Happly Canada!

It is our national holiday and I am going to . . . Canada. No, I am already here. I am in Waterloo and I am volunteering at the university where we will put ona huge celebration. Givien Canada is 140 years old today, the city is 150 years old this year and  the university is 50 years old today, things are going to be bigger, better, and more than ever.

May stalwart sons and  gentle maidens rise to keep thee steadfast through the years from east to western sea — O Canada.

I saw Vinton Cerf speak at Hagey Hall last week. The thing that struck me when I was there in the upper level of the crowded theatre and this 63-year-old (now 64) was going on about trojan horses, bots, zombies, and TCP/IP is that I hadn’t ever talked technically about the Internet with anyone older than their twenties.

That was the first of many reasons that I enjoyed the talk by this pioneer of the Internet who is still working on new and cool projects.

Vinton worked on ARPANET and helped develop TCP/IP while at UCLA as a grad students and at Stanford as a Professor. Now he works at Google as Chief Internet Evangelist and works with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory among other things.

Here are some of my notes from his talk:

• “I get nervouse when people clap when you get up. meybe you should just sit down because you won’t get any better.”
• When he went to Google they asked him what title he wanted and he first suggested “Arch Duke.” They later agreed on Chief Internet Evangelist.
• He had recently received an honorary degree from a university in the Balearic Islands and got to keep there formal robes that looked unusual. He wore them on his first day.
• He made a plug for Google, saying they are looking for good people and suggested that students go to the info session.
• He showed a slide of a house boat on lake Vembanad near Bangalore that he said loked like a hobbit might live in it. He was surprised when he turned his Blackberry on, got a good signal, and had 300 e-mails. (I think the connectionw as a surprise, not the numebr of e-mails)
• The internet has grown in the past ten years. He compared 22.5 million hosts and 433 million users in 1997 to 50 million hosts and 1,114 million users recently.
• He said that the growth of mobile telphony is an important new element.
• In the 1970s they drove around in a van measuring the packet switched radio network
• They connected three networks together for the Internet: ARPAnet, packet radio network, and the packet satellite network.
• They sent the first Internet transmission from the SRI van to USC through London on 22 November 1977.
• Then the internet “got bigger, more complex, and more colourful.”
• He showed a slide of a magazine cover with a t-shirt that said “IP on everything.”
• Any underlying transmission system should be able to carry a bag of bits.
• It means you can build an application without permission from providers.
• End to end privacy and of neutrality. It doesn’t care what’s on it.
• Broadband is unstable because it’s asynchonous. There’s pressure to move to symmetric.
• IP address space standardized in 1977.
• 4.3 billion was a mistake, too few addresses.
• Now we have to switch to a larger address space. Need to move to IPv6
• Of traffic on the Internet: http is 45%; streaming video is 36%, streaming audio is 5%. YouTube is 20% of all http and is nearly 10% of all Internet traffic.
• Information consumers are becoming producers.
• There’s democratic access to the world’s information
• There are new educational alternative and outlets.
• New business models (value added, low digital media costs)
• There are risk factors (spam, viruses/worms, abuse, misinformation, fraud)
• Innovation at the edge (e.g. Wikipedia)
• You can correct a single word on wikipedia. You would never publish a book with one word in it. You can make a contribution.
• Mobility and mobile, 2.5 billion mobiles and counting
• Some people don’t have bank accounts, but have mobiles.
• Devices can transfer minutes as currency.
• The keyboard on this is suitable for someone 3 inches tall.
• He started listing areas of research. Places that need innovation: SMS, payment systems, innovative interfaces, navigation systems, geo-location based services.
• He told the story of travelling and needing saffron because they were going to make paella. He looked for grocery stores on Google maps. He called the Safeway and asked for the spice department. He drove in and bought it. It cost like 12.95 for 0.06 oz. or something.
• Innovation needed in Internet enables services. He showed a slide on a laptop in a surfboard.
• He talked about how there is no Nobel prize for computer science and he joked that he came up with a theory of Schroedinger’s wine bottle (you don’t know whether it is good until you open it). No cats were harmed in this Gedanken experiment.
• Research problems: security at all levels, mobility persistence, intermediate “Erlang” formulas, QOS debates (smart routers), multihoming multipath routines, names (CCTLDs & GTLDs), mesh and sensor netowrks, ditributed algorithms, scaling of everyhting (IPv6)
• IP addressing is bound to the TCP that’s a weakness for mobility
• Need an identity layer above IP layer to be able to move from one access point to another the binding is at a higher layer of protocol.
• We have not taken advantage of broadcast media (software updates simultaneously for certain applications).
• Semantic network, modal indexing, what to do about information decay
• I say Google earth should have a time axis showing past earth views as well as proposed future developments
• Things are more being organized around people liike with MyFace and Spacebook (did he really say that?). Information is more useful if organized that way.
• Imagine in the year 300 pulling up a powerpoint from 1997. The ability to retain information depends on interpreting bits. We can’t rely on rtranslating data forward.
• New application challenges: IP TV and effects of symmetric broadband, VPOD practices, you could download additional info from objects on screen, like product placement.
• Some of you probably play WoW or Second Life. Sun had a panel discussion that occurredon second life.
• Google recently bought a company that placed advertising in virtual environments
• Cerf works with the jet propulsion lab on an interplanetary internet.
• His presentation was interrupted bya message on his laptop saying “a little virus thingy said it blocked something.”
• Rovers working on Mars were expecteed to have their solar panels get dusty, but dust devils clean them off so they are able to work for longer. They transmitted data on a 28kb cycle. They were reprogrammed to work on a 128kb cycle. The satellites used a store and forward system.
• We should expand networking capabiltiies of deep space network.
• We thought we could use TCP/IP. The distance between the planets is literally astronomical. Interplanetary Network IPN
• Delay and disintolerant networking - delay and disruption tolerant protocols - I worked on a chat project - they took it off to Iraq and I said wait it’s just an experiemtn and they said no it’s not.
• NASA should standardize on dtn protocol. On new missions past equipments could be assets. They should expect to creat a backbone with the same advantage as on earth.
• Then he showed a video of penguins.