardless of legislation, that we’re at the outset, for better or worse, of the new normal. From a BGR post by Brad Reed:

“While having a right to privacy sounds nice, the Internet’s co-creator thinks that it’s also unrealistic to expect your behavior to stay private if you engage in social networking and post through social media. Adweek’s Katy Bachman reports that during a panel at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on privacy in the age of wearable computers, tech industry legend Vint Cerf said that new technology means that ‘it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy’ and that ‘privacy may be an anomaly.'”

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“You Have A Bag Of Bits That You Saved For A Thousand Years, But You Don’t Know What They Mean”

July 14, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I love books so much, but when was the last time I stepped inside of a library? I can’t even remember. From a piece by Paul Sawers at the Next Web in which Internet pioneer Vint Cerf thinks about the future of libraries:

“As with the newspaper industry, Google has had an immeasurable impact on how people access information. Indeed, most petty arguments are settled in seconds now thanks to smartphones and search engines.

When asked what he saw as the ‘future’ of libraries, he expressed deep concern about the way information will be stored and passed through generations. Books, if looked after, can be passed down through many generations – but the rate at which technology is evolving leads to some concerns about so-called bit-rot.

‘You have no idea how eager I am to ensure that the notion of library does not disappear – it’s too important. But the thing is, it’s going to have to curate an extremely broad range of materials, and increasingly digital content,’ says Cerf.

‘I am really worried right now, about the possibility of saving ‘bits’ but losing their meaning and ending up with bit-rot,’ he continues. ‘This means, you have  a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what they mean, because the software that was needed to interpret them is no longer available, or it’s no longer executable, or you just don’t have a platform that will run it. This is a serious, serious problem and we have to solve that.'”

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“Technology Can Be Used To Communicate With Other Species”

March 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a BGR post, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf predicting further applications of Web-based communication:

“One of the Internet’s founding fathers envisions a bright future that one day may involve communicating with animals and even aliens using the Web. During a speech given at the annual TED conference, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf described how technology can be used to communicate with other species, explaining that the Internet isn’t just a way of connecting machines but a way for people to interact.

‘Now what’s important about what these people are doing is that they’re beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us — but share a common sensory environment,’ he said about the other event speakers. ‘We’re beginning to explore what it means to communicate with something that isn’t just another person.'”

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“They’re Living Twenty Years In The Future For All Practical Purposes”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of our interconnected digital world, answering a Wired query about how he shepherded the Internet from proprietary to public:

“Wired: So how did the internet get beyond the technical and academic community?

Cerf: Xerox invented the Alto machine which was a $50,000 personal computer given to every employee of Xerox PARC — so they’re living twenty years in the future for all practical purposes. They were even inventing their own internet. They had a whole suite of protocols. Some of the students that worked with me in Stanford went to work with Xerox PARC, so there was a lot of cross-fertilization.

It’s just that they decided to treat their protocol as proprietary, and Bob and I were desperate to have a non-proprietary protocol for the military to use. We said we’re not going to patent it, we’re not going to control it. We’re going to release it to the world as soon as it’s available, which we did.

So by 1988, I’m seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, ‘Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?’ There were no public internet services at that point.

And there was a rule that the government had instituted that said you could not put commercial traffic on government-sponsored backbones, and, in this case, it was the ARPANET run by ARPA or for ARPA; the NSFNet run for the National Science Foundation, and there were others. The Department of Energy has ESnet and NASA had what was called the NASA Science Internet. The rule was no commercial traffic on any of them. So I thought, ‘Well, you know, we’re never going to get commercial networking until we have the business community seeing that commercial networking is actually a business possibility.’

So I went to the US government, specifically to a committee called the Federal Networking Council since they had the program managers from various agencies and they had been funding internet research. I said, ‘Would you give me permission to connect MCI Mail, a commercial e-mail service, to the internet as a test?’

Of course, my purpose was to break the rule that said you couldn’t have commercial traffic on the backbone.

And so they kind of grumbled for a while and they said, ‘Well, OK. Do it for a year.’”

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A 1974 demo of the Xerox Alto:

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“The System Kind Of Got Loose”

March 30, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"A decentralized network that routed mes­sages from place to place using addresses that had nothing to do with physical locations." (Image by Remi Jouan.)

From “World War 3.0,” Michael Joseph Gross’ new Vanity Fair examination of the current challenges to the Internet, a passage about the origin of the boundary-busting nature of the medium:

“Vint Cerf knew from the start that there was a problem—he just couldn’t fix it. The year was 1975, and Cerf was on a team of computer scientists at Stanford University under contract to finish a new communications network for the U.S. military. The goal was full cryptographic capability—a system that allowed all messages to be authenticated from both sides—on a network that could be used anywhere in the world. Two things prevented the scientists from making this network as secure as they would have liked. One obstacle was institutional: ‘The only technology that would have allowed for such security was still classified at the time,’ Cerf recalls. The other obstacle was simple momentum. Before the developers could implement truly secure encryption, Cerf explains, ‘the system kind of got loose,’ meaning that problems would have to be fixed on the fly.

Cerf is frequently referred to as ‘the father of the Internet.’ His most celebrated achievement, for which he shares credit with the engineer and computer scientist Robert Kahn, was creating the TCP/IP protocol, the system that allows computers and networks all over the world to talk to one another. He was an early chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or icann, which maintains the Domain Name System, the virtual address book that shows your computer where to go when you type the name of a Web site into your browser. He now works as Internet Evangelist—that’s his actual title—for Google.

Most of the Internet’s problems, Cerf believes, stem from the issue of state sovereignty. The Internet was designed to ignore national boundaries. It was designed this way, Cerf says, because ‘it was intended to deal with a military problem’: how could soldiers exchange messages without letting their enemies know where they were? Cerf and others solved that problem by building a decentralized network that routed mes­sages from place to place using addresses that had nothing to do with physical locations.

This was something new.”

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