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Net's evolution surprises creator
LINDSBORG, May 27, 2009 (The Salina Journal - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
One of the people who essentially "invented the Internet" didn't imagine what it would become more than three decades later -- you did know it's been around that long, right? -- and if he had it to do over again, there are some things Vinton Cerf would change.
Though annoying, he wouldn't change your mom's ability to send you 10-year-old jokes and pictures of kittens that have been forwarded, and forwarded and forwarded, etc. The Viagra spam and Nigerian princesses who need your help aren't really a concern for the architect of the Internet either.
Cerf, who co-invented the TCP/IP protocols that run the Internet, likens that accomplishment to building a road system.
"We figured out how to build roads," he said of himself and co-inventor Rob Kahn. "We didn't care what kind of cars you drove on them, within limits, or what kind of buildings you put along them. The Internet is an infrastructure on top of which all kinds of uses are possible."
Cerf was the keynote speaker Sunday at Bethany College's commencement exercises, and in an interview just before that, said he's long wished the Internet had been built with today's usage in mind.
Behind every Web site address, such as www.salina.com, is what's called an IP address, a numerical address such as 64.79.165.124 that the Internet uses to find the site.
The problem is, Cerf said, that system only allows for about 4.3 billion unique addresses, and with more and more devices connected to the Internet -- not only computers, but Internet-connected pdas, smart phones, security systems, and so on, all those addresses are expected to be in use by next year.
When Cerf was developing the system, called IP version 4, in the 1970s, he and others considered other options, such as a 128-bit address that would have allowed for 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses -- or many billions of addresses per person -- but didn't see the need.
"How could I justify that?" Cerf said, considering the additional computing overhead that would have been needed to work such a system. "4.3 billion addresses seemed like enough to do an experiment, and then it caught on, and it's what we've got."
For more than 10 years, that new 128-bit addressing system, called IPv6, has been slowly gaining acceptance, and Cerf urges networks to adopt it as soon as possible.
He can't do what he did in 1983, to push adoption of the TCP/IP over older computer communication protocols.
Then, he said Sunday, he told everyone on the still-tiny net that anyone who didn't start using TCP/IP wouldn't be able to use the net anymore; to punctuate his point, he shut down the older protocols for one day, so people would know he meant business.
That caused a spike in people starting to use the newer protocols, he said, and when that spike plateaued, he disabled the older protocols for two days.
"Sometimes, you have to jam it down their throats," he said.
Intellectual bumblebee Today, Cerf doesn't have the power to take down the Internet.
"I'm kind of an intellectual bumblebee," he said of his job as VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, which is not only the world's most popular Internet search engine but also provides services such as customized calendars, financial information, mapping and direction-finding services, photo-editing services and even its own web browser, called Chrome.
His job today, Cerf said, is to find new technologies that help people solve problems and do what they want to do -- or to find existing solutions to those problems that aren't yet widely known.
"I can move from one thing to another, or dive in deeply," he said.
And it can take years for an idea or an invention to make it into widespread acceptance, he said, noting that the TCP/IP protocols the Internet currently runs under were set in 1973. The idea of hyperlinking text dates to the 1960s -- even though at the time it was only done on one computer.
And when he was building the Internet's basic architecture -- back during the Nixon administration -- he had access to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) "where we saw the personal computer being developed," he said. The first computer mouse using a rotating ball was built at Xerox PARC about the same time TCP/IP was created.
Beta? Alpha?
Cerf also said he is intrigued by the newly unveiled "Wolfram Alpha" Internet service, which is intended to understand and answer questions in a natural language format, rather than provide a list of Web sites based on keywords, which is essentially what Google's search service does.
The service was developed by Stephen Wolfram, who developed the "Mathematica" scientific computing software package, and authored the 1,197-page (not counting the index) book "A New Kind of Science."
"Wolfram Alpha is designed to give you a single authoritative answer," Cerf said. "Google doesn't attempt to do that."
Each of those paradigms can have its shortcomings, Cerf said; he's doubtful the vast majority of questions have that "single authoritative answer," but Google has its shortcomings, too.
Recently, for example, someone asked Google the number of calories in a pound, Cerf said.
A person -- or a computer -- that understands language might have asked "a pound of what," as common usage would suggest the question was about food, and a pound of lettuce and a pound of lard have different calorie counts.
Instead, Cerf said, the Google computers interpreted the question as a simple matter of converting from one unit to another -- such as inches to feet -- and knowing Einstein's famous E=mc^2, returned a result in the range of 9,000,000,000,000,000 calories. Even considering that what dietitians commonly call a calorie is 1,000 calories to a chemist or physicist, that's a lot.
"If they meant to ask how many calories in a Quarter-Pounder, they probably decided not to get one," Cerf said.
He also questioned Wolfram's naming system; the test version of Wolfram Alpha, released to a handful of people months ago, was called "Wolfram Beta," in keeping with the tradition of adding "beta" to the end of test versions of software.
But with the public version being called Wolfram Alpha, Cerf wondered whether the next version would be called Wolfram Beta, and what confusion that might cause.
In the news Google also has been in the news in recent months for its Google News service, which reads online news sites around the world, and provides users with a few words of a story along with a link to the original site.
Several news organizations, such as The Associated Press, and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. have accused Google News of stealing their content and/or demanding to be paid by Google for linking.
"I'm puzzled by that," Cerf said. "We think we're driving a fair amount of business to the newspaper Web sites -- it's their job to monetize that. I don't understand the argument, we're driving business to them."
To see more of The Salina Journal, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.saljournal.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Salina Journal, Kan.
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