Ask Internet Visionary and Pioneer Vint Cerf 109
As co-designer of TCP/IP (along with Robert E. Kahn), and former chairman of ICANN, it is no exaggeration to say that Vint Cerf is certainly one of the fathers of the internet, and is often referred to as simply the father. His lifetime of network engineering accomplishments — meriting, among many other laurels, the Turing Award — leaves little doubt as to why he's now a full-time internet visionary for Google (and formerly with WorldCom) as well as a Google VP. Now, Cerf has graciously agreed to answer Slashdot readers' inquiries about the past and future of this little thing called the Internet, and his role in it thus far. This short call for questions is inadequate to sum up his contributions to engineering the data flows that entangle and enlighten us in 2011, but read through a few of these capsule descriptions to get a sense of them. In accord with the interview guidelines, please try not to lump together unrelated questions. (You may find that your questions are moderated downward if they aren't concise; if you have several distinct questions, simply submit separately as many as you'd like.)
Hindsight is 20/20 (Score:5, Insightful)
Best and Worst of Communications Protocols? (Score:5, Insightful)
What would you like to see developed next? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm curious what technologies you would like to see developed next, or what you think would be most important to develop next. In other words, what do you think researchers should work on now that would be most significant?
Oh, and thank you for changing my life!
Privacy and the Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
What is you opinion regarding Internet privacy?
Do you think anything should be changed?
Re:IPV6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Engineering for an unpredictable future just means you waste a huge amount of time and often it means your idea won't get off the ground at all. The internet wasn't ever expected to get as big as it is, because it was essentially a research network. Perhaps analogously, our phone numbering system isn't designed to allow direct-dialing nearby galaxies.
2^32 was - and is - a huge number. 4 billion addresses was unthinkably high, when there were only a few thousand machines who could even use one. It was more than sufficient until a majority of the world needed their own address, or several.
And it wasn't an arbitrary number, either. It's 32 bits, or 4 bytes. Hardware at the time couldn't easily handle addresses larger than that, so if we'd started out with 128-bit addresses, nobody would ever use it because it would be impossible to implement, or far too slow. Hardware has gotten faster/cheaper/better and now it's no longer an issue. So now we're doing it.