WebProNews

Tag: Vint Cerf

  • Vint Cerf Doesn’t Think The Internet Is In Any Danger

    Vint Cerf knows a thing or two about the Internet – he helped invent it. So, what does he think about all the doom and gloom that’s directed towards the future of the Internet? He’s not worried in the least.

    In a response to Danny Hillis’ concern that the Internet may one day fail, Cerf says the ubiquity of the Internet will be its saving grace. In other words, the Internet’s constant evolution and movement into every facet of our lives will ensure that it stays ahead of any potential threats.

    Instead of putting his faith in a Plan B to save the Internet, Cerf says that a Plan C is much more likely to happen. In short, he thinks that something may come along that proves to be far more effective than the Internet. His bet is on quantum communication – an idea that’s just crazy enough to work.

  • Over 1 Million People Are Protesting The ITU With Google

    In just a few hours, delegates from around the world will be meeting in Dubai to discuss changes to the ITU. The results of which could lead to further regulation of the Internet by less than reputable countries that want more power in controlling how and what its citizens access online. Google doesn’t like that for a variety of reasons, some self-serving, and the company has invited citizens from around the world to protest with them.

    In a post on the Google Public Policy Blog, Vint Cerf details his hand in helping create the Internet. He says that “openness is why the Internet creates so much value today.” He also says that the Internet is “borderless and belongs to everyone.” That’s the basic gist of Google’s initial protest movement in getting people to share why the Internet is important to them. You can now see the results of that first movement in an interactive map.

    Over 1 Million People Are Protesting the ITU With Google

    That map shows a real time count of how many people are signing Google’s petition from around the world. It’s now at over 1 million people and climbing rather quickly. The largest number of those opposed to an ITU takeover of the Web are obviously in more developed nations, but citizens in less developed nations are doing their part to let their voice be heard. Surprisingly enough, even some people in mainland China have signed Google’s pledge.

    The ITU negotiations will begin today and continue until December 14. You can add your voice to the growing number of those opposing the ITU until then. The sooner the better, however, as some governments may perhaps have a change of heart after seeing its citizens raise a stink. It worked for SOPA and ACTA. It can work here too.

  • House Passes Resolution To Protect Open Internet, Google Applauds

    The United States House of Representatives passed a Concurrent Resolution aimed at preserving and advancing “the multistakeholder governance model under which the Internet has thrived.”

    The resolution recognizes the importance of the Internet to the global economy, and access to knowledge, services, commerce and communication, as well as the “accompanying benefits to economic development, education, and health care, and the informed discussion that is the bedrock of democratic self-government that the Internet provides.”

    It also aims to protect freedom of expression and innovation. Read the document here (pdf).

    Google, for one, is happy with the bipartisan resolution, which opposes increased international regulation of the Internet.

    Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, who is widely recognized as one of the “fathers of the Internet,” had the following to say on Google’s Public Policy blog:

    As I have recently testified and written, a battle in the war for the Internet is opening at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations organization. This December, the ITU is conducting a review of the international agreements governing telecommunications, and some member countries see the ITU conference as an opportunity to expand the ITU’s regulatory authority to reach the Internet.

    Traditionally, international discussions of Internet policy have flourished in a “multistakeholder” system that involves the input of lawmakers, academics, civil society, and users. If certain member states are successful in Dubai, they could change the Internet governance process as we know it, increasing state control over networks and substantially limiting the role of users and other vital, nongovernmental actors in important Internet policy debates.

    By passing this resolution, the U.S. Government has recognized the Internet’s critical role in growing the global economy, its unique status as a platform for innovation, and the success of multistakeholder model that lies at the heart of its governance. In the lead-up to the December conference, the future of the Internet is at stake, and I hope that other countries will adopt publicly similar positions.

    Meanwhile, in other Internet law news, on Thursday, the Senate voted to kill the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. More on that here.

  • U.N. Considering Global Internet Tax for U.S.-Based Websites

    Should some of the largest online content providers have to pay up in order to continue to reach the global market? The United Nations thinks so, according to some leaked documents obtained by WCITLeaks.org, and such a tax will be up for debate this December when the agency’s International Telecommunications Union convenes for the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai.

    The tax would have adverse effects on companies such as Google, Apple, and Facebook that have thrived off of their access to the rest of the world. Levying a tax on these companies so that they can continue to maintain a presence throughout the world has raised concern among industry observers about how the ITU’s internet tax would diminish the communication outlets around the world and hamper the openness of the internet, leaving developing countries in isolation.

    On page 36, Section CWG/54/6.14 of the draft of the document dated June 6, 2012, the proposed regulation states, “Countries are free to levy fiscal taxes on international telecommunication services in accordance with their national laws.” Later, in CWG/54/6/6.16, the document continues:

    National authorities are free to impose taxes on all telecommunications traffic, whether incoming or outgoing. However, such taxes should be reasonable and the proceeds should be directed where possible at the development of the industry. Regarding double taxation, Member States are encouraged to cooperate within the framework of bilateral, juridical double taxation treaties under which taxation arrangements are pre-determined by the terms of the treaty so as to protect against the risk of double taxation and avoidance or evasion of tax liability.

    The two policy analysts behind WCITLeaks spoke to CNET about the dangers of the ITU’s proposed tax, suggesting that the attempt to tax U.S.-based internet companies is likely born of greedy ambitions but carries with it the collateral threat to free speech.

    Eli Dourado, a research fellow who founded WCITLeaks along with Jerry Brito, told CNET this afternoon that the documents show that Internet taxes represent “an attractive revenue stream for many governments, but it probably is not in the interest of their people, since it would increase global isolation.”

    Dourado hopes to continue posting internal ITU documents, and is asking for more submissions. “We hope that shedding some light on them will help people understand what’s at stake,” he says.

    The tax proposal comes by way of the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association, a lobbyist group that represents several companies throughout different countries that would love to see a the tax proposal ratified.

    Last week, Vint Cerf, one of the architects of the internet, testified before the U.S. Congress about his growing concern about the U.N.’s ambitions to regulate the internet and the organization’s vulnerability to the influences of countries that aren’t so much in favor of having an open internet, like China, Russia, India, and others. Deciding to tax companies that have championed the free exchange of information on the internet would be a covert yet decisive victory for those interests that wish to undermine web’s openness.

  • Vint Cerf Fears Internet Regulation from the UN

    Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and one of the “fathers of the internet,” Vint Cerf, spoke before Congress last month to express his concern about some countries and government entities’ attempts to exert an authority over the internet.

    Testifying as part of a panel before the House Energy and Commerce CommitteeSubcommittee on Communications and Technology, Cerf told Congress he fears that the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the United Nations, could exert regulations that would potentially undermine the openness of the global internet. Cerf went on to describe how the success of the internet is perceived as a potential threat by some countries, prompting those governments “to create new international rules that would jeopardize the network’s innovative evolution and its multi-faceted success.”

    Among the culprits, Cerf listed Russia, China, Brazil, India, and other countries that have attempted to influence the ITU to increase the amount of control it has over internet governance. He went on to warn against a government-endorsed centralized entity charged with regulating the internet.

    Such a move holds profound – and I believe potentially hazardous – implications for the future of the Internet and all of its users. If all of us do not pay attention to what is going on, users worldwide will be at risk of losing the open and free Internet that has brought so much to so many.

    […]

    As a result of these efforts, there is a strong possibility that this December the ITU will significantly amend the International Telecommunication Regulations – a multilateral treaty last revised in 1988 – in a way that authorizes increased ITU and member state control over the Internet. These proposals, if implemented, would change the foundational structure of the Internet that has historically led to unprecedented worldwide innovation and economic growth.

    Some have interpreted Cerf’s comments as an alarm against a potential insurrection of the internet by Communist interests while others have perceived his statements more generally as a defense for the open nature of the internet, the latter being a cause that Cerf has never hesitated to champion. Regardless of which yard you stand in, Cerf maintains the position that an internet that has to answer to any form of government is vulnerable to specific interests that could potentially diminish the unmitigated freedom of communication afforded by the internet.

    Cerf has previously spoken out against proposed regulation of the internet by the European Union as well as any manner of closed-circuit internet business that prohibits the free-flowing stream of information on the internet.

    In other words, don’t tread on Mr. Cerf’s open internet. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

    Cerf’s full testimony to Congress can be found… here.

  • IPv6 Goes Live Today: The Future Of The Internet Is Here

    IPv6 Goes Live Today: The Future Of The Internet Is Here

    After years of preparation and teasing, IPv6 finally goes live today. IPv4 will now begin it’s long slow death march across the wasteland of the Internet. In reality, it’s a little more complicated than that. IPv6 and IPv4 will live in harmony for many years to come, but this newest iteration is something worth celebrating.

    IPv6 is the response to a problem that’s been in the making ever since the Internbet began – its exponential growth. In the beginning, there were only a few thousand IPs floating around and all was good. More and more people began to connect to the Internet in more ways than ever before. The 4.3 billion IP addresses afforded by IPv4 were no longer enough. IPv6 has been in the works since the early 90s to address the problem that we now face today.

    With the launch of IPv6, a crisis has been averted. So how many addresses does IPv6 support? One would think maybe a few more billion addresses because the Internet isn’t really that big, right? Well, the Internet is a constantly evolving network with more and more addresses coming online all the time. This is why IPv6 has been granted the capacity to hold 340 undecillion addresses. I could list in arabic numerals how large that number is, but I don’t think you want to see 36 zeroes.

    There’s obviously enough room for all the IPv4 addresses currently in use as well any new IP addresses that will be assigned as we march forward towards progress. Of course, you may be wondering if the introduction of IPv4 is going to force you off the Internet until you switch over to IPv6. Worry not as we’re all in this together and IPv4 will still work alongside IPv6 for years to come.

    Just because IPv4 still works doesn’t mean that you should just ignore IPv6. PCWorld caught up with Tri Nguyen at ZyXEL and he explained that IPv6 offers a host of improvements over IPv4 that should have many people wanting to make the switch. The biggest reason being security. IPv6 packets are encrypted thus making it harder to actually breach a network that’s on IPv6.

    Unfortunately, more secure just signals a challenge to those that launch attacks on Web sites. It was reported back in February that the number of DDoS attacks were beginning to rise on networks using IPv6. It proved that even the increased security of IPv6 could not stop all of the attacks, but security groups saw it as a perfect excuse to begin studying attacks on IPv6 addresses to develop new safeguards for the future.

    Barring cyber attacks, you’re probably liking the sound of this IPv6 thing. So what does a strapping young net savvy individual have to do to prepare for the switch? Absolutely nothing. You heard that right, folks. ISPs, Web companies and equipment manufacturers are doing all the hard work for us. They will be overseeing the switch to IPv6 so that you don’t have to.

    While everybody is going to have to switch over to IPv6 sooner or later, a number of companies are already switching over starting today. In our report yesterday, big players like AT&T and Google were listed among those that are fully embracing IPv6. Google has been especially proactive in regards to the switch by having Vint Cerf talk up the need for IPv6. You can see Cerf talking about IPv6 in the video below:

    As you can see, IPv6 is not threatening in the least bit. In fact, it’s the best thing to happen to the Internet since, well, the Internet. The best part about it is that we don’t have to worry about it. IPv6 will be moved to new areas as needed. The only thing that people should be aware of is that any device or computer they buy should have support for IPv6. Considering that my laptop from 2004 has IPv6, the average consumer should be good.

    It’s an exciting time of growth and innovation for the Internet. IPv6 is just the newest expansion that will increase the speed and security of the Internet. It’s these kind of innovations that make the Internet something to be protected from those who would rather limit it to protect their own interests, like the UN.

  • Google Pushes IPv6 Awareness, Adoption

    In about four hours from now, the switch IPv4 to IPv6 begins on a worldwide basis. To celebrate the enabling of IPv6, the website, WorldIPv6Launch.org has a countdown clock–four hours and nine minutes as of this line–and some pertinent information about which web platforms, ISPs, and other web business will be enabling the latest Internet Protocol.

    The list includes the following:

    Committed ISPs:

  • AT&T
  • Comcast
  • Free Telecom
  • Internode
  • KDDI
  • Time Warner Cable
  • XS4ALL

    • Committed equipment manufacturers:

  • Cisco
  • D-Link

    • Web companies participating:

  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Bing
  • Yahoo!

    • But what is IPv6 you ask, and why is it necessary. To address this, Google has been front and center, first conducting a Google+ Hangout that featured, among others, Vint Cerf, who discussed the reasons why the new Internet Protocol is necessary. If you missed that, fear not, because Google has also created an IPv6 information page that attempts to answer any concerns web users may have. The page also includes an explanatory video, featuring Cerf himself:


    There’s a text explanation of why IPv4 is no longer suitable for the Internet:

    The problem is that the current Internet addressing system, IPv4, only has room for about 4 billion addresses — not nearly enough for the world’s people, let alone the devices that are online today and those that will be in the future: computers, phones, TVs, watches, fridges, cars, and so on. More than 4 billion devices already share addresses. As IPv4 runs out of free addresses, everyone will need to share.

    If IPv4 gives us a little over 4 billion addresses, how many will IPv6 provide? The answer is more. A lot more. Try 340 trillion trillion trillion, something Google is nice enough to put in a numeric format, just to drive the extra space IPv6 creates home:

    340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

    That’s a lot of IP addresses for us to use and abuse, or, as Google puts it, “that’s a number big enough to give everyone on Earth their own list of billions of IP addresses.” With that in mind, the changeover from 4 to 6 only makes sense, especially when you consider just how many people currently access the Internet, even more so when you consider the future generations who will soon be connected.

    For the SEOs out there worrying whether or not the changeover is going to ruin years and years of work, Matt Cutts has you in mind:

    Steven Minardi @Stupidmonk18
    @mattcutts what do you feel will be the biggest impact to the SEO market with iPv6 going live tomorrow?

     

    Matt Cutts
    @mattcutts     @Stupidmonk18 hopefully not too much impact at all.
    24 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto
     Reply  · Retweet  · Favorite

    Any thoughts or fears you may have about the impending IPv6 changeover?

  • Vint Cerf Questions European Internet Regulation

    Google’s Internet Evangelist is out and about overseas, extolling the virtues of European Internet regulation, if, by “extolling,” I mean trashing it for being impractical. Cerf’s comments, while being applied to the EU’s proposed “right to be forgotten” proposal that’s the talk of the Union.

    From my brief exposure to the concept, the “ePrivacy,” something software giant Adobe discusses at length, the “right to be forgotten” has to do with the removal of content for placation purposes. Apparently, reputation control is serious business is Europe. The Telegraph offers this brief description:

    The current European proposals seek to harmonise laws across the 27 EU nations and will force sites to delete information shortly after consumers request it be removed. If they do not comply, a fine of up to two per cent of a firm’s global turnover could follow.

    The EU commissioner, Viviane Reding, defended the proposal’s goals:

    “The right to be forgotten has nothing to do with journalists, nothing to do with the work of bloggers, nothing to do with tweeters – it’s about when you entrust information to a company. Because freedom of expression is very important we have also to take this into account.”

    From Reding’s perspective, the measure would give European web users control of the content associated with them. For example, remember that drunk picture you took last year of you and your friends in various states of intoxication? Under the EU’s proposal, you’d have a modicum of control over this content, even if it’s been broadcast beyond the standard social media platforms. In other words, let’s say the drunk picture in question went viral. Under EU’s proposal, you’d essentially be able to put that particular genie back in the bottle by having web properties remove the offending image(s).

    Because of that, it’s easy to see why Cerf is opposed to such measures. Cerf, while speaking with the Telegraph, offered his–and Google’s–position on this matter, and it’s safe to say he disagrees:

    “You can’t go out and remove content from everybody’s computer just because you want the world to forget about something. I don’t think it’s a practical proposition at all… It’s very, very hard to get the internet to forget things that you don’t want it to remember because it’s easy to download and copy and reupload files again later.”

    It’s clear Cerf is speaking for Google as well as himself, and he didn’t stop there either:

    “The analogue [equivalent of this digital idea] is terrifying; if somebody said ‘I want everyone to forget about this book that I published because it’s embarrassing’, how would you implement that? You would have to break in to people’s homes and take the book off the bookshelves. There’s some legal issues with that and it seems to me that it shouldn’t be any easier in the online world.”

    What Cerf expects is a little bit of personal responsibility instead of expecting the Googles and Facebooks of the world to save you from yourself:

    “People who take pictures and post them on the net might want to think twice, because someone might take a picture of them in a compromising situation too. The question is what rules do we want to adopt in this online environment and I don’t think we know yet.”

    Personal responsibility in today’s world? Perish the thought.

  • Vint Cerf Believes Google Could be Toppled

    No, this is not an alarmist reaction to Google+ or anything like that. Instead, it’s an incredibly innovative person who understands there are future generations who could very well create something that succeeds Google’s position in the Internet industry.

    What we have is a Vint Cerf situation. That is, when he speaks, especially about the Internet, we listen, and listen closely. And when Cerf says he firmly believes there’s nothing to prevent the development of technology that could unseat Google, it’s worth noting.

    That’s what being one of the “Fathers of the Internet” brings you.

    While speaking at the Life Online exhibition, Cerf offered his view of a potential future Google faces, via Pocket-Lint.com:

    “There’s nothing to stop someone from developing better technology than we have and to invent something even more powerful and efficient and effective. Which, of course, scares us. And that’s good because it means we run as fast as we can to develop better tools for search in order to try to stay ahead of the game… We absolutely know that there could be somebody just like Larry and Sergey on some university campus with an idea we don’t have that could explode on the scene and take the business away.”

    Is that how Google will fall? Not from failed ventures into social media or anything Microsoft does, but from a younger generation of web developers who have the kind of vision required to develop something better than Google, while building it into the worldwide powerhouse? While it’s likely there are many who are hoping for Google’s demise sooner rather than later, especially in the wake of the Panda updates, is that a reasonable expectation to have?

    Even when Google fails–and there have been many–it still doesn’t impact their position as the lead search engine in the world. With that in mind, it’s pretty clear Cerf has mapped out the best way to topple Google: make something better than what they already offer. Are you up to the challenge?

  • Another Open Letter Concerning SOPA Disapproval

    Earlier today, Chris Crum wrote about an open letter discussing the potentially damaging rules set forth in the oft-discussed SOPA/PIPA bills. In the letter, members of Google, Yahoo, Flickr, LinkedIn, PayPal, the Huffington Post and many others detailed the issues they have with these bills in a very straight-forward, easy to understand manner.

    From the group’s perspective, the pieces of legislation threaten innovation, due process of the law, the security threat SOPA/PIPA poses, and the creation of something similar to the Chinese firewall in regards to censorship. It’s powerful approach from some of the most powerful entities in the tech industry, and it’s just found a loud voice of support from additional power players in the Internet industry.

    Thanks to a post from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), we find the support Google, et al, is receiving comes from “83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers” who also penned their own open letter, this one aimed at the United States Congress. The letter, in its entirety:

    We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We’re just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

    Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the proposed “COICA” copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives of last year’s bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to read last year.

    If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

    All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE seizures program.

    Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

    The current bills — SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly — also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.

    The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

    Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills aside.

    While the prose of the letter is indeed impressive, the people that volunteered their endorsement is a who’s who of Internet dignitaries, including such names as Vint Cerf, furthering the point that, by and large, the Internet industry is against the methods with which SOPA/PIPA enforces its rules. The letters signees are as follows:

    • Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, one of the “fathers of the Internet”, signing as private citizen
    • Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software, and President of the Internet Systems Consortium
    • Tony Li, co-author of BGP (the protocol used to arrange Internet routing); chair of the IRTF’s Routing Research Group; a Cisco Fellow; and architect for many of the systems that have actually been used to build the Internet
    • Steven Bellovin, invented the DNS cache contamination attack; co-authored the first book on Internet security; recipient of the 2007 NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award and member of the DHS Science and Technology Advisory Committee
    • Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards, which we use to do everything on the Web
    • Dave Kristol, co-author, RFCs 2109, 2965 (Web cookies); contributor, RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1)
    • Steve Deering, Ph.D., invented the IP multicast feature of the Internet; lead designer of IPv6 (version 6 of the Internet Protocol)
    • David Ulevitch, David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS, which offers alternative DNS services for enhanced security.
    • Elizabeth Feinler, director of the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International, administered the Internet Name Space from 1970 until 1989 and developed the naming conventions for the internet top level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .com, .org, etc. under contracts to DoD
    • Robert W. Taylor, founded and funded the beginning of the ARPAnet; founded and managed the Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab which designed and built the first networked personal computer (Alto), the Ethernet, the first internet protocol and internet, and desktop publishing
    • Fred Baker, former IETF chair, has written about 50 RFCs and contributed to about 150 more, regarding widely used Internet technology
    • Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist, DKH
    • Esther Dyson, EDventure; founding chairman, ICANN; former chairman, EFF; active investor in many start-ups that support commerce, news and advertising on the Internet; director, Sunlight Foundation
    • Walt Daniels, IBM’s contributor to MIME, the mechanism used to add attachments to emails
    • Nathaniel Borenstein, Chief Scientist, Mimecast; one of the two authors of the MIME protocol, and has worked on many other software systems and protocols, mostly related to e-mail and payments
    • Simon Higgs, designed the role of the stealth DNS server that protects a.root-servers.net; worked on all versions of Draft Postel for creating new TLDs and addressed trademark issues with a complimentary Internet Draft; ran the shared-TLD mailing list back in 1995 which defined the domain name registry/registrar relationship; was a root server operator for the Open Root Server Consortium; founded coupons.com in 1994
    • John Bartas, was the technical lead on the first commercial IP/TCP software for IBM PCs in 1985-1987 at The Wollongong Group. As part of that work, developed the first tunneling RFC, rfc-1088
    • Nathan Eisenberg, Atlas Networks Senior System Administrator; manager of 25K sq. ft. of data centers which provide services to Starbucks, Oracle, and local state
    • Dave Crocker, author of Internet standards including email, DKIM anti-abuse, electronic data interchange and facsimile, developer of CSNet and MCI national email services, former IETF Area Director for network management, DNS and standards, recipient of IEEE Internet Award for contributions to email, and serial entrepreneur
    • Craig Partridge, architect of how email is routed through the Internet; designed the world’s fastest router in the mid 1990s
    • Doug Moeller, Chief Technology Officer at Autonet Mobile
    • John Todd, Lead Designer/Maintainer – Freenum Project (DNS-based, free telephony/chat pointer system), http://freenum.org/
    • Alia Atlas, designed software in a core router (Avici) and has various RFCs around resiliency, MPLS, and ICMP
    • Kelly Kane, shared web hosting network operator
    • Robert Rodgers, distinguished engineer, Juniper Networks
    • Anthony Lauck, helped design and standardize routing protocols and local area network protocols and served on the Internet Architecture Board
    • Ramaswamy Aditya, built various networks and web/mail content and application hosting providers including AS10368 (DNAI) which is now part of AS6079 (RCN); did network engineering and peering for that provider; did network engineering for AS25 (UC Berkeley); currently does network engineering for AS177-179 and others (UMich)
    • Blake Pfankuch, Connecting Point of Greeley, Network Engineer
    • Jon Loeliger, has implemented OSPF, one of the main routing protocols used to determine IP packet delivery; at other companies, has helped design and build the actual computers used to implement core routers or storage delivery systems; at another company, installed network services (T-1 lines and ISP service) into Hotels and Airports across the country
    • Jim Deleskie, internetMCI Sr. Network Engineer, Teleglobe Principal Network Architect
    • David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify
    • Mikki Barry, VP Engineering of InterCon Systems Corp., creators of the first commercial applications software for the Macintosh platform and the first commercial Internet Service Provider in Japan
    • Peter Rubenstein,helped to design and build the AOL backbone network, ATDN.
    • David Farber, distinguished Professor CMU; Principal in development of CSNET, NSFNET, NREN, GIGABIT TESTBED, and the first operational distributed computer system; EFF board member
    • Bradford Chatterjee, Network Engineer, helped design and operate the backbone network for a nationwide ISP serving about 450,000 users
    • Gary E. Miller Network Engineer specializing in eCommerce
    • Jon Callas, worked on a number of Internet security standards including OpenPGP, ZRTP, DKIM, Signed Syslog, SPKI, and others; also participated in other standards for applications and network routing
    • John Kemp, Principal Software Architect, Nokia; helped build the distributed authorization protocol OAuth and its predecessors; former member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group
    • Christian Huitema, worked on building the Internet in France and Europe in the 80’s, and authored many Internet standards related to IPv6, RTP, and SIP; a former member of the Internet Architecture Board
    • Steve Goldstein, Program Officer for International Networking Coordination at the National Science Foundation 1989-2003, initiated several projects that spread Internet and advanced Internet capabilities globally
    • David Newman, 20 years’ experience in performance testing of Internet
      infrastructure; author of three RFCs on measurement techniques (two on firewall performance, one on test traffic contents)
    • Justin Krejci, helped build and run the two biggest and most successful municipal wifi networks located in Minneapolis, MN and Riverside, CA; building and running a new FTTH network in Minneapolis
    • Christopher Liljenstolpe, was the chief architect for AS3561 (at the time about 30% of the Internet backbone by traffic), and AS1221 (Australia’s main Internet infrastructure)
    • Joe Hamelin, co-founder of Seattle Internet Exchange (http://www.seattleix.net) in 1997, and former peering engineer for Amazon in 2001
    • John Adams, operations engineer at Twitter, signing as a private citizen
    • David M. Miller, CTO / Exec VP for DNS Made Easy (IP Anycast Managed Enterprise DNS provider)
    • Seth Breidbart, helped build the Pluribus IMP/TIP for the ARPANET
    • Timothy McGinnis, co-chair of the African Network Information Center Policy Development Working Group, and active in various IETF Working Groups
    • Richard Kulawiec, 30 years designing/operating academic/commercial/ISP systems and networks
    • Larry Stewart, built the Etherphone at Xerox, the first telephone system working over a local area network; designed early e-commerce systems for the Internet at Open Market
    • John Pettitt, Internet commerce pioneer, online since 1983, CEO Free Range Content Inc.; founder/CTO CyberSource & Beyond.com; created online fraud protection software that processes over 2 billion transaction a year
    • Brandon Ross, Chief Network Architect and CEO of Network Utility Force LLC
    • Chris Boyd, runs a green hosting company and supports EFF-Austin as a board member
    • Dr. Richard Clayton, designer of Turnpike, widely used Windows-based Internet access suite; prominent Computer Security researcher at Cambridge University
    • Robert Bonomi, designed, built, and implemented, the Internet presence for a number of large corporations
    • Owen DeLong, member of the ARIN Advisory Council who has spent more than a decade developing better IP addressing policies for the internet in North America and around the world
    • Baudouin Schombe, blog design and content trainer
    • Lyndon Nerenberg, Creator of IMAP Binary extension (RFC 3516)
    • John Gilmore, co-designed BOOTP (RFC 951), which became DHCP, the way you get an IP address when you plug into an Ethernet or get on a WiFi access point; current EFF board member
    • John Bond, Systems Engineer at RIPE NCC maintaining AS25152 (k.root-servers.net.) and AS197000 (f.in-addr-servers.arpa. ,f.ip6-servers.arpa.); signing as a private citizen
    • Stephen Farrell, co-author on about 15 RFCs
    • Samuel Moats, senior systems engineer for the Department of Defense; helps build and defend the networks that deliver data to Defense Department users
    • John Vittal, created the first full email client and the email standards still in use today
    • Ryan Rawdon, built out and maintains the network infrastructure for a rapidly growing company in our country’s bustling advertising industry; was on the technical operations team for one of our country’s largest residential ISPs
    • Brian Haberman, has been involved in the design of IPv6, IGMP/MLD, and NTP within the IETF for nearly 15 years
    • Eric Tykwinski, Network Engineer working for a small ISP based in the Philadelphia region; currently maintains the network as well as the DNS and server infrastructure
    • Noel Chiappa, has been working on the lowest level stuff (the IP protocol level) since 1977; name on the ‘Birth of the Internet’ plaque at Stanford); actively helping to develop new ‘plumbing’ at that level
    • Robert M. Hinden, worked on the gateways in the early Internet, author of many of the core IPv6 specifications, active in the IETF since the first IETF meeting, author of 37 RFCs, and current Internet Society Board of Trustee member
    • Alexander McKenzie, former member of the Network Working Group and participated in the design of the first ARPAnet Host protocols; was the manager of the ARPAnet Network Operation Center that kept the network running in the early 1970s; was a charter member of the International Network Working Group that developed the ideas used in TCP and IP
    • Keith Moore, was on the Internet Engineering Steering Group from 1996-2000, as one of two Area Directors for applications; wrote or co-wrote technical specification RFCs associated with email, WWW, and IPv6 transition
    • Guy Almes, led the connection of universities in Texas to the NSFnet during the late 1980s; served as Chief Engineer of Internet2 in the late 1990s
    • David Mercer, formerly of The River Internet, provided service to more of Arizona than any local or national ISP
    • Paul Timmins, designed and runs the multi-state network of a medium sized telephone and internet company in the Midwest
    • Stephen L. Casner, led the working group that designed the Real-time Transport Protocol that carries the voice signals in VoIP systems
    • Tim Rutherford, DNS and network administrator at C4
    • Mike Alexander, helped implement (on the Michigan Terminal System at the University of Michigan) one of the first EMail systems to be connected to the Internet (and to its predecessors such as Bitnet, Mailnet, and UUCP); helped with the basic work to connect MTS to the Internet; implemented various IP related drivers on early Macintosh systems: one allowed TCP/IP connections over ISDN lines and another made a TCP connection look like a serial port
    • John Klensin, Ph.D., early and ongoing role in the design of Internet applications and coordination and administrative policies
    • L. Jean Camp, former Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, focusing on computer security; eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School; tenured Professor at Indiana Unviersity’s School of Informatics with research addressing security in society.
    • Louis Pouzin, designed and implemented the first computer network using datagrams (CYCLADES), from which TCP/IP was derived
    • Carl Page, helped found eGroups, the biggest social network of its day, 14 million users at the point of sale to Yahoo for around $430,000,000, at which point it became Yahoo Groups
    • Phil Lapsley, co-author of the Internet Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), RFC 977, and developer of the NNTP reference implementation
    • Jack Haverty (MSEE, BSEE MIT 1970), Principal Investigator for several DARPA projects including the first Internet development and operation; Corporate Network Architect for BBN; Founding member of the IAB/ICCB; Internet Architect and Corporate Founding Member of W3C for Oracle Corporation
    • Glenn Ricart, Managed the original (FIX) Internet interconnection point

    That’s a lot of clout speaking out against these protection acts. The question is, will such a powerful piece of opposition work or will it fall on deaf ears? Is there anyone else you’d like to see on here that wasn’t? Let us know what you think.

  • World IPv6 Day Will Test the Next Phase of the Internet

    The Internet Society, a nonprofit organization for Internet standards has announced World IPv6 Day to take place on June 8. This is a day in which major web properties like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo (the three of which make up a combined billion visits per day) join major content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight Networks for a 24-hour global trial of IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol. 

    The need for the new protocol arises as the older IPv4 runs out of room. "IPv4 has approximately four billion IP addresses (the sequence of numbers assigned to each Internet-connected device)," the Internet Society explains. "The explosion in the number of people, devices and web services on the Internet means that IPv4 is running out of space. IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol, which provides over four billion times more space, will connect the billions of people not connected today and will help ensure the Internet can continue its current growth rate."

    "In the short history of the Internet, the transition to IPv6 is one of the most important steps we will take together to protect the Internet as we know it," says Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol stack. "It’s as if the Internet was originally designed with a limited number of telephone numbers, and we’re soon going to run out."

    Google has actually offered a separate IPv6-only version of search since early 2008. On June 8, Google will try the protocol out on sites like Google.com and YouTube.com.

    IPv6 Google Adoption

    "The good news is that Internet users don’t need to do anything special to prepare for World IPv6 Day. Our current measurements suggest that the vast majority (99.95%) of users will be unaffected," says Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti. "However, in rare cases, users may experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices. Over the coming months we will be working with application developers, operating system vendors and network device manufacturers to further minimize the impact and provide testing tools and advice for users."

    Adam Bechtel, VP of Yahoo’s Infrastructure Group says, "Participating in World IPv6 Day will allow us to obtain real-life data that we can use to ensure a seamless user experience as we transition to IPv6. We welcome this opportunity to collaborate with the technical community and provide leadership in addressing the scaling challenges facing the Internet."

    "As an industry, we’re working together to ensure future generations continue to have open and direct access to the Internet as we do today," adds Jonathan Heiliger, VP of Technical Operations at Facebook. "The number of web-connected devices is exploding, and World IPv6 Day is a crucial step in ensuring they can all communicate."

    The Internet Society is calling for other website owners and network operators to take part in the event as well. The organization also has a test you can take to find our your IPv6 readiness.

     

  • Google Promotes Open, Inclusive Internet Governance

    The United Nations Commission on Science & Technology for Development needs to open its doors and allow many more organizations to join an Internet-related group, according to Google.  Vint Cerf, who serves as "Chief Internet Evangelist" at the search giant, spoke up this morning following a row over a governments-only proposal.

    Cerf explained on the Official Google Blog,"[L]ast week the UN Committee on Science and Technology announced that only governments would be able to sit on a working group set up to examine improvements to the IGF – one of the Internet’s most important discussion forums."

    Then Cerf, who’s considered a father of the Internet, continued, "This move has been condemned by the Internet Governance Caucus, the Internet Society (ISOC), the International Chamber of Commerce and numerous other organizations – who have published a joint letter (PDF) and launched an online petition to mobilize opposition."

    Finally, Cerf wrote, "Today, I have signed that petition on Google’s behalf because we don’t believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance.  The current bottoms-up, open approach works – protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation.  Let’s fight to keep it that way."

    That call to action is sure to motivate many, many people to follow Cerf’s/Google’s lead.  And the petition’s already collected over 1,000 signatures.

    It should be interesting to see where this goes.  The recent WikiLeaks problems have caused many politicians to suggest that governments keep a closer eye on the Web.

  • Google, PayPal, Mozilla Help StopBadware Go Solo

    Thanks to Google, PayPal, and Mozilla, the anti-malware organization borne out of Harvard’s Berkman center has become an independent entity.  StopBadware.org is now a non-profit known simply as StopBadware.

    This change should be viewed as more evolutionary than revolutionary; like before, StopBadware will work to minimize the threat of malware, and at the moment, nothing more significant than some colors, logos, and site content has been changed.

    Urs Gasser, executive director of the Berkman Center, also explained in a statement that StopBadware is just following a path taken by previous Berkman Center ventures like Creative Commons and Global Voices.

    And as mentioned earlier, it’s doing so with the support of a lot of important companies.  Google, PayPal, and Mozilla all provided funding for StopBadware’s launch, and one person from each group will now sit on its board of directors.  Notably, "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf is Google’s representative.

    Anyway, a hat tip goes to Elinor Mills, and we’ll see what happens.  In a blog post, Maxim Weinstein, StopBadware’s executive director, did encourage onlookers to "watch for more changes, both aesthetic and substantive, as we embark on this new adventure."

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