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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

#91

Post by PaulHoule »

I was impressed with Vint Cerf when I saw him at a distance but once I had dealings with him about issues such as: the way the internet has become a pernicious influence, how the ACM is an industry group for computer science professors that doesn't support practitioners [1], the ACM's support for H-1B visas [2] I came to the conclusion that this quote is about him:

   “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
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

[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.

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

#92

Post by croes »

jibal wrote: post #81
croes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title of your second link is "The Fathers of the Internet" and Robert Kahn as co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol is also considered a father of the internet. BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"

I know what the title says, of course ... but the title is descriptive, not a label, and only Cerf is referred to as the father, as quoted. And yes of course Kahn co-invented TCP/IP but no one ever calls him father of the Internet. And I already said what happens if you google "father of the Internet" -- what I said is actually true. And none of this is really relevant because it's TFA that should determine HN titles…

> and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet"

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.

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

#93

Post by jnwatson »

bflesch wrote: post #62
echelon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google can't tarnish Vint Cerf. 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 compa…

His name shows up in Epstein files as #1 on Epstein's list of scientists https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA003070...

It doesn't indicate Epstein even met with Cerf. It looks like a wish list.

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

#94

Post by djtriptych »

manuisin wrote: post #48
djtriptych wrote: post #32

hah. I was an intern at Google in 2005 when he was hired and remember the wave of reverence that went through Mountain View. Salute to a legend! 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.

wow, that was the golden age of Google.

I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.

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

#95

Post by dboreham »

hyperman1 wrote: post #56
Sesse__ wrote: 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.

As someone who was there at the time, OSI certainly didn't fail by being "overcomplicated". It failed because a) they charged money to read the standards documents and b) TCP/IP already had so much deployment momentum that nothing was going to supplant it (we see proof of this in the fact that IPv6 also didn't achieve that). Edit: also c) there was no requirement (unlike RFCs) to have an interoperable reference implementation available. So the implementations that were created mostly didn't interoperate.

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

#96

Post by alienchow »

aooao wrote: post #27

I wonder if he would have designed TCP/IP differently if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it. 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.

It would depend on whether the computers back then could handle that (along with all the crypto algorithms in their infancy) when A:\ and B:\ weren't even a thing.

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

#98

Post by indigodaddy »

hydrogenbon007 wrote: post #97

I remember watching Lo and Behold by Werner Herzog and just going how dedicated the internet pioneers were working in their 70s and beyond. Legends https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828/

Didn't know about this doc, thank you.

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

#99

Post by driverdan »

djtriptych wrote: post #94
manuisin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, that was the golden age of Google.

I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.

They made him write code as part of an interview?

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

#100

Post by justin66 »

djtriptych wrote: post #94
manuisin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, that was the golden age of Google.

I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.

I suspect the only thing at risk of being smeared by a more complete retelling of that story is Google’s interview process.
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