IPv6 is not in and of itself risky. There's really nothing to it...just a bigger address. But imagine how scared people were of the Y2K problem. I think when changing to a different address format, a lot of applications will break. I think we will need to move to IPv6, but it is just so frustrating that it would have been so easy in 1992. The Internet wasn't this big mission critical thing. It was still a researchy thing.
So yes, I believe we will gradually convert, but there will be lots of headaches during the transition.
It's possible that with things like NATs maybe we could last with IPv4 forever. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to convert, and the more people invent bandaids that will let us last with IPv4 longer.
By the way, I'm going to get kicked out of the conference room soon, so I'm quickly trying to find any other questions I should be answering...just letting you know in case I suddenly disappear when a crowd of grumpy people who'd reserved the room show up...
Funny thing you mention that...my daughter plays violin (and sings opera). I've always been her piano accompanist. One time we were doing a recital of German and Italian arias, and my son, for fun, set Algorhyme to music, and so we threw that into the program. Then a few years later, came TRILL. The first time I gave a talk about it, I felt like there wasn't enough jokes, so I called up my son at 10 PM, telling him I wanted a version of Algorhyme for TRILL, explained the new technology, and told him I needed to fly the next morning, so I told him I'd give him one hour, call him at 11, and if he did a good enough job I'd use his poem in the talk, and otherwise, hey...all he'd have lost was one hour of his life...and he owed me that much...
So I called him an hour later, and he did such a good job that it's actually in the TRILL spec. (I wish I could remember the RFC number so people could look it up.)
Not sure how word of that came out...I was on a cruise to see the eclipse in Siberia...not a huge boat like usual cruises...a few hundred people. The tour organizers kept asking me whether I'd be in their talent show. About the 6th time they asked I said, "If you're desperate"...and they said they were. I figured I'd play piano. The day of the talent show, Charlie (my SO) and I were walking around and he said, "Is there a piano on this boat?" And then we looked for it, couldn't find it, and then asked the crew. Turned out there was no piano. So I thought. Gee...I've always wanted to try standup comedy, and I'll never see these people again, so why not. And it was really amazing. I don't think I was nearly as funny as they acted like I was, but for the rest of the cruise I could hear people talking about me, retelling my stories.
It's quite intoxicating, getting people to laugh, but luckily I'm sensible enough not to quit my day job. :-)
Ah yes. An opportunity to rant. What is IP, after all...it's just an envelope for addressing your data to the destination. IPv4 has a 4 byte destination address. In 1992, the IAB (part of the IETF) suggested replacing IP with CLNP, the similar ISO standard, which had 20 byte addresses. CLNP was just fine, actually superior to IPv6 (which wasn't invented at that point), and implemented by all the major vendors. But because of NIH (not invented here), and rivalry between standards bodies, IETF decided to invent their own thing. IPv6 is better than IPv4...bigger addresses would be nice. But it's so much harder to migrate the Internet at this point in time than it would have been in 1992.
One thing is TRILL, which was a simple idea that I proposed about 6 years ago. It's intended to replace spanning tree Ethernet, but in a compatible way. You can take a spanning tree-based Ethernet, replace any subset of your bridges with TRILL switches, and the more you replace, the better bandwidth utilization and the more stable it is, but the nodes attached don't have to change in any way...just that the "Ethernet" they are attached to gets better. It's now an IETF standard.
And I'm thinking of other ways of making protocols better, for instance saving wireless bandwidth, user authentication, etc.
"what is the number one problem the Internet faces today"
That's a hard question. DDOS, user authentication, running out of power, running out of storage...I can't believe that companies allow us to post our family photos, videos, etc....and for free! The amount of storage is just mind-boggling.
Question "Did you really develop spanning tree algorithm in a week?"
Yes. My manager posed the problem late on a Friday. And to make it more challenging, he said, I should make it scale as a constant, meaning, the amount of memory to run it shouldn't grow with the number of bridges and links. That sounded ricidulous. Nothing scales as a constant. But that night I realized it was trivial, and furthermore, required only 50 bytes per port on the bridge (so a 6 port bridge would require 300 bytes), regardless of the size of the network. I spend Monday and Tuesday of the next week writing the spec, in enough detail that the implementers got it working in about 2 months without asking me a single question, and the remainder of the week I wrote the poem that was the abstract of the paper in which I published it. The poem is called "Algorhyme", and it's easily found on the net.
And by the way...I thought forwarding Ethernet packets was a mistake, and it should be done at layer 3, but anyway...it was fun.
@Radia: In your current posiution as an Intel Fellow, how do you see the likes of Intel adjusting to the changing IT landscaoe in order for them to stay relevant in a rapidly changing IT field?
Hi everyone. I will scan for some questions to answer.
"What would I have done if not computers"?
Actually, I had no particular plan other than "something vaguely interesting, working with people I enjoyed working with, that paid enough to live on". I would have been happy with pretty much any sort of sciency/math thing, but I also really like writing. Sometimes I say that there are two types of people, those that would be happy doing pretty much anything, and those that won't be happy no matter what they do. So...I'm the first, I think.
@paul - it is one of the most interesting threats that I have read about in a while... just read through the scenario presented in the article(s) and consider how easy they are to do and have some user perform
social engineering is the most difficult threat to block & challenge... consider this news from today:
New Trojan routes your bank's calls to CROOKS
"By gaining control of phone lines, the crooks are able to divert calls from banks querying suspicious transactions to hacker-controlled phone numbers."
@Radia: You mentioned in one of your interviews that technology as it is today is very complex. What do engineers need to do i order on simplifying technology?
@Radia: How do you assess the curent state of computeer science education in the U.S. and what do you think the U.S. can do boost the talent pooll of network security experts?
What a priviledge to have on the show today someone who has been branded as the "Mother of the Internet". Can't wait to hear her thoughts on a lot of topics
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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