subject: The Tech Lab: Vint Cerf posted: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:16:50 +0100
[Can't fault this one, sometimes Mr Cerf can get a little starry-eyed
but this article has none of that - in his own words as well. A nice
wrap-up of current and future issues, even bit-rot gets a mention.
Plenty of stuff here for fortune-seekers as well - "global demand for
new ways to do data mining" ... "non-trivial migration to IPv6" ....
"keeping digital information meaningful" ... "general purpose
controllers" ... a business might be built on any of these. Looks
like IT might be a profitable industry for a few more years yet... -
Stu]
Vint Cerf, is known as one of the founder fathers of the internet,
and played a key role in the development of the protocols which
underpin the global net. He was a founding member of the Internet
Society and is Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.
As intellectual phenomena go, the internet is still very young.
If we look at other innovative technologies that fundamentally
transformed human communications - the printing press, the telephone
and television, to name a few - we are confronted with the fact that
it takes generations for their full effects to be understood.
The internet, by comparison, has only existed for three decades, and
the World Wide Web is younger still.
The internet, however, stands poised to become the greatest
communications platform humanity has ever known. It has profoundly
increased access to information around the world, and it has likewise
provided a platform for free expression on a scale unimaginable a
generation ago.
For a variety of reasons - cultural, political, technological - the
internet has grown rapidly.
The benefits it offers and the degree to which we rely on it (for
everything from personal communications to global financial
transactions), far outstrip its relatively short existence.
As access to the internet spreads to more and more places around the
world, more people will come online; they'll access the net through a
wider variety of devices, and they'll produce and consume new types
of content.
The continued expansion of the internet poses very real challenges to
those of us responsible for its health.
Key infrastructure
The robustness and security of the internet will climb in importance
as we rely increasingly on it and its services.
Improving the resilience and resistance to attack of key
infrastructure such as the Domain Name System (the phone book of the
internet) and the routing system will be major focal points for near-
term internet development.
Introducing DNSSEC (security for the Domain Name System) and the
digital signing of address space by the Regional Internet Registries
will assume much higher priority.
Internet-based software and digital goods have historically been
vulnerable to various kinds of failures and subject to a variety of
attacks. The computer science community is challenged to devise
solutions to these problems.
Capacity poses a further challenge to the future of the web. As more
devices become part of the internet (think of the three billion
mobile phones already in operation), we will need to move to a new
internet address space, called IPv6.
With its 128 bits of address space (about 340 trillion trillion
trillion addresses), there will be ample address space for the
foreseeable future.
It will be a non-trivial exercise to bring IPv6 online in parallel
with the present IPv4 system and it is not too early to get started.
Efforts in Japan and China have begun blazing trails towards this
important new goal.
Stunningly valuable
Going forward, we must also remain aware of limitations of the data
we access through the internet. Information on the web varies in
quality from completely useless or even damaging to stunningly
valuable.
Today's search engines draw the most relevant information to our
attention, and as more data become available online, the importance
of search engines will only increase. In the future, people around
the world will likely look for new ways to identify the authenticity
of online information sources.
We will also be confronted with a kind of "information decay" in
which digital objects become less and less accessible owing to the
age of the software that created it.
As an example: it is already a challenge to watch videos posted on
the BBC website in 1997.
Imagine trying to watch the same video in 100 years. Or in one
thousand years.
It's not only file formats that change, though. Changes in computer
programs, operating systems and even the hardware that we use to
build computers will accentuate the challenge of keeping digital
information meaningful.
This raises a host of intellectual property questions that will
almost certainly need to be considered.
Prosaic opportunities
From a strictly technological standpoint, then, the future of the
internet poses a number of challenges to computer scientists. The
future of the net also poses opportunities for society as a whole.
Some of these opportunities are prosaic. With home, car and office
appliances all online and rich sensor networks as part of the
landscape of the internet, it is easy to predict that people will be
looking for online services to manage these devices and systems,
regardless of where they happen to be.
It is clear that programmable mobiles have the potential to become
general purpose "controllers" that allow us to interact, possibly
indirectly through online services, with the many devices that
service us from moment to moment.
The internet is a medium for communicating information, and by
democratising access to information the internet is changing people's
lives for the better.
We have barely begun what will no doubt be a long journey, but
already the openness of the web is fostering free expression in parts
of the world that need it most.
There are challenges and setbacks along the way, but the trend is
clear and inexorable. At the same time, access to information is
expanding rapidly.
Usage spike
When Google News for mobile devices became available in French, the
biggest spike in usage outside France was in Côte d'Ivoire.
In the developing world especially, the proliferation of mobile
devices and improvements in the ability of those devices to access
the web will accelerate access to information.
Every year, humanity produces more data, and we must decide how that
data will be found, shared, remembered, and interpreted. As we become
better able to cope with huge quantities of information, scientific
and otherwise, our appetites for organising and mining it will
increase.
We have already witnessed the salient benefits of shared scientific
databases such as the online human genome archives.
The idea that all the world's knowledge could be discoverable not
just by humans but by programs acting on their behalf at speeds well
beyond the superhuman, is one of this century's most exciting
opportunities, especially as much of this information may lead to
medical understanding and breakthroughs.
As we deepen our understanding of our biology - the move from
genetics to epigenetics and the proteome - our understanding of
ourselves and the universe around us will deepen.
What a gift to be a part of this period in the evolution of our
civilisation.
