Bimbonet


[Al*** Bore claims to have invented the bimbo nation super
bottleneck. That's the problem. It is based on a Star-Trek-Commie
anticommercial view of the world. It is time to charge users by their
usage, at each gateway. The free-love, free-money, free-AIDS
mentality of the canker sore sandal wearers of the 1960s is the
problem! When the Red Chinese downed a USA plane near Taiwan in 2001
they retaliated in part by publishing computer virus kits on the
web. However, the Chinese government strictly censors and controls the
internet going into China. Why do we not censor the internet coming
OUT of China? It didn't seem to bother anyone when the slightest
information from the Serbian side was censored in the 1990s. In the
summer of 2003 a wave of spam paralysed the internet and we have not
been able to use the internet in a normal way since then.]


The Internet Is Broken By David Talbot [Cover story in MIT
Technology Review Dec 2005]
In his office within the gleaming-stainless-steel and orange-brick
jumble of MIT's Stata Center, Internet elder statesman and onetime
chief protocol architect David D. Clark prints out an old PowerPoint
talk. Dated July 1992, it ranges over technical issues like domain
naming and scalability. But in one slide, Clark points to the
Internet's dark side: its lack of built-in security.
In others, he observes that sometimes the worst disasters are
caused not by sudden events but by slow, incremental processes -- and
that humans are good at ignoring problems. "Things get worse
slowly. People adjust," Clark noted in his presentation. "The problem
is assigning the correct degree of fear to distant elephants."

Today, Clark believes the elephants are upon us. Yes, the Internet
has wrought wonders: e-commerce has flourished, and e-mail has become
a ubiquitous means of communication. Almost one billion people now use
the Internet, and critical industries like banking increasingly rely
on it.

At the same time, the Internet's shortcomings have resulted in
plunging security and a decreased ability to accommodate new
technologies. "We are at an inflection point, a revolution point,"
Clark now argues. And he delivers a strikingly pessimistic assessment
of where the Internet will end up without dramatic intervention. "We
might just be at the point where the utility of the Internet stalls --
and perhaps turns downward."

Indeed, for the average user, the Internet these days all too often
resembles New York's Times Square in the 1980s. It was exciting and
vibrant, but you made sure to keep your head down, lest you be offered
drugs, robbed, or harangued by the insane. Times Square has been
cleaned up, but the Internet keeps getting worse, both at the user's
level, and -- in the view of Clark and others -- deep within its
architecture.

Over the years, as Internet applications proliferated -- wireless
devices, peer-to-peer file-sharing, telephony -- companies and network
engineers came up with ingenious and expedient patches, plugs, and
workarounds. The result is that the originally simple communications
technology has become a complex and convoluted affair. For all of the
Internet's wonders, it is also difficult to manage and more fragile
with each passing day.

That's why Clark argues that it's time to rethink the Internet's
basic architecture, to potentially start over with a fresh design --
and equally important, with a plausible strategy for proving the
design's viability, so that it stands a chance of
implementation. "It's not as if there is some killer technology at the
protocol or network level that we somehow failed to include," says
Clark. "We need to take all the technologies we already know and fit
them together so that we get a different overall system. This is not
about building a technology innovation that changes the world but
about architecture -- pulling the pieces together in a different way
to achieve high-level objectives."

Just such an approach is now gaining momentum, spurred on by the
National Science Foundation. NSF managers are working to forge a
five-to-seven-year plan estimated to cost $200 million to $300 million
in research funding to develop clean-slate architectures that provide
security, accommodate new technologies, and are easier to manage.

They also hope to develop an infrastructure that can be used to
prove that the new system is really better than the current one. "If
we succeed in what we are trying to do, this is bigger than anything
we, as a research community, have done in computer science so far,"
says Guru Parulkar, an NSF program manager involved with the
effort. "In terms of its mission and vision, it is a very big
deal. But now we are just at the beginning. It has the potential to
change the game. It could take it to the next level in realizing what
the Internet could be that has not been possible because of the
challenges and problems."

The Internet's original protocols, forged in the late 1960s, were
designed to do one thing very well: facilitate communication between a
few hundred academic and government users. The protocols efficiently
break digital data into simple units called packets and send the
packets to their destinations through a series of network routers.
Both the routers and PCs, also called nodes, have unique digital
addresses known as Internet Protocol or IP addresses. That's basically
it. The system assumed that all users on the network could be trusted
and that the computers linked by the Internet were mostly fixed
objects.

The Internet's design was indifferent to whether the information
packets added up to a malicious virus or a love letter; it had no
provisions for doing much besides getting the data to its destination.
Nor did it accommodate nodes that moved -- such as PDAs that could
connect to the Internet at any of myriad locations. Over the years, a
slew of patches arose: firewalls, antivirus software, spam filters,
and the like. One patch assigns each mobile node a new IP address
every time it moves to a new point in the network.

Clearly, security patches aren't keeping pace. That's partly
because different people use different patches and not everyone
updates them religiously; some people don't have any installed. And
the most common mobility patch -- the IP addresses that constantly
change as you move around -- has downsides. When your mobile computer
has a new identity every time it connects to the Internet, the
websites you deal with regularly won't know it's you. This means, for
example, that your favorite airline's Web page might not cough up a
reservation form with your name and frequent-flyer number already
filled out. The constantly changing address also means you can expect
breaks in service if you are using the Internet to, say, listen to a
streaming radio broadcast on your PDA. It also means that someone who
commits a crime online using a mobile device will be harder to track
down.

In the view of many experts in the field, there are even more
fundamental reasons to be concerned. Patches create an ever more
complicated system, one that becomes harder to manage, understand, and
improve upon. "We've been on a track for 30 years of incrementally
making improvements to the Internet and fixing problems that we see,"
says Larry Peterson, a computer scientist at Princeton University. "We
see vulnerability, we try to patch it. That approach is one that has
worked for 30 years. But there is reason to be concerned. Without a
long-term plan, if you are just patching the next problem you see, you
end up with an increasingly complex and brittle system. It makes new
services difficult to employ. It makes it much harder to manage
because of the added complexity of all these point solutions that have
been added. At the same time, there is concern that we will hit a dead
end at some point. There will be problems we can't sufficiently
patch."

It's worth remembering that despite all of its flaws, all of its
architectural kluginess and insecurity and the costs associated with
patching it, the Internet still gets the job done. Any effort to
implement a better version faces enormous practical problems: all
Internet service providers would have to agree to change all their
routers and software, and someone would have to foot the bill, which
will likely come to many billions of dollars. But NSF isn't proposing
to abandon the old network or to forcibly impose something new on the
world. Rather, it essentially wants to build a better mousetrap, show
that it's better, and allow a changeover to take place in response to
user demand.

To that end, the NSF effort envisions the construction of a
sprawling infrastructure that could cost approximately $300
million. It would include research labs across the United States and
perhaps link with research efforts abroad, where new architectures can
be given a full workout. With a high-speed optical backbone and smart
routers, this test bed would be far more elaborate and representative
than the smaller, more limited test beds in use today. The idea is
that new architectures would be battle tested with real-world Internet
traffic. "You hope that provides enough value added that people are
slowly and selectively willing to switch, and maybe it gets enough
traction that people will switch over," Parulkar says. But he
acknowledges, "Ten years from now, how things play out is anyone's
guess. It could be a parallel infrastructure that people could use for
selective applications."

Still, skeptics claim that a smarter network could be even more
complicated and thus failure-prone than the original bare-bones
Internet. Conventional wisdom holds that the network should remain
dumb, but that the smart devices at its ends should become smarter.
"I'm not happy with the current state of affairs. I'm not happy with
spam; I'm not happy with the amount of vulnerability to various forms
of attack," says Vinton Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet's
basic protocols, who recently joined Google with a job title created
just for him: chief Internet evangelist. "I do want to distinguish
that the primary vectors causing a lot of trouble are penetrating
holes in operating systems. It's more like the operating systems don't
protect themselves very well. An argument could be made, 'Why does the
network have to do that?'"

According to Cerf, the more you ask the network to examine data --
to authenticate a person's identity, say, or search for viruses -- the
less efficiently it will move the data around. "It's really hard to
have a network-level thing do this stuff, which means you have to
assemble the packets into something bigger and thus violate all the
protocols," Cerf says. "That takes a heck of a lot of resources."
Still, Cerf sees value in the new NSF initiative. "If Dave
Clark...sees some notions and ideas that would be dramatically better
than what we have, I think that's important and healthy," Cerf says.
"I sort of wonder about something, though. The collapse of the Net, or
a major security disaster, has been predicted for a decade now." And
of course no such disaster has occurred -- at least not by the time
this issue of Technology Review went to press.



- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bio$trategist
BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
Pataki+JebBush in 2008!

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