The Internet Vint Cerf re-think of its architecture, and NPR audio history

Tony Austin
Saturday, 19 February 2011 09:12

Business IT - Technology

Dr. Vint Cerf - often called the 'Father of the Internet' (along with Dr. Bob Kahn, and others), now chief Internet evangelist at Google - gave a fascinating recent lecture at Stanford University about the Internet's development, its successes, surprises along the way,  areas where it hasn't succeeded, and ways that it should be improved.

You couldn't get anything more authoritative than Dr. Cerf's recent lecture at Stanford University.

In my opinion, this is one of those absolutely must watch presentations.

He discusses the history of the Internet for the first 40 minutes or so, then in the final 20 minutes of his hour-long presentation shares his views on how the Internet needs to be improved.

Many topics are covered, such as the original ARPANET, IP addressing (IPv4 versus IPv6), the importance of the Internet's open architecture, growth of the Web user population, error recovery and performance (including the notorious outage caused by an errant forward slash character).

Some other matters discussed include internationalization of top level domains (TLDs), security weaknesses and privacy problems, Cloud collaboration, unresolved Internet research problems (routing, multicasting, mobility issues), virtualization, authentication/identity/authorization issues, governance, and much more.

There's a fascinating discussion of problems he experienced with remote control of the temperature in his wine cellar, and the need for and an 'InterPlaNetary' Internet (re-routing of Mars Rover data transmissions via store-and-forward via the circling Orbiters) - why TCP/IP wasn't effective for such highly-disrupted and variably-delayed transmission environments.

Starting just past the one-hour mark, the final 15 to 20 minutes is a Question & Answer segment, and this too is well worth watching for Dr Cerf's insights into the additional topics that were raised by the audience.

In a similar vein, why not learn more by listening to the various segments of An Audio History of the Internet from the National Public Radio (NPR) Archives?