Saturday, May 26, 2018

Father of the Internet in Canberra


Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, will speak on "The future of the Internet" at the Australian National University in Canberra, 26 June 2018. For an understanding of the way the Internet was envisioned, I recommend Carl Malamud's 1992 book "Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue", in which he reports on discussion with Vint Cerf and Australian Internet pioneer Geoff Huston.

I stumbled across Vint and Geoff in Stockholm during the Internet Society 2001 Conference. I went through the wrong door and interrupted a meeting deciding global domain name services. Geoff looked up and said "Hi Tom", when I saw Vint and just about everyone else running the Internet in the world, I turned and fled. ;-)
"Vint Cerf will explore areas where serious technical and policy efforts are needed to reinforce the utility of the Internet and diminish some of the harmful behaviors we are seeing. Some of the work will require transnational cooperation. Some solutions have much to do with educating users about protecting themselves when online and thinking critically about content. Technical improvements in software production will help, as will better security tools and practices. Vint will finish up with some speculations about the arc of the Internet as we get to the mid-2000s.
Vint will be coming to Australia as a featured speaker at the ANU Crawford Leadership Forum, 24-26 June 2018."

No comments: