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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

#171

Post by defrost »

Vaslo wrote: post #124
defrost wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President." ~ peer linked wikipedia article. Emphasis on actual words, with an obligatory side dish of context .

I’m talking about Gores quote. Did you read that too?

Yes, at the actual time it happened, and I saw it broadcast. As did Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

The key is not taking a quip on a live light entertainment show out of context, and resisting the urge to cough up shallow takes decades later perpetuating a politically biased take.

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

#173

Post by bigcityslider »

ayewo wrote: post #107
dboreham wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imple…

In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now? Or there is too much inertia for IPv8 to overcome to become a truly backwards compatible extension / superset of IPv4? Part of the reasons for the slow adoption of IPv6 was that it was never designed to be backwards compatible unlike IPv8. 1: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/dr…

That IPv8 draft has stuff like oauth in it that don't make sense. I put together an IPv5 proposal based on all the old ones. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781622

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

#174

Post by bigcityslider »

Sesse__ wrote: post #136
throw0101a wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now? IPv8 solves precisely zero of the problems that is causing a 'slow' roll out of IPv6 / replacement of IPv4: """ So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately: You have t…

> Actually, we tried that I'm always fascinated by how many people think IPv6 adoption would have gone lightning-fast if we just used This One Weird Trick, where said trick has actually been tried and didn't help. They usually refuse to back down even after you tell them so.

6to4 or NAT64 isn't the same thing as what all those IPv4+/5/7/8 people want, if that's what you were referring to. You don't actually own the IPv4-mapped-V6 address, as in packets don't get routed to you, they go to a relay that was notoriously flaky.

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

#175

Post by protocolture »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #164
tty456 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has he really evangelized the evil practices that you are so concerned about? Or would you lump in anyone working at Google to not live up to your expectations?

I would say there's a huge difference between taking a paycheck from Google because you need it to feed your family, and specifically carving out a role in promoting Google's agenda for two decades. Even in this puff piece about him, he is quoted promoting the agentic era of the Internet. (In other news, I recently read about a city that tried to hide that a third of it's water supply was getting used by a Google dat…

> I recently read about a city that tried to hide that a third of it's water supply was getting used by a Google datacenter.

I don't get why its suddenly fashionable to hate datacenters?

Did a lot of people really think that their code was running in an actual cloud?

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

#176

Post by etc-hosts »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #128
djtriptych wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vint had an interview?!! Who had the gall to suggest he needs to come in and be evaluated?

When Google hired Guido van Rossumm, they put him through the same trials they require of every employee who is thinking of contributing Python code. Then they yelled at him for making Python inefficient.

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

#177

Post by aksss »

Hey, I met Vint once at a conference - we were talking about some subsea fiber projects I was involved with. At the time he was working on interplanetary IP (IPIP? jk), which I thought was pretty stellar. Nice guy and very curious - qualities we should all work hard to foster.

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

#178

Post by jvanderbot »

esafak wrote: post #117
jvanderbot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He worked on a few X projects and had some free reign to push next gen ideas. Delay tolerant networking is the one I interacted with the most, as well as Google Loon, if you recall that.

Was DTN used in Loon? They are a natural fit.

DTN was, or was supposed to be.

Contract-graph routing (a core part of dtn - where do you send packets when there are delays in your route graph) was spec'd to be used, and I believe they may have done an experiment. The balloons had schedules or predictable winds, and satellites come and go (at least back then), so forwarding packets to the right carrier (or two) to get the next hop home was a big part of it.

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

#179

Post by foobarian »

jibal wrote: post #43

I worked on the ARPANET project under Steve Crocker at UCLA and met his bud Vint there (with his ever-present 3 piece suit, briefcase, and hearing aids) ... what a great guy. An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few ti…

Wow that's wild. Our org spent years playing jotto on office whiteboards before Covid. There would just be games going in random places.

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

#180

Post by esseph »

djtriptych wrote: post #157
jrockway wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on GFiber in the mid 2010s. We were having a debate about IPv6 support, which many people wanted to not do. I wrote a far-too-long essay on why it was important (at the time) and Vint picked it up to yell at the leadership team to get it prioritized. It was truly an "only at Google" experience to have someone who essentially invented the Internet reading your posts and acting on them. (I guess a decade later…

Wow Google Fiber what a blast from the past. I eventually went full time at Google NYC in the early 2010s - I remember the internal uproar when Reader was sunsetted =)

The Google Fiber name didn't change to GFiber until March 26th, 2026.
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