ARTelevision

Internet Turns 35, Still Work in Progress

Aug 29, 12:50 PM (ET)
Associated Pess

By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK (AP) - Thirty-five years after computer scientists at UCLA linked two bulky computers using a 15-foot gray cable, testing a new way for exchanging data over networks, what would ultimately become the Internet remains a work in progress.

University researchers are experimenting with ways to increase its capacity and speed. Programmers are trying to imbue Web pages with intelligence. And work is underway to re-engineer the network to reduce spam and security troubles.

All the while threats loom: Critics warn that commercial, legal and political pressures could hinder the types of innovations that made the Internet what it is today.
Stephen Crocker and Vinton Cerf were among the graduate students who joined UCLA professor Len Kleinrock in an engineering lab on Sept. 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers. By January, three other "nodes" joined the fledgling network.

Then came e-mail a few years later, a core communications protocol called TCP/IP in the late 70s, the domain name system in the 80s and the World Wide Web - now the second most popular application behind e-mail - in 1990. The Internet expanded beyond its initial military and educational domain into businesses and homes around the world.

Today, Crocker continues work on the Internet, designing better tools for collaboration. And as security chairman for the Internet's key oversight body, he is trying to defend the core addressing system from outside threats, including an attempt last year by a private search engine to grab Web surfers who mistype addresses.

He acknowledges the Internet he helped build is far from finished, and changes are in store to meet growing demands for multimedia. Network providers now make only "best efforts" at delivering data packets, and Crocker said better guarantees are needed to prevent the skips and stutters now common with video.

Cerf, now at MCI Inc. (MCIP), said he wished he could have designed the Internet with security built-in. Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) and America Online Inc., among others, are currently trying to retrofit the network so e-mail senders can be authenticated - a way to cut down on junk messages sent using spoofed addresses.

Among Cerf's other projects: a next-generation numbering system called IPv6 to accommodate the ever-growing armies of Internet-ready wireless devices, game consoles, even dog collars. Working with NASA, Cerf is also trying to extend the network into outer space to better communicate with spacecraft.

But many features being developed today wouldn't have been possible at birth given the slower computing speeds and narrower Internet pipes, or bandwidth, Cerf said.
"With the tools we had then, we did as much as we could reasonably have done," he said.

While engineers tinker with the Internet's core framework, some university researchers looking for more speed are developing separate systems that parallel the Internet. That way, data-intensive applications like video conferencing, brain imaging and global climate research won't have to compete with e-mail and e-commerce.
Think information highway with an express lane.

Some applications are so data-intensive, they are "simply impractical to do on the current Internet," said Tracy Futhey, chairwoman of the National LambdaRail. The project offers for its members dedicated high-speed lines so data can "get from point A to point B and not have to contend with the other traffic."

LambdaRail recently completed its first optical connection from San Diego to Seattle to Pittsburgh to Jacksonville, Fla. Work on additional links is planned for next year.
Undersea explorer Robert Ballard has used another network, Internet2, to host live, interactive presentations with students and aquarium visitors from the wreck of the Titanic, which he found in 1985.

The Internet's bandwidth can carry only "lousy" video and "can't compete with looking out the window," Ballard said. But with Internet2, "high-definition zoom cameras can show them the eyelids."

Internet2, with speeds 100 times the typical broadband service at home, is now limited to selected universities, companies and institutions, but researchers expect any breakthroughs to ultimately migrate to the main Internet.
While Internet2 and LambdaRail seek to move data faster and faster, researchers with the World Wide Web Consortium are trying to make information smarter and smarter. Semantic Web is a next-generation Web designed to make more kinds of data easier for computers to locate and process.

Consider the separate teams of scientists who study genes, proteins and chemical pathways. With the Semantic Web, tags are added to information in databases describing gene and protein sequences. One group may use one scheme and another team something else; the Semantic Web could help link the two. Ultimately, software could be written to process the data and make inferences that previously required human intervention.
With the same principles, searching to buy an automobile in Massachusetts will also incorporate listings for cars in Boston.

Change doesn't come easily, however. For instance, the IPv6 numbering system was deemed an Internet standard about five years ago, but the vast majority of software and hardware today still runs on the older IPv4, which is rapidly running out of room.

And the Internet faces general resistance from old-world forces that want to preserve their current ways of doing things: Companies that value profit over greater good. Copyright holders who want to protect their music and movies. Governments that seek to censor information or spy on its citizens.

In early August, the Federal Communications Commission declared that Internet-based phone calls should be subject to the same type of law enforcement surveillance as cell and landline phones. That means Internet service providers would have to design their systems to permit police wiretaps.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, fears a slippery slope. As these outside pressures meddle with the Net's open architecture, he said, there's less opportunity for experimentation and for innovations like the World Wide Web, born out of an unauthorized project at a Swiss nuclear research lab.

..............................

As someone who makes a living based on Internet Development, I'm connected to this global entity on a survival basis. As a person who produces Internet content as my central means of creative expression, I have a vital interest in it as a medium of communication.

These plus numerous other aspects of the Net receive a significant - heck, major - part of my attention on a daily basis.

But if you ask me what I think of it, I'd reflect some skepticism. Some of the reasons are listed above: its domination by commercial and political interests, its inherent limitations. Others are glaringly apparent: the situation in which it is clogged by SPAM and virii, the silly uses to which its precious bandwidth are put to use, the fact that it remains mostly in the hands of the Western middle-and-higher classes, etc.

I'd say, however, that it has ineluctably changed the world - and mostly for the better. It is our exo-neural network, our superbrain, pulling us forward in an upward-spiraling evolutionary leap even as we create it - by simply using it....

...enough from me.

What are your thoughts on what it is, what we're doing with it, and its ultimate potential?

__________________
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tehblaed

What the fuck is the internet?

ngdawg

Although it is, as stated, 35 years old, it really is in its infancy still. When we think of how we are communicating via the internet vs. the innovations in other forms of communications, there is quite a distance to go.
Having said that, it amazes me still, after only 4 years of my being connected, how close into our own worlds we have brought the worlds of others. No longer do we only have relationships with the people in our own backyards, we have them from across oceans or over state lines.(Marriages and friendships made or broken by strokes on a keyboard).
We don't have shelves full of Funk and Wagnall's-we have thin discs and search engines for everything we need to know and some things we might be better off not knowing.
Free enterprise is taking off like never before. Businesses can fail or succeed just by their use of the net. No longer are we trapped by the offerings of our own home towns. But competition is necessarily cutthroat. No longer is being good enough, good enough.
Of course, for every yin there is a yang, and the balance has yet to favor complete security and foolproof applications by the users or enterprise. Whether that will ever happen can't be answered anytime soon. We have come so far but have so far yet to go.
For me personally, it's the train I have been waiting for longer than I would care to admit. It has introduced me to an ever-expanding world of people, art and experiences I would never have imagined even 10 years ago. Through the internet, I have formed relationships that brought me to a new understanding of myself I would never have thought possible and re-opened my mind to exploring the artist I had suppressed decades earlier and allowed me to express myself without preconceived ideas from the recipients of my deeds. I have travelled to places all over the country and met the people I had chatted with online-making new best, dear friends in other states. Some that don't have computers can't understand any of this-I kind of pity them. Their minds are still small-towned closed to the endless possibilities that, by being in here-are really out there in an expanding, yet more accessible world.

Manic_Skafe

Great steps were taken in it's creation and though it's development even more great steps will be taken. To this day, I'm still amazed at how much the internet affords us the ability to learn though the experiences of other - some experiences we'd never know in our own lives.

It's entertainment, communication, education, and pornography all in one - there really isn't much more you could ask for.

There are definetly still more great steps to be taken but with the help of the internet, a lot less people will be left in the dark.

I <3 the intarweb.

__________________
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Antikarma

35? Does that mean on its next birthday its Rogaine, Viagra, or Depends? I, for one, would welcome the internet on Viagra.

__________________

"Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are."

warrrreagl

The following opinions of mine would be original, but Michael Crichton beat me to the act of writing them down a few years ago.

The Internet has certainly made an incredible change in human affairs and society like perhaps none other in human history. However, in order for society to remain stable, it must be diverse. In some respects, the Internet dissolves part of that precious diversity by connecting everyone around the world and making us part of a larger whole society. In other words, we are becoming a more uniform society with our diversity imbedded instead of palpable.

When society becomes uniform, it becomes stagnant. And the very volatile dynamic of the self-organizing behavior of human society shows that when we become stagnant, we tend to break out of that state in highly dramatic (and cataclysmic) ways.

Otherwise, it's way cool, dude.

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Living is easy with eyes closed.

Cadwiz

I think they should ask Al Gore before they go changing things.

Cynthetiq

Having been online since the mid80's and on the internet since the early 90's while it's vastly different from where we first came from, it's still very much the same place and same thing, just bigger and flashier.

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forseti-6

Well.... I don't think the inventors could have foreseen the extensive use for transfer of pornographic material...

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roachboy

i think the net is a fascinating place. or could be.

i dont think it has reached anything like its potential yet--mostly because the form of information transmission has not shifted away from a text paradigm. most information that circulates out there (here? where?) adopts the form of a copy of text, from search functions to layout. it is an interesting case of the power of existing frameworks for thinking about an essentially new medium, and how difficult a process it is to move beyond/break with them.

the net is one of the great collective inventions of the past decades. i like that it is collective.


like questions of form, social meanings of the net are still working themselves out.


sometime have a look at manuel castell's books, "the rise of the network society"--the first volume contains a wealth of data about the infrastructure, nature and distrubtion of web resources as of a copule years ago and functions as an interesting point of departure for conversation/analysis.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

For me, the fact that it remains, for the most part, a text-based medium is its major strength. We're better equipped - though not vastly so - to deal with the manipulative power of words than we are with the manipulative power of sounds and images.

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create evolution

roachboy

agreed, but i wonder about the possibilities of simultaneous presentation of information that netform might make possible---something that would shift the general relation people hold to the net as an information source, that would mark net-based information as something different from print, different from television. it would not involve a break with text, but more with the idea that existing forms of text presentation need to be mapped onto the net, a change (a series of changes) to the framing assumptions.

i think about this quite a bit, but suspect that there are limits to how far i or anyone could go with working out a solution (or the start/germinal form of one) without actually engaging practically. so this is a project that i keep floating about in my head, waiting for a chance to assemble a group that could work on it. thinking it might be a nice thing to divert academic resources into sometime.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Xell101

I get the feeling that one day the internet will have everything integrated into it and will eventaully become the great medium upon which a world government will rest and exert it's power through, and what sort of future it will create will largely be based upon how it is first utilized and most likely abused by the large entities like corporations and governmets. Gives me the heebie jeebies.

rockogre

I've lost track of how many years I have been on the net. I remember text only. I remember the first graphical browser I ever used. Not MS or Netscape but privatly written and licensed by my ISP. One of the early ones started by a friend of mine. I learned to do web pages in a text only editor.

I spent several enjoyable minutes this morning visiting with my sister in California and a girl that stayed with us for a year as a foreign exchange student from Omsk, Russia smack in the middle of Siberia. We communicate by IM almost daily.

Although this may make us a more homogonous community, it also opens our eyes to other cultures and possibilities.

I hope it continues to have at least a little of the Wild West, rebel, flavor to it. It is very important the the flow of information and ideas is not restricted by the government or commercial interests.

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Jesus Christ and the American G. I.
One died for your soul, the other for your freedom

ARTelevision

roachboy, I like the idea you propose...
rockogre, yep. I agree about the Wild West aspect !

..............

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch."
----
Tim Berners-Lee (1955-) English inventor - software engineer; invented World Wide Web (1989); made technology widely available (1991); heads consortium that mediates Web protocols.

__________________
create evolution

The Phenomenon

heppy birfday innernet!

Rodney

I've been on the Internet since Usenet was where it was at, and the community was small enough that Nettiquette could be reliably enforced by an email to the offending user's sysop. Those _were_ the days.

As for the future -- remember back in the '80s when people told us that computers would disappear -- that many devices would have intelligence in them without being computers? Well, they were right in that embedded computers are everywhere, but I've still got a general-purpose PC on my desk. I think that the Internet will go the same way. Part of it will "disappear:" it'll be in phone calls and television broadcasts, on demand and otherwise, and in videophones and all sorts of other digital devices that'll come along as demand increases. And it'll all be Internet-based, but all the user will see is the TV or the telephone or the stereo.

The rest of the Internet -- the keyboard-based, text-based part -- will still be here, maybe bigger than ever. But it'll be dwarfed by the parts that take over our audio and video infrastructure from the current telecom and broadcast technologies. Just as commercial Internet use has dwarfed the original volunteer/hobbyist/enthusiast Internet, even though the enthusiast Internet (like this place) has always continued to grow.

Macheath

What Art said about the internet remaining mostly in the hands of the Western middle-and-higher classes is something that's always at the back of my mind whenever I rave about how world changing the internet is for everyone.

I'm always thinking about what it would mean to take the internet to other parts of the world and for it to be used in a meaningful way.

For it to be used in the third world, there'd be a lot of infrastructure problems to overcome - access to power and telecommunications networks - but the beauty is the solution exists within the technology itself. Some technologies seem capable of providing a "roving infrastructure".

I kind of imagine an internet future that is not just wireless laptops in cool coffee shops or powerful suburban basement web servers, but also something like inexpensive wireless networks running off clockwork laptops in rural Mongolia.

That should be just as much part of the future as the persuit of raw speed and power, and it's why the text paradigm remains important.

Redjake

I think a lot of us take it for granted....or maybe don't appreciate it. I remember just 6 or 7 years ago, thinking "one day I want to know how to use the internet." Now it's my bitch.

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Off the record, on the q.t., and very hush-hush.

QuasiMojo

I remember when I was in 5th grade I thought that computers were from sci-fi land and never dreamed that I would operate one, much less OWN one. I fantasized that there should be a telephone number that one might dial where one would be able to ask a question...any question...and an answer would be given forthwith. I don't know if this wonderment arose from my needing information for scholastic reasons or from my natural curiosity, but this internet thing sure seems to me to be an answer to that
wonderment.
Now before you are tempted to call me Al Gore Jr. I also daydreamt that the *STAR* sign on the telephone would one day be configured to be the means in which one could communicate with the anti-christ.
yyyeah, you could say I was twisted from way back

I think that the future of the internet will definately be intertwined with the science of artificial intelligence.
And, oh yeah.....our cultures definition of being "Godly" will undoubtably change.

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Madd

Ah they ahve the internet on computers now...

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