Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

UPDATE: I believe either Vint Cerf himself or more likely a Google India representative posted a comment with some updated stats. I double checked the stats and indeed found them out to be right as shown in the presentation. I am updating the post to reflect the correct stats. 

So, I finally make my way into the Google Speaker series where the guest speaker was Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Dr.Vinton Cerf who is also the current Chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The whole show was extremely well organized. Dr. Cerf promptly showed up at the assigned time at 5:30 pm IST. There was a formal introduction of Dr.Cerf, his contributions, his various achievements by the Google India representatives before handing the stage over to him.

He starts of by introducing himself and then praising the cofounder of TCP/IP Bob Kahn and then talks briefly about SETI and the role which collective computing is playing these days in crunching the world’s problems. About SETI he jokes ” Maybe the reason we are searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is that we didn’t find any here on Earth”

His formal presentation began with him talking about some stats. He tells us that there are almost 500-600 million servers on this planet and that the number of Internet users has jumped from 50 million in 1997 to over a Billion in 2006 where Asia with 56% of the world’s total population brings in almost 389.4 Million Internet users with a total penetration of 16.6%. He then talks with dismay about how there are a Billion people in Africa and yet there are only 32.8 Million users in the entire continent.

Mobile Devices: Then he talks about mobile devices where he lets us know that there are almost 2.5 Billion mobile users which far exceed the number of laptops or desktops or servers out there. He then talks about the benefits of a mobile phone which is smaller, has a smaller keyboard and a smaller screen size all of which present their own unique challenges in delivering content and applications to such a mobile platform.

Current technology shaping the Internet — BroadBand

Vint Cerf then makes an interesting observation where he says that we are not sending as much as we are downloading which the basis of today’s internet. He lets us know that he a very strong proponent of symmetric broadband.

“Half of the traffic is Bit Torrent, and a lot of that may be video. It’s symmetric. As a user downloads a piece of a file, that piece is made available to others. The effect is that a user is pushing as much traffic as they pull. This does a funny thing to companies that offer ‘broadband service.’ Cable modems are asymmetric. DSL is the same. Symmetric service is competing with higher priced DS-3 and T-1 service. There’s a built in disincentive to create symmetric services, but as fiber capacities reach residential users, we will all want to push as much information as we pull. I’m not talking about people doing anything illegal. There’s a pressure from the edge for symmetry in the internet.”

Current Research problems being faced by Google

He then talks about the problems being faced by Google and the opportunities for everyone out there to come up with a solution by including the following as their dissertation topics…

a. Internet is not secure

b. Internet “Erlang” formulas

c. QOS debates(smart routers?) — debating whether the cost of charging for services and examining traffic would be more expensive than simply building more bandwidth.

d. Mobility, persistence(processes, convertions)

e. Multi homing — Multi-homing can be very effective for ensuring continuous connectivity — eliminating the ISP as a single point of failure — and it can be cost effective as well. However, your multi-homing strategy must be carefully planned to ensure that you actually improve connectivity for your company

f. Multipath routing — the concept of providing multipath routing at the naming level and supporting replicated sites. Also getting people thinking about multi-path routing algorithms should provide a good “safety valve”, just in case there should ever be valid military reasons for separating the Internet.

Vint Cerf adds in the comments

“Multipath routing actually is intended to increase the capacity between a pair of endpoints on the Internet,if there are in fact independent paths that could concurrently carry traffic between them”

g. Broadcast utilization

h. Mesh and Sensor networks

i. Scaling(of events) - IPVL — On scaling, IPv6 is intended to deal with increasing number of endpoints on the internet, not so much scaling of events

 

Social Networks:

Although he doesn’t mention Digg or any other social networks by name, Vint Cerf did acknowledge that the users have now become the producers of the Internet. Users are now completely in control. They are the ones who initiate a search, initiate transactions etc.Question and Answer session at the end of the presentation

Question # 1: India lives in the villages. How would you increase internet penetration when you have to factor in expenses such as hardware costs and other expenses?

Vint Cerf: He proposes that Mobile technology is going to be a big part of the solution. They are cheaper and can be distributed on a much larger scale than say handing out individual machines. Also, he is hoping that the governments would step in and provide financial and regulatory incentives for municipalities to build their own broadband networks.

Question # 2: Are there any tools Google is going to develop for people with disabilities?

Vint Cerf: Cerf points out that at Google there is a team whose job is to make Google based applications and services more accessible and visible. They are even doing some experimental tests like adapting colors for applications for people who might be suffering from color blindness. Another thing we need to do is increased support on the voice side. For the blind, the only way to access the internet is through speech. Also, if you are not blind, but do not know how to read and write but can speak and hear; we need to explore the concept of spoken converstation. This is something that could be huge for the illiterate in the villages of India and around the world. Another is provide caching. We already provide caching on the voice side. This is something we already did with Google video but need to do it on the Youtube side. I need to dig up information on this. Anyone have any leads on the need to incorporate this on YouTube.

Question # 3: Why are you at Google?

Vint Cerf: I wanted to get into the application space and when I looked around Google was at the top of my list doing something very exciting related to my interests. He thinks that he definitely raised the average age at Google while also hoping that he didn’t lower the IQ avg there. While praising Google in general, he says that the employees there ” They didn’t learn that they can’t do it yet”

Question # 4: How can the Internet preserve its independence from the governments?

Vint Cerf: He says that this is going to be a challenge. The Internet is very distributed and that national laws can have certain limits on its enforcement. The Internet amplifies voices that may never be heard otherwise. At the same time, people are living in a 24/7 always connected environment. Consumers expect 24/7 access to resources which in turn can put pressure on governments to limit what users can do.

Question # 5: What is a feasible solution to Botnets?

Vint Cerf: The need to make networks secure and more robust. Also the vulnerabilities exist in the Operating System We need to plug these. Once we do, it is going to be harder for Botnets to operate. Also, if we move over to IPv6, we can use IPSEC. If you can’t see the inside of packets, its going to be harder for Botnets to operate. Also, we need increased co-operation from the users. We also need to develop tools which tell people that their machine is infected and how to clean them.

Question # 6: Is there any concern about AI? What are your feelings? Are we headed into a terminator world?

Vint Cerf: He quotes some paper/author and says By 2030, the computing power of a single machine would equal or exceed the capacity of a human brain. By the year 2050, a single machine would have more computing power than all the humans combined. So does this mean we need to be scared? Are we headed into a world where the Internet would become conscious or become aware of itself like in the movie Short Circuit( I need to watch this now). I am not too worried. The Internet of tomorrow is not going to replace the human race. It is only going to augment it.

The presentation concludes. I tried to get hold of him, maybe shake his hand and take a picture, but he was ushered outside faster than the speed of light. All in all, a very interesting presentation. We got to hear about a potential Google OS in works? A bit of MS bashing and how he thinks we are safe from the terminators of tomorrow.

My Observations

What role Vint Cerf might be playing at Google

1. It definitely seems that he is focussing on developing and delivering content to mobile devices.

2. He thinks that SMS is a huge opportunity for Google to interact with users or bringing in new users.

Interesting Observations from the Presentation

1. Vint Cerf uses a 12″ or a 13″ IBM Thinkpad. He was using this laptop for walking through the slides during the presentation.

2. He said one of his tasks was pushing out and accelerating the acceptance of the IPv6 out there before the IPv4 address space with its 4.3 Billion unique addresses runs out. He says that if he was to revist the whole design of TCP/IP again, he would choose IPv6 over IPv4 and the benefit of the end to end authentication which would have prevented spam and some fraud problems. One other thing he would have incorporated from the very beginning would be the concept of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) into the basic structure.

3. MOST Interesting Point he makes: After talking about his idea of wishing to incorporate the concept of a VPN into the basic structure of the internet, he says that the most troubling aspect of today’s internet and with respect to his current employer Google is

” We wish we have a solution to the security problems we have. Most of these problems are caused by the bugs in the Operating Systems out there. How do we determine if the source address of a visitor is legit? Is this particular domain name entry a valid one? We know that there are bugs but we won’t know about it except by putting the Operating System out on the Internet“

4. Need for Semantec tagging: This is something which Yahoo is already doing but Cerf did acknowlege that there needs to be more of semantec tagging of the world wide web. Then he gives an example of a search for Jaguar, whether it is a search for Jaguar the car or Jaguar the animal, this search problem can be solved by incorporating semantics.

5. Microsoft Windows 3000: Vint Cerf goes

” It is the year 3000. Now, you are searching for and discovered a 1997 powerpoint format based file. Say you are running Microsoft Windows 3000, does this Operating System know how to interpret this 1997 ppt file. I don’t think so. I am not slamming Microsoft in this instance, but it is just hard to incorporate backward compatibility for over a period of 1000 years. So, if we wish to open this file, do we need to dig up a copy of Office 1997? Also , do we need to dig up a copy of Windows which would run this office platform? How to avoid this information and bit decay is definitely going to be a challenge”

6. How would Vint Cerf solve the problem of the missing sock?

So he is dressing up and missing a sock. How would he find it? He is a big proponent of an RFID based world where everything can talk to everything and everything knows where everything else is. So in this instance, we have a sock 144L missing. Now, there is a multicast message being broadcast. Sock 144L transmits back saying it is under the couch in the living room. And this is how we solve the problem of the missing sock.