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Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

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Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#71
post #2

He made millions last 20 years at Google without doing much and just being a honorary post, not sure what he feels about BS jobs like this

I couldn't disagree more.

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

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#72
post #58

[flagged]

N.b. that Cerf was mentioned in the Epstein Files in a list of scientists Epstein wanted to invite to an event. There is no evidence Cerf actually accepted any such invitation.

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.

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#73
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a talk where he brought up exactly this (I also once did a talk alongside him, but that's a different story). He said there would be two changes: 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 encr…

Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware. 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.

You’re definitely right — the tech stack travels through time along what’s called a “path dependent” trajectory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#74

I met Vint at the Kech Institute for Space Studies. He arrived to help us look at in-space data centers for planetary science throughout the solar system. He was a big proponent of delay-tolerant networking and other useful networking stacks, so he was the "rep" for that layer of problems. Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He took the note-takers job during our breakouts, had beers with us after the session, and…

Apparently there's "more to come" and its not a complete retirement.

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#75
post #68
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Al Gore is definitely one of them!

> Al Gore is definitely one of them! Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)

1999 CNN interview where Gore stated: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet".

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#77
post #63
post #59

How many "father's of the Internet" are there exactly?

Al Gore is definitely one of them!

> 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>

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