Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Greyglers@Google: Vint Cerf

Googlers are lucky to have among them some great luminaries of computer science, including VP and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf. If you dont know Vint, you can start by checking out his nearly 380,000 mentions on Google, the pivotal roles hes played in developing the web, the significant honors he's received all over the world, and his nickname, father of the Internet.

You can learn more by attending a rare tech talk by Vint, presented by the Greyglers*: Reimagining the Internet: If wed known then what we know now, what would we have done differently?

Back in the Internet's design phase, Bob Kahn and I spent six months developing concepts and architecture and a year creating the TCP specification, but we didn't know that the idea would work. We concentrated on solving the problems we envisioned, such as networks that couldn't handle each other's packet lengths. Security against direct attacks and authentication of sources weren't high on the agenda. Now that we have spam, DDOS, viruses, and worms, we look back and think about what we might have done differently had we realized that we were creating a global infrastructure for the 21st century!

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