StephenFalken

hace 8 añosdiscuss

That made me remember part of an interview done to Dennis Ritchie back in 2000:

  When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, 
  I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed 
  under the advice of a worldwide crowd. C is peculiar in a lot 
  of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a 
  certain unity of approach that stems from development in a 
  small group.

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

  LinuxWorld.com: What is your advice to designers of new programming languages?
  
  Dennis Ritchie: At least for the people who send me mail about a new language 
  that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to 
  write a compiler. Don't have any expectations that anyone will use it, unless 
  you hook up with some sort of organization in a position to push it hard. 
  It's a lottery, and some can buy a lot of the tickets. There are plenty of 
  beautiful languages (more beautiful than C) that didn't catch on. But someone 
  does win the lottery, and doing a language at least teaches you something.
  
  Oh, by the way, if your new language does begin to grow in usage, it can 
  become really hard to fix early mistakes.[0]

[0] http://www.itworld.com/article/2826125/development/the-futur...

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

That truly is a pressing challenge due to all these DNS related issues.

It makes me remember a short paper from 1977 by Carl A. Sunshine [0] where he proposed a network architecture with no global unique addressing, no global routing, and no global naming. These three major axis of modern Internet censorship would fall apart.

David P. Reed, the designer of UDP, tried to push for larger role of source routing in the then nascent Internet architecture. But, somehow, it didn't reach what he had envisioned.

The 70's were a very interesting era on the research of networking fundamentals and I find it sad that such important topics like source routing weren't investigated much further in the following decades.

Shouldn't we somehow return to the fundamentals of networking to try to find ways of dealing with the censorship by the status quo against the natural need of sharing our digital culture in a free and anonymous way?

[0] http://cartap.us/p29-sunshine.pdf

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

An example of a BITNET Relay session [0]:

  /SIGNUP robert harper
  * Thank you for signing up, robert harper.
  * Now use the /SIGNON <nickname> command to
  * establish a nickname and to logon Relay.
  /SIGN ON rob
  Welcome to the Inter Chat Relay Network, Rob.
  Your host is RELAY@FINHUTC (Finland).
  Your last logon was at 08:39:23 on 03/17/89.
  There are 67 users on 27 relays.
  /HELP
  **************** Relay Commands ***************
  /Bye . . . . . . . . . . . . Signoff from Relay
  /Channel <num> . . . . .Change to channel <num>
  /Contact <host-nick> . .Show Relay contact info
  /Getop . . . . . Try to summon a Relay operator
  /Help. . . . . . . . . . . . . Prints this list
  /Info. . . . . . . . . . . Send RELAY INFO file
  /Invite <nick> . . .Invite user to your channel
  /Links . . . . . . . . . . .Shows active relays
  /List. . . . . . . . . . . List active channels
  /Msg <nick> <text> . . . .Sends private message
  /Nick <newnick>. . . . . . Change your nickname
  /Names <channel> . . . . .Show users with names
  /Rates . . . . . . . . . .Display message rates
  /Servers <node>. . . . Show relays serving node
  /Signon <nick> <channel> . . . .Signon to Relay
  /Signon <nick>,SHIFT . . Forces uppercase shift
  /Signon <nick>,UNSHIFT . Forces lowercase shift
  /Signoff . . . . . . . . . . Signoff from Relay
  /Signup <full name>. Signup or change full name
  /Stats . . . . . . . . Display Relay statistics
  /Summon <userid>@<node>. . Invite user to Relay
  /Topic <subject> . . . . Topic for your channel
  /Who <channel> . . . . Show users and nicknames
  /WhoIs <nick>. . . . . . . .Identify a nickname 
  /LINKS    
  RELAY Version 01.24x0 Host RELAY@FINHUTC (Finland)
  Relay  RELAY  @ CEARN   (  Geneva  ) ->  Finland
  Relay  RELAY  @ DEARN   ( Germany  ) ->  Switzerland
  Relay  RELAY  @ AEARN   ( Austria  ) ->  Germany
  Relay  RELAY  @CZHRZU1A (  Zurich  ) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @ HEARN   ( Holland  ) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @TAUNIVM  ( TAUrelay ) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @EB0UB011 (Barcelona ) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @ ORION   (New_Jersey) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @ BITNIC  ( NewYork  ) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RELAY  @JPNSUT10 (  Tokyo   ) ->  NewYork
  Relay  RELAY  @ VILLVM  (Philadelph) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RELAY  @NDSUVM1  (No_Dakota ) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RLY   @CORNELLC (Ithaca_NY ) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RELAY  @ UTCVM   (Tennessee ) ->  Pittsburgh
  Relay  RELAY  @UIUCVMD  (Urbana_IL ) ->  Pittsburgh
  Relay  RELAY  @CANADA01 ( Canada01 ) ->  Ithaca_NY
  Relay  RELAY  @  AUVM   ( Wash_DC  ) ->  Va_Tech
  Relay  RELAY  @ VTVM2   ( Va_Tech  ) ->  Ithaca_NY
  Relay  RELAY  @UALTAVM  ( Edmonton ) ->  Canada01
  Relay  RELAY  @NYUCCVM  (   Nyu    ) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RELAY  @  UWF    (Pensacola ) ->  Va_Tech
  Relay MASRELAY@  UBVM   ( Buffalo  ) ->  Ithaca_NY
  Relay  RELAY  @CMUCCVMA (Pittsburgh) ->  Ithaca_NY
  Relay  RELAY  @PURCCVM  (  Purdue  ) ->  Pittsburgh
  Relay  RELAY  @UREGINA1 (Regina_Sk ) ->  Canada01
  Relay  RELAY  @ GITVM1  ( Atlanta  ) ->  Tennessee

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET_Relay#Usage

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

What I see is that no amount of monitoring of the more radicalized elements of society will alter the deep and profound civilizational changes that are taking place in Europe.

This seems to be about the end of an era and the beginning of a whole new one. And nothing seems able to alter that course of History.

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

  One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of (state) violence will
  ever solve a (hard) math problem.

  -- Jacob Appelbaum

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

I always ask this to myself:

  If we haven't been able to make our human civilizations sustainable here on 
  planet Earth (where we have the perfect conditions to do so), how will we 
  ever create sustainable environments in much harsher conditions such as on 
  the Moon or Mars ?

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

I wonder if they will ever be able to ban steganography on ham radio. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

Another good example is Lynn Conway [1][2], that together with Carver Mead wrote "Introduction to VLSI System Design" bestseller that would catalyze the Mead & Conway revolution [3] in VLSI design in late 70's, early 80's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

[2] http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead_%26_Conway_revolution

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

There is an interesting graph on how the block chain size has progressed over the years since Jan 2009 [1].

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&show...

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

Great point.

The original Usenet comp.mail.pine newsgroup post [1] by Mark Crispin (father of the IMAP protocol):

  This statement is based upon a terrible misunderstand of Postel's
  robustness principle. I knew Jon Postel. He was quite unhappy with
  how his robustness principle was abused to cover up non-compliant
  behavior, and to criticize compliant software.

  Jon's principle could perhaps be more accurately stated as "in general,
  only a subset of a protocol is actually used in real life. So, you should
  be conservative and only generate that subset. However, you should also
  be liberal and accept everything that the protocol permits, even if it
  appears that nobody will ever use it."

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.mail.pine/E5ojND1L4u8/i...

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

It's pretty impressive how LEGO has changed its destiny in the last 10 years, given this: [1]

  In 2003, The LEGO Group faced a budget deficit of 1.4 billion DKK (220 million
  USD at then current exchange rates; equal to EUR 175 million),[40] causing
  Poul Plougmann to be replaced by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen as president. In the
  following year, almost one thousand employees were laid off, due to budget
  cuts. However, in October, 2004, on reporting an even larger deficit, 
  Kristiansen also stepped down as president, while placing 800 million DKK of 
  his private funds into the company.

Right now, LEGO is the largest toy company in the world, surpassing Mattel since late 2014. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lego_Group#Financial_resul...

[2] http://time.com/money/3268065/lego-largest-toy-company-matte...

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

  C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely
  helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language
  efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and
  fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments.

  -- Dennis M. Ritchie (in "The Development of the C Language" [1])

[1] http://heim.ifi.uio.no/inf2270/programmer/historien-om-C.pdf

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

Great point !

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

You raise a really interesting point about the relevance of Source Routing.

Recently I read a small but significant paper by Carl A. Sunshine [1] (from the beginning of 1977) about Source Routing and some of its implications. This was written at a time when there was still a very active community researching the fundamentals of Computer Networking.

He shows how one could build an even simpler and dumber (while still functional) core computer network with no routing infrastructure (pretty amazing concept when you think of it), no global addresses and no global node naming. All that complexity would be transferred to the endpoints, making the whole network even more configurable and adaptable to topology changes. Endpoints would have a more powerful and free participation in that network. The End-to-End Principle taken to its limits.

Is there still some deep fundamental research on the feasibility of such a large scale network based on Source Routing ?

[1] Source Routing in Computer Networks http://cartap.us/p29-sunshine.pdf

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

For those wishing to try and submit the problems, there is an online judge containing the ACM-ICPC World Finals since 2012 till 2015 [1].

[1] https://icpc.kattis.com/problems

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

A bit of UDP history by its creator [1]:

  Actually, UDP was "un-designed" by me and others.By this I mean that 
  UDP was the final expression of a process that today we would call 
  "factoring" an overcomplex design. Originally, the ARPANET end-to-end 
  protocol NCP was a "kitchen sink" oriented toward providing remote 
  teletype-centric access using the "telnet" protocol and the "FTP" 
  protocol to remote machines over a packet network.

  A group of us, interested in a mix of real-time telephony, local area 
  networks, distributed operating systems, and communications security, 
  argued for several years for a datagram based network, rather than a 
  virtual circuit based network. The group involved me, John Schoch and 
  Yogen Dalal of Xerox PARC, Danny Cohen of ISI (now at Caltech, I think), 
  and Steve Crocker, with Jon Postel as a supporter, and Vint Cerf and Bob 
  Kahn as neutral referees.

  UDP was actually "designed" in 30 minutes on a blackboard when we decided 
  pull the original TCP protocol apart into TCP and IP, and created UDP on 
  top of IP as an alternative for multiplexing and demultiplexing IP 
  datagrams inside a host among the various host processes or tasks. But it 
  was a placeholder that enabled all the non-virtual-circuit protocols since 
  then to be invented, including encapsulation, RTP, DNS, ..., without having 
  to negotiate for permission either to define a new protocol or to extend 
  TCP by adding "features".

[1] "udp and me" http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=6

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

Thanks for that snapshot. Unfortunately it's missing a lot of the content that was available there. It's only around 1/3 of the full content.

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

That makes me remember the now famous quote:

  The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural 
  resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. 
  When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-
  -free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

    -- Alan Kay

StephenFalken

hace 11 añosdiscuss

Some years before his death, Konrad Zuse wrote a book about his long and interesting life called "Der Computer - Mein Lebenswerk", which was later translated to an English version titled as "The Computer - My Life".

StephenFalken

Submissions

How do I continue in my math studies knowing people like Terrence Tao exist?

Reboot of ReBoot officially coming to TV with 26 new episodes

Dennis Ritchie official webpage deleted by Alcatel-Lucent(/Nokia)

Darknet Sweep Casts Doubt on Tor

CitizenFour (Laura Poitras, Oct 11, 2014)

Kim Dotcom parts ways with Baboom: 'The music industry hates me'

The State of C (1988)

How Google Fired Scribe Creator (Brian Reid)

One Bitcoin Group Now Controls 51% of Total Mining Power

The Rise and Fall of Netscape

Match Fixing Analysis Across Europe (2013/2014) [pdf]

Vint Cerf On How NSA Stood In The Way Of Early TCP/IP Security

NASA Suspends Activities With Russian Government Representatives

MH370: "I believe I saw the Malaysian Airlines plane come down"

Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs its freedom

Europa Mission Gets Boost From President’s New NASA Budget

Shirley Temple dies age 85

High Tech Engineering From NASA

What is the cost to make Smartphone in USA? $4

Bitcoin, or The 4 Main Stages of a Bubble

comments