I met Vint at the Kech Institute for Space Studies. He arrived to help us look at in-space data centers for planetary science throughout the solar system. He was a big proponent of delay-tolerant networking and other useful networking stacks, so he was the "rep" for that layer of problems.
Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He took the note-takers job during our breakouts, had beers with us after the session, and asked really good questions and never asserted anything the whole time.
What a legend.
ixaxaar 3 hours ago [-]
Apparently there's "more to come" and its not a complete retirement.
justin66 3 hours ago [-]
It’s hard to imagine that guy sitting still.
djtriptych 5 hours ago [-]
hah. I was an intern at Google in 2005 when he was hired and remember the wave of reverence that went through Mountain View. Salute to a legend!
It’s like two lifetimes in tech years. I remember that summer Google Earth was launched, we were a year removed from the Gmail launch, and I worked on shipping the first Summer of Code.
manuisin 5 hours ago [-]
wow, that was the golden age of Google.
djtriptych 2 hours ago [-]
I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.
justin66 2 hours ago [-]
I suspect the only thing at risk of being smeared by a more complete retelling of that story is Google’s interview process.
driverdan 2 hours ago [-]
They made him write code as part of an interview?
Angostura 6 hours ago [-]
I interviewed him a few times, when I was a tech journalist in the 90s - a very impressive man.
However I never forget my surprise, Idly flicking through TV one evening and coming across Earth Final Conflict - and there was Vint in a fairly substantial role
atombender 3 hours ago [-]
Anyone know what he actually did at Google? Was it an active role, did he publish anything interesting? Or was it more of an Institute for Advanced Study kind of position?
acheron 1 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
jvanderbot 1 hours ago [-]
He worked on a few X projects and had some free reign to push next gen ideas. Delay tolerant networking is the one I interacted with the most, as well as Google Loon, if you recall that.
bushbaba 1 hours ago [-]
He was hired to go to meetings and state “I’m vint cerf, I work at Google” then blab for 2 mins and introduce the actual speaker for a meeting/conference.
Similar ish to an influencer
IncreasePosts 29 minutes ago [-]
I loved being able to say "vint cerf, my coworker, invented the internet"
hydrogenbon007 2 hours ago [-]
I remember watching Lo and Behold by Werner Herzog and just going how dedicated the internet pioneers were working in their 70s and beyond.
I wonder if he would have designed TCP/IP differently if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it.
Maybe having multiple streams within a single connection, like QUIC does, would have been a better choice. Also being able to demarcate message boundaries within the protocol itself, perhaps, instead of it being a simple byte stream.
Sesse__ 5 hours ago [-]
I was at a talk where he brought up exactly this (I also once did a talk alongside him, but that's a different story). He said there would be two changes:
1. It would have 128-bit addresses.
2. It would have end-to-end encryption (or was it authentication, I forget).
IPv6 was supposed to fix both of these, with IPsec mandatory, but the latter demand sort of faded out into obscurity. We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.
throw0101a 48 minutes ago [-]
> We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.
The "solving" of encryption with TLS should not be celebrated.
Everything needs to go over TLS/HTTP-443 because of middleware boxes basically blocking everything else by default in many cases, and so application/protocol designs have to shoehorn / kludge everything into a round hole even if it's a square peg.
Certainly I'd want everything to have encryption at the higher layers (OSI 5-7), but having opportunistic encryption at IP (OSI 3) would also be great because snoopers could tell that two nodes are communicating but not how / what: RTSP? Torrent? Mindcraft? PvP2 game? If every node could (say) do an IKEv2 negotiation with every other node have IP-level traffic wrapped in IPsec that would help with traffic analysis.
hyperman1 4 hours ago [-]
Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.
cobbzilla 3 hours ago [-]
You’re definitely right — the tech stack travels through time along what’s called a “path dependent” trajectory.
> The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.
dboreham 2 hours ago [-]
As someone who was there at the time, OSI certainly didn't fail by being "overcomplicated". It failed because a) they charged money to read the standards documents and b) TCP/IP already had so much deployment momentum that nothing was going to supplant it (we see proof of this in the fact that IPv6 also didn't achieve that). Edit: also c) there was no requirement (unlike RFCs) to have an interoperable reference implementation available. So the implementations that were created mostly didn't interoperate.
ayewo 1 hours ago [-]
In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now?
Or there is too much inertia for IPv8 to overcome to become a truly backwards compatible extension / superset of IPv4?
Part of the reasons for the slow adoption of IPv6 was that it was never designed to be backwards compatible unlike IPv8.
> In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now?
IPv8 solves precisely zero of the problems that is causing a 'slow' roll out of IPv6 / replacement of IPv4:
"""
So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:
You have to change the version number.
You have to add new code to handle the new version.
Furthermore, you don't want to split the Internet in two, so you must design a method of interworking between the old version and the new version. Annoyingly, you need to do that in a way that can be done completely in machines that know about the new version, because other machines don't know anything at all about the new version, by definition. So,
You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know nothing of the new protocol.
Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only two solutions:
(3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.
(3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses between the old and new protocols.
[…]
Incidentally, "IPv8" proponents often ask why IPv6 didn't simply stick some extra bits on the front of IPv4 addresses, instead of inventing a whole new format. Actually, we tried that: the "IPv4-Compatible IPv6 address" format was defined in [RFC3513] but deprecated by [RFC4291] because it turned out to be of no practical use for coexistence or transition. The related "IPv4-Mapped IPv6 address" format is still valid and has a role in the POSIX socket API. Mappings of this kind also figured in the moderately successful coexistence technologies known as 6to4 [RFC3056, RFC3068] and Teredo [RFC4380], which have now been overtaken by events.
he's answered this question a few times. It's basically "how was I supposed to have any idea what the implications were?" He said something like "16 bit, 32 bit, 48 bit addressing, it felt all equally improbable. Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
johannes1234321 1 hours ago [-]
> "... Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
This thinking can be seen in the allocation of network blocks. Mercedes Benz getting 53.0.0.0/8 is just a "we have more addresses than we ever need."
If somebody had imagined "yeah, let's give an address to each of our vehicles" they would have realized the space running out.
justin66 2 hours ago [-]
There’s a whole body of work in the form of public statements and documents from Vint Cerf on that topic. You could explore Google for hours…
It would depend on whether the computers back then could handle that (along with all the crypto algorithms in their infancy) when A:\ and B:\ weren't even a thing.
greyface- 5 hours ago [-]
> if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it
In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
The computers of today are vastly more capable than the computers of the day when he came up with TCP/IP so if he were to have a second chance, knowing what he knows now, we'd have to calibrate it against the fact that computers in the 1970s simply weren't as capable as the beasts we have today.
nickdothutton 4 hours ago [-]
Worked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
wwind123 6 hours ago [-]
I still remember back in 2005 when I just joined a company, a coworker was quipping Google is not a real elite company, because it doesn't even have a Turing Award winner. I showed him the news that Vint Cerf joined Google recently.
FartyMcFarter 4 hours ago [-]
Now they have several Turing Award winners, and several Nobel Prize winners.
mahouk 47 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if the transformer inventors will ever get a Turing (honestly proving to be one of the most transformative - no pun intended - technologies of the millennium so far). I know pretty much all of them left Google but they'd still be counted as alumni.
chips_not_fries 8 hours ago [-]
A genuine innovator
No matter what you think of Google
linguae 5 hours ago [-]
I may be biased since I interned at Google in 2013 and 2014, but Google in the 2000s and early 2010s felt downright magical as someone who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research. They made impressive technologies that still hold up today, like MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner. They hired many legends of computer science and software engineering, such as Rob Pike and Jeff Dean.
I’m concerned about the power that Google and other Big Tech companies have, but from a technical point of view Google has a lot of impressive technologies, and from a workplace standpoint, it seemed idyllic back in the early 2010s, though I’ve heard the work culture has changed in the past decade, and I may have rose-colored glasses from only being an intern there, never a full-timer.
kaladin-jasnah 2 hours ago [-]
> who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research
I interacted with many professors in OS research and other adjacent systems fields when touring grad schools and I heard or saw that some were extremely toxic or intense compared to other fields I saw. With OS at least, big tech companies seem to hold a lot of influence over research directions (eg. so much of it is specifically for AI datacenters, or for one company's AI datacenter problems), and I asked OS professors about this and got disheartened replies that there was nothing they could do because of the incentives in the field. I was quite disillusioned. I know that AI being a hot new topic makes leaves more stones unturned and might lead to more publishability, but it's still depressing.
linguae 35 minutes ago [-]
I’m out of the loop these days in systems research since I largely focus on programming languages and AI these days (though I still love systems) and I treat research more as a side hobby rather than a full-fledged career. It’s disappointing to hear about toxic systems labs. There’s also the “funding-or-perish” and “publish-or-perish” pressures of academia. This is one of the reasons why I teach at a community college, where 8 months of the year I focus on teaching, leaving me 4 months of break per year where I could do research without having to worry about my tenure chances or about funding, though it would be nice to be able to pay some students to help with research projects, and it would also be nice to have the funds to buy expensive equipment such as GPUs with large amounts of RAM.
echelon 6 hours ago [-]
Google can't tarnish Vint Cerf.
There are lots of brilliant people at Google who do no evil.
The fact that the company makes evil decisions about the direction of the web, privacy, and performs blatantly monopolistic actions does not outweigh the good things people at Google have done. At least not yet.
You can hate the company but love the brilliant work the engineers have done. The same can be said of lots of companies: Apple, Anthropic, ...
Meta, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. It's less of an overt monopoly, but some of its actions are heinously amoral.
3 hours ago [-]
ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago [-]
Wasn’t the first time, for him, but he has managed to keep his name in the clear.
He worked for MCI/Worldcomm, before Google. Bernie Ebbers went to jail, for that.
Ahh… the good ol’ days, when we actually jailed scumbag billionaires, instead of voting massive pay bumps…
3 hours ago [-]
bflesch 4 hours ago [-]
His name shows up in Epstein files as #1 on Epstein's list of scientists
It doesn't indicate Epstein even met with Cerf. It looks like a wish list.
incognito124 6 hours ago [-]
I'm relatively young and my first exposure to life and work of Vint Cerf was through DTN and Interplanetary Internet. What a life of accomplishment!
jdw64 6 hours ago [-]
How amazing it must be to be called the 'father' of something that everyone uses... I'm envious. Could I ever create something like that? As a programmer, the dream is always to build something that others actually use properly.
pwdisswordfishq 7 hours ago [-]
> a relatively good career
What's that for?
lkramer 7 hours ago [-]
I believe it's what is called a joke. I'm with you, I don't like them either.
khurs 5 hours ago [-]
It's written down so no body language.
The video probably shows a wide smile whilst saying it.
TAlborough 3 hours ago [-]
Thank you. May your peace continue.
jibal 5 hours ago [-]
I worked on the ARPANET project under Steve Crocker at UCLA and met his bud Vint there (with his ever-present 3 piece suit, briefcase, and hearing aids) ... what a great guy.
An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few times, and then collared me to ask me a couple of questions: 1) It seemed to know some of the words he entered but not all -- what was up with that? 2) What sort of AI algorithm was I using for the program to make guesses? (It usually beat the human player.)
Answers: 1) I didn't have a digitized dictionary (it was 1969!) so I hand-entered the five letter words from a pocket dictionary but got tired halfway through so it only knew words starting with a-l. 2) The program would eliminate any words that didn't fit the responses to its guesses so far and then pick a remaining word at random.
Upon hearing my answers Vint walked away in disgust! But years later he gave me a recommendation when I interviewed with Google (it didn't work out for other reasons).
I also shared a cubicle wall with another Van Nuys High alumni, Jon Postel, aka "God of the Internet". Sartorially, Jon was the complete opposite of Vint--long scraggly beard, blue jeans, forever barefoot--but those weren't the things that mattered. Man, those were the days.
jamesbelchamber 5 hours ago [-]
IP on everything :D
IncreasePosts 29 minutes ago [-]
Vint cerf now vintage cerf
p1dda 4 hours ago [-]
How many "father's of the Internet" are there exactly?
Y-bar 4 hours ago [-]
Exactly as many as the USA has founding fathers, give or take a few. Which is to say less than in the Fathers of Mercy.
baxtr 4 hours ago [-]
Al Gore is definitely one of them!
cxr 3 hours ago [-]
> There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)
greenchair 3 hours ago [-]
1999 CNN interview where Gore stated: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet".
gilrain 3 hours ago [-]
And that was true, within his context as senator. He was instrumental in passing the laws that fostered the Internet.
It’s astonishing, I know, but the heavily-parroted meme was always reductive and is, at this point, misnformation.
3 hours ago [-]
My_Name 4 hours ago [-]
You have to wonder about the "Mother of the Internet" at this point...
slim 3 hours ago [-]
DoD
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
The two that are most widely recognized are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for TCP/IP, but that's just the start of it. There's JCR Licklider, who first imagined a global network of computers. There's Leonard Kleinrock, first ARPANET nod and packet-switching theory. Larry Roberts, who led development of ARPANET. Paul Baran independently invented packet switching. Donald Davies coined the term "packet" and also developed packet switching. Louis Pouzin also worked on TCP/IP. Jon Postel managed the IP standards and address assignments for decades. Ray Tomlinson invented email and the @ sign. Of course, we can't forget Tim Berneres-Lee, to whom we credit the invention of the web (HTTP, HTML, URLS, the first web browser and server).
So, eleven.
The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.
mahouk 41 minutes ago [-]
Vannevar Bush?
8 hours ago [-]
CurbStomper 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
croes 7 hours ago [-]
Nitpicking: a father of the internet not the father. There is more than one.
tomhow 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks! We’ve updated the title.
jibal 5 hours ago [-]
Eh? Vint is KNOWN AS "the father of the Internet", and that's what TFA's title says.
> Vinton Cerf (Connecticut, 1943) Considered to be the founding father of the Internet.
croes 4 hours ago [-]
The title of your second link is "The Fathers of the Internet" and Robert Kahn as co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol is also considered a father of the internet.
BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"
jibal 3 hours ago [-]
I know what the title says, of course ... but the title is descriptive, not a label, and only Cerf is referred to as the father, as quoted. And yes of course Kahn co-invented TCP/IP but no one ever calls him father of the Internet. And I already said what happens if you google "father of the Internet" -- what I said is actually true.
And none of this is really relevant because it's TFA that should determine HN titles. But for better or worse the mod has made his decision, so this is moot -- I won't comment on it further.
And man, for someone who calls something "nitpicking" to dig so deep into it ...
croes 3 hours ago [-]
> and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet"
So much for "but no one ever calls him father of the Internet."
It’s widely recognized that the internet has multiple fathers.
pipes 6 hours ago [-]
I'm reading "where the wizards stay up late", and I was thinking the same thing. It's difficult to keep track of who is who but I'm pretty certain Cerf has appeared yet. I'm not that far through.
(Well actually I'm listening to it not reading, maybe that's why I can't keep track of the protagonists!)
roschdal 6 hours ago [-]
Al Gore invented the internet.
hdgvhicv 6 hours ago [-]
Al Gore pushed for public funding to make the intenet what it is before the majority of computer professionals, let alone the public, had heard of it.
> Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called "the father of the Internet" for his part in designing the network's common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."
tomhow 6 hours ago [-]
Please don’t post snarky or low-substance comments on HN.
As another commenter has pointed out, Vint Cerf himself credits Gore as playing a significant role in enabling the Internet’s emergence. He didn’t claim to have “invented” it.
Vaslo 5 hours ago [-]
He said he created it though. It’s a quote you can look up.
defrost 4 hours ago [-]
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
~ peer linked wikipedia article.
Emphasis on actual words, with an obligatory side dish of context.
andrewl 2 hours ago [-]
Quoting from an earlier comment in this discussion:
There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
You can just hide things you don't like, or y'know, live and let live.
kelnos 5 hours ago [-]
(The person you are replying to is one of HN's mods.)
locknitpicker 5 hours ago [-]
> You can just hide things you don't like, or y'know, live and let live.
The same goes for you. Calling out bullshit and disinformation benefits the whole community,unlike nonsensical remarks. So if you don't appreciate efforts to counter nonsense by bringing facts to the discussion, just sit this one out.
tosti 4 hours ago [-]
An uphill battle. IMHO it's okay to assume users have brains and they can figure out the difference between facts and jokes just fine.
raychis 7 hours ago [-]
Thought this was about Tim Berners-Lee, he is the only father I know.
almost 6 hours ago [-]
Father of the web sure. But HTTP is not the Internet!
cxr 3 hours ago [-]
And the Web is not HTTP!
Jaxan 6 hours ago [-]
Which also shows there isn’t “one father”, multiple things (and people) had to come together.
uwagar 5 hours ago [-]
he the mother
TurdF3rguson 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kulahan 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cube00 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tonyhart7 7 hours ago [-]
Imagine creating internet to connect people and live to see the day that most internet traffic is Bot and AI talk to each other is fascinating
I wonder what he feeling about it
bflesch 4 hours ago [-]
Vint Cert is #1 on Jeffrey Epstein's "List of Scientists" [1 pg6]:
JE's LIST OF SCIENTIST's
Vinton Cerf
Dennis S. Charney
James Fallon
Elaine Fuchs
Neil Gershenfeld
John Holdren-No
Petr Janata
Seth Lloyd- Yes
Maja Mataric
Lyman Page
David Spergel
Suzanne Staggs
Edward 0. Wilson- No
Adam Wilson
Kinda sad state of journalism if techcrunch writes article and doesn't do the basic "boomer VIP check" against the Epstein files.
Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today.
So this "Robert Kahn" who he closely worked with might be related to Epstein's main accountant "Richard Kahn".
saalweachter 3 hours ago [-]
N.b. that Cerf was mentioned in the Epstein Files in a list of scientists Epstein wanted to invite to an event. There is no evidence Cerf actually accepted any such invitation.
Not everyone "in the files" is in the files. For instance, Rebecca Watson is "in the Epstein Files" because Lawrence Kraus and Richard Dawkins wrote to Epstein to complain about her.
grosswait 3 hours ago [-]
I thought we were all aware by now that being on an Epstein list doesn’t automatically mean anything?
nubinetwork 6 hours ago [-]
The dude is in his 80s, he should have been allowed to retire decades ago.
ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago [-]
I was forced to retire, at 55. Good ol’ SV ageism at work. Wasn’t happy about it -at all, but I’m fortunate, in having the means to do so.
That was almost nine years ago, and I actually increased my development work, with the caveat that no one pays me to do it, anymore.
Probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, but I didn’t think so, at the time.
I wish him luck.
bookofjoe 3 hours ago [-]
I had to look up SV
ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago [-]
SillyCon Valley
zeafoamrun 6 hours ago [-]
Lots of people continue working because they enjoy it and to keep busy.
nubinetwork 5 hours ago [-]
When I retire, I'm working on my stuff, not anyone else's. :)
kappi 3 days ago [-]
He made millions last 20 years at Google without doing much and just being a honorary post, not sure what he feels about BS jobs like this
sollewitt 8 hours ago [-]
Vint took what could have been a prestige emeritus position at Google and turned it into a platform to champion accessibility and “Greyglers”. The man has more class than his suits.
fridek 4 hours ago [-]
I couldn't disagree more.
I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right.
One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.".
I hope he enjoys retirement, well deserved
sph 7 hours ago [-]
Of all the millionaires in the world, I feel he’s earned a little bit of monetary recognition for his achievements.
Had I coinvented TCP/IP, I’d gladly take a bullshit, cushy paying job in my latter half of my career as a ‘reward’
PaulHoule 3 hours ago [-]
I was impressed with Vint Cerf when I saw him at a distance but once I had dealings with him about issues such as: the way the internet has become a pernicious influence, how the ACM is an industry group for computer science professors that doesn't support practitioners [1], the ACM's support for H-1B visas [2] I came to the conclusion that this quote is about him:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on
his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
[1] open access journals were a big step forward, but I was open access decades before
[2] i'll join a club which is neutral on the issue, but I can't accept the positive position, not because I feel it threatens me but because it pains me to see a brilliant data scientist being jerked around (bad enough that the HR lady leaves) and not being able to tell him "your skills are in demand and you can find another employer on the other side of the street" (this is NYC) And the argument that "startups" need it is bogus: Google can take a chance on a lottery, a key employee at a startup is key however.
Rendered at 14:51:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He took the note-takers job during our breakouts, had beers with us after the session, and asked really good questions and never asserted anything the whole time.
What a legend.
It’s like two lifetimes in tech years. I remember that summer Google Earth was launched, we were a year removed from the Gmail launch, and I worked on shipping the first Summer of Code.
However I never forget my surprise, Idly flicking through TV one evening and coming across Earth Final Conflict - and there was Vint in a fairly substantial role
Similar ish to an influencer
Legends
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828/
Maybe having multiple streams within a single connection, like QUIC does, would have been a better choice. Also being able to demarcate message boundaries within the protocol itself, perhaps, instead of it being a simple byte stream.
1. It would have 128-bit addresses. 2. It would have end-to-end encryption (or was it authentication, I forget).
IPv6 was supposed to fix both of these, with IPsec mandatory, but the latter demand sort of faded out into obscurity. We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.
The "solving" of encryption with TLS should not be celebrated.
Everything needs to go over TLS/HTTP-443 because of middleware boxes basically blocking everything else by default in many cases, and so application/protocol designs have to shoehorn / kludge everything into a round hole even if it's a square peg.
Certainly I'd want everything to have encryption at the higher layers (OSI 5-7), but having opportunistic encryption at IP (OSI 3) would also be great because snoopers could tell that two nodes are communicating but not how / what: RTSP? Torrent? Mindcraft? PvP2 game? If every node could (say) do an IKEv2 negotiation with every other node have IP-level traffic wrapped in IPsec that would help with traffic analysis.
I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.
Or there is too much inertia for IPv8 to overcome to become a truly backwards compatible extension / superset of IPv4?
Part of the reasons for the slow adoption of IPv6 was that it was never designed to be backwards compatible unlike IPv8.
1: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html
IPv8 solves precisely zero of the problems that is causing a 'slow' roll out of IPv6 / replacement of IPv4:
"""
So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:
You have to change the version number.
You have to add new code to handle the new version.
Furthermore, you don't want to split the Internet in two, so you must design a method of interworking between the old version and the new version. Annoyingly, you need to do that in a way that can be done completely in machines that know about the new version, because other machines don't know anything at all about the new version, by definition. So,
You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know nothing of the new protocol. Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only two solutions:
(3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.
(3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses between the old and new protocols.
[…]
Incidentally, "IPv8" proponents often ask why IPv6 didn't simply stick some extra bits on the front of IPv4 addresses, instead of inventing a whole new format. Actually, we tried that: the "IPv4-Compatible IPv6 address" format was defined in [RFC3513] but deprecated by [RFC4291] because it turned out to be of no practical use for coexistence or transition. The related "IPv4-Mapped IPv6 address" format is still valid and has a role in the POSIX socket API. Mappings of this kind also figured in the moderately successful coexistence technologies known as 6to4 [RFC3056, RFC3068] and Teredo [RFC4380], which have now been overtaken by events.
"""
* https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/01.%20Introdu...
* Interview with author of article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3jkZ1Ulz-s
This thinking can be seen in the allocation of network blocks. Mercedes Benz getting 53.0.0.0/8 is just a "we have more addresses than we ever need."
If somebody had imagined "yeah, let's give an address to each of our vehicles" they would have realized the space running out.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes
In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.
No matter what you think of Google
I’m concerned about the power that Google and other Big Tech companies have, but from a technical point of view Google has a lot of impressive technologies, and from a workplace standpoint, it seemed idyllic back in the early 2010s, though I’ve heard the work culture has changed in the past decade, and I may have rose-colored glasses from only being an intern there, never a full-timer.
I interacted with many professors in OS research and other adjacent systems fields when touring grad schools and I heard or saw that some were extremely toxic or intense compared to other fields I saw. With OS at least, big tech companies seem to hold a lot of influence over research directions (eg. so much of it is specifically for AI datacenters, or for one company's AI datacenter problems), and I asked OS professors about this and got disheartened replies that there was nothing they could do because of the incentives in the field. I was quite disillusioned. I know that AI being a hot new topic makes leaves more stones unturned and might lead to more publishability, but it's still depressing.
There are lots of brilliant people at Google who do no evil.
The fact that the company makes evil decisions about the direction of the web, privacy, and performs blatantly monopolistic actions does not outweigh the good things people at Google have done. At least not yet.
You can hate the company but love the brilliant work the engineers have done. The same can be said of lots of companies: Apple, Anthropic, ...
Meta, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. It's less of an overt monopoly, but some of its actions are heinously amoral.
He worked for MCI/Worldcomm, before Google. Bernie Ebbers went to jail, for that.
Ahh… the good ol’ days, when we actually jailed scumbag billionaires, instead of voting massive pay bumps…
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA003070...
What's that for?
The video probably shows a wide smile whilst saying it.
An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few times, and then collared me to ask me a couple of questions: 1) It seemed to know some of the words he entered but not all -- what was up with that? 2) What sort of AI algorithm was I using for the program to make guesses? (It usually beat the human player.)
Answers: 1) I didn't have a digitized dictionary (it was 1969!) so I hand-entered the five letter words from a pocket dictionary but got tired halfway through so it only knew words starting with a-l. 2) The program would eliminate any words that didn't fit the responses to its guesses so far and then pick a remaining word at random.
Upon hearing my answers Vint walked away in disgust! But years later he gave me a recommendation when I interviewed with Google (it didn't work out for other reasons).
I also shared a cubicle wall with another Van Nuys High alumni, Jon Postel, aka "God of the Internet". Sartorially, Jon was the complete opposite of Vint--long scraggly beard, blue jeans, forever barefoot--but those weren't the things that mattered. Man, those were the days.
— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>
Al Gore Jr.'s father, the Sr., was instrumental in enacting the US Interstate Highway system:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gore_Sr.#U.S._Senate
Which transformed the economy for physical goods. Jr saw parallels with the transportation of information, and coined a term (in 1978!) about it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)
It’s astonishing, I know, but the heavily-parroted meme was always reductive and is, at this point, misnformation.
So, eleven.
The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131104212006/http://deafness.a...
> He is routinely referred to as "the father of the internet,"
There is no one else who is referred to that way. If you google "father of the Internet", Vint pops up.
https://www.inmesol.com/blog/fathers-internet/
> Vinton Cerf (Connecticut, 1943) Considered to be the founding father of the Internet.
BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"
And none of this is really relevant because it's TFA that should determine HN titles. But for better or worse the mod has made his decision, so this is moot -- I won't comment on it further.
And man, for someone who calls something "nitpicking" to dig so deep into it ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
> Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,
https://www.internethalloffame.org/vint-cerf/
> Together with Vint Cerf, Kahn is known as "the father of the Internet." https://computerhistory.org/profile/robert-kahn/
So much for "but no one ever calls him father of the Internet."
It’s widely recognized that the internet has multiple fathers.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848...
(Well actually I'm listening to it not reading, maybe that's why I can't keep track of the protagonists!)
> Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called "the father of the Internet" for his part in designing the network's common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."
As another commenter has pointed out, Vint Cerf himself credits Gore as playing a significant role in enabling the Internet’s emergence. He didn’t claim to have “invented” it.
Emphasis on actual words, with an obligatory side dish of context.
There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
The same goes for you. Calling out bullshit and disinformation benefits the whole community,unlike nonsensical remarks. So if you don't appreciate efforts to counter nonsense by bringing facts to the discussion, just sit this one out.
I wonder what he feeling about it
Kinda sad state of journalism if techcrunch writes article and doesn't do the basic "boomer VIP check" against the Epstein files.
So this "Robert Kahn" who he closely worked with might be related to Epstein's main accountant "Richard Kahn".Not everyone "in the files" is in the files. For instance, Rebecca Watson is "in the Epstein Files" because Lawrence Kraus and Richard Dawkins wrote to Epstein to complain about her.
That was almost nine years ago, and I actually increased my development work, with the caveat that no one pays me to do it, anymore.
Probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, but I didn’t think so, at the time.
I wish him luck.
I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right.
One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.".
I hope he enjoys retirement, well deserved
Had I coinvented TCP/IP, I’d gladly take a bullshit, cushy paying job in my latter half of my career as a ‘reward’
[1] open access journals were a big step forward, but I was open access decades before
[2] i'll join a club which is neutral on the issue, but I can't accept the positive position, not because I feel it threatens me but because it pains me to see a brilliant data scientist being jerked around (bad enough that the HR lady leaves) and not being able to tell him "your skills are in demand and you can find another employer on the other side of the street" (this is NYC) And the argument that "startups" need it is bogus: Google can take a chance on a lottery, a key employee at a startup is key however.