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 a legend.
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
It’s like two lifetimes in tech years. I remember that summer Google Earth was launched, we were a year removed from the Gmail launch, and I worked on shipping the first Summer of Code.
(I guess a decade later, was IPv6 important? Still not sure about that one. But it seemed important at the time.)
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.
Legends
Disc: Former Googler, Cloud Networking.
Similar ish to an influencer
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.
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.
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.
Certainly I'd want everything to have encryption at the higher layers (OSI 5-7), but having opportunistic encryption at IP (OSI 3) would also be great because snoopers could tell that two nodes are communicating but not how / what: RTSP? Torrent? Mindcraft? PvP2 game? If every node could (say) do an IKEv2 negotiation with every other node have IP-level traffic wrapped in IPsec that would help with traffic analysis.
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.
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.
Anyone can publish an IETF draft document, it doesn't mean it's a serious proposal under consideration or will ever actually be implemented.
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...
* Interview with author of article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3jkZ1Ulz-s
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.
This thinking can be seen in the allocation of network blocks. Mercedes Benz getting 53.0.0.0/8 is just a "we have more addresses than we ever need."
If somebody had imagined "yeah, let's give an address to each of our vehicles" they would have realized the space running out.
In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.
No matter what you think of Google
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.
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 MCI/Worldcomm, before Google. Bernie Ebbers went to jail, for that.
Ahh… the good ol’ days, when we actually jailed scumbag billionaires, instead of voting massive pay bumps…
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA003070...
What's that for?
The video probably shows a wide smile whilst saying it.
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).
I also shared a cubicle wall with another Van Nuys High alumni, Jon Postel, aka "God of the Internet". Sartorially, Jon was the complete opposite of Vint--long scraggly beard, blue jeans, forever barefoot--but those weren't the things that mattered. Man, those were the days.
— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>
Al Gore Jr.'s father, the Sr., was instrumental in enacting the US Interstate Highway system:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gore_Sr.#U.S._Senate
Which transformed the economy for physical goods. Jr saw parallels with the transportation of information, and coined a term (in 1978!) about it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)
It’s astonishing, I know, but the heavily-parroted meme was always reductive and is, at this point, misnformation.
So, eleven.
The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.
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.
And man, for someone who calls something "nitpicking" to dig so deep into it ...
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.
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!)
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.
> 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."
As another commenter has pointed out, Vint Cerf himself credits Gore as playing a significant role in enabling the Internet’s emergence. He didn’t claim to have “invented” it.
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
Emphasis on actual words, with an obligatory side dish of context.
There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
The same goes for you. Calling out bullshit and disinformation benefits the whole community,unlike nonsensical remarks. So if you don't appreciate efforts to counter nonsense by bringing facts to the discussion, just sit this one out.
I wonder what he feeling about it
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.
Had 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
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on
his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
[1] open access journals were a big step forward, but I was open access decades before
[2] i'll join a club which is neutral on the issue, but I can't accept the positive position, not because I feel it threatens me but because it pains me to see a brilliant data scientist being jerked around (bad enough that the HR lady leaves) and not being able to tell him "your skills are in demand and you can find another employer on the other side of the street" (this is NYC) And the argument that "startups" need it is bogus: Google can take a chance on a lottery, a key employee at a startup is key however.