💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 262.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 21:41:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
2007-08-24 08:17:36
Vint Cerf, is known as one of the founder fathers of the internet, and played a
key role in the development of the protocols which underpin the global net. He
was a founding member of the Internet Society and is Google's Chief Internet
Evangelist.
As intellectual phenomena go, the internet is still very young.
If we look at other innovative technologies that fundamentally transformed
human communications - the printing press, the telephone and television, to
name a few - we are confronted with the fact that it takes generations for
their full effects to be understood.
The internet, by comparison, has only existed for three decades, and the World
Wide Web is younger still.
The internet, however, stands poised to become the greatest communications
platform humanity has ever known. It has profoundly increased access to
information around the world, and it has likewise provided a platform for free
expression on a scale unimaginable a generation ago.
For a variety of reasons - cultural, political, technological - the internet
has grown rapidly.
The benefits it offers and the degree to which we rely on it (for everything
from personal communications to global financial transactions), far outstrip
its relatively short existence.
As access to the internet spreads to more and more places around the world,
more people will come online; they'll access the net through a wider variety of
devices, and they'll produce and consume new types of content.
The continued expansion of the internet poses very real challenges to those of
us responsible for its health.
Key infrastructure
The robustness and security of the internet will climb in importance as we rely
increasingly on it and its services.
Improving the resilience and resistance to attack of key infrastructure such as
the Domain Name System (the phone book of the internet) and the routing system
will be major focal points for near-term internet development.
WHAT IS THE TECH LAB?
The world's leading thinkers give a personal view of future technologies
Introducing DNSSEC (security for the Domain Name System) and the digital
signing of address space by the Regional Internet Registries will assume much
higher priority.
Internet-based software and digital goods have historically been vulnerable to
various kinds of failures and subject to a variety of attacks. The computer
science community is challenged to devise solutions to these problems.
Capacity poses a further challenge to the future of the web. As more devices
become part of the internet (think of the three billion mobile phones already
in operation), we will need to move to a new internet address space, called
IPv6.
With its 128 bits of address space (about 340 trillion trillion trillion
addresses), there will be ample address space for the foreseeable future.
It will be a non-trivial exercise to bring IPv6 online in parallel with the
present IPv4 system and it is not too early to get started. Efforts in Japan
and China have begun blazing trails towards this important new goal.
Stunningly valuable
Going forward, we must also remain aware of limitations of the data we access
through the internet. Information on the web varies in quality from completely
useless or even damaging to stunningly valuable.
Today's search engines draw the most relevant information to our attention, and
as more data become available online, the importance of search engines will
only increase. In the future, people around the world will likely look for new
ways to identify the authenticity of online information sources.
The idea that all the world's knowledge could be discoverable not just by
humans but by programs acting on their behalf at speeds well beyond the
superhuman, is one of this century's most exciting opportunities
We will also be confronted with a kind of "information decay" in which digital
objects become less and less accessible owing to the age of the software that
created it.
As an example: it is already a challenge to watch videos posted on the BBC
website in 1997.
Imagine trying to watch the same video in 100 years. Or in one thousand years.
It's not only file formats that change, though. Changes in computer programs,
operating systems and even the hardware that we use to build computers will
accentuate the challenge of keeping digital information meaningful.
This raises a host of intellectual property questions that will almost
certainly need to be considered.
Prosaic opportunities
From a strictly technological standpoint, then, the future of the internet
poses a number of challenges to computer scientists. The future of the net also
poses opportunities for society as a whole.
Some of these opportunities are prosaic. With home, car and office appliances
all online and rich sensor networks as part of the landscape of the internet,
it is easy to predict that people will be looking for online services to manage
these devices and systems, regardless of where they happen to be.
We have barely begun what will no doubt be a long journey, but already the
openness of the web is fostering free expression in parts of the world that
need it most
It is clear that programmable mobiles have the potential to become general
purpose "controllers" that allow us to interact, possibly indirectly through
online services, with the many devices that service us from moment to moment.
The internet is a medium for communicating information, and by democratising
access to information the internet is changing people's lives for the better.
We have barely begun what will no doubt be a long journey, but already the
openness of the web is fostering free expression in parts of the world that
need it most.
There are challenges and setbacks along the way, but the trend is clear and
inexorable. At the same time, access to information is expanding rapidly.
Usage spike
When Google News for mobile devices became available in French, the biggest
spike in usage outside France was in C te d'Ivoire.
In the developing world especially, the proliferation of mobile devices and
improvements in the ability of those devices to access the web will accelerate
access to information.
Every year, humanity produces more data, and we must decide how that data will
be found, shared, remembered, and interpreted. As we become better able to cope
with huge quantities of information, scientific and otherwise, our appetites
for organising and mining it will increase.
We have already witnessed the salient benefits of shared scientific databases
such as the online human genome archives.
The idea that all the world's knowledge could be discoverable not just by
humans but by programs acting on their behalf at speeds well beyond the
superhuman, is one of this century's most exciting opportunities, especially as
much of this information may lead to medical understanding and breakthroughs.
As we deepen our understanding of our biology - the move from genetics to
epigenetics and the proteome - our understanding of ourselves and the universe
around us will deepen.
What a gift to be a part of this period in the evolution of our civilisation.
Imagining the future of technology