internet of things = SDN + hypergraph

basically, almost any service in the future internet of things can be decomposed into a graph (food/waste, health monitoring/control, environmental, security/access through doors/windows, power network, air con, etc etc) and a set of on/off operations (a few involve set points - like thermostats, but if you assume a network which provides heat, then that is just on/off at some level of granularity)

so we could do this all with SDN applied to a hypergraph - the specific graphs would be VPNs and openflow specifications would say how permissions and TE work, then you just use same tech to run ALL the IoT apps across the VPNs - then your home hub/service center (or cached/cloned copy on your smart phone, or car computer) would just be the controller for this - the state (and audit trail/history) can be written/read to an append only (cf. git/irminsule) database which can therefore be easily replicated for high availability/low latency access, and then you are done....all other tools work
in the right direction...

Where devices might be a bit more complex, we might want to build a simple semantic description system (but many are going to be like the setpoint controller - even your PVR/home digital media recorder) - how many more patterns can there be? well, think how many physical actuators there are (include remote controls for existing legacy devices) and what state/actuator model they have - not many....

IoT - game over...

j.

quantity v. quality in social 'science' research + big data

My cousin Antony pointed me at the work of Tarde (and earlier, Leibniz) on the concept of monads

A paper by Latour (see
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/144
for background and google for the full paper/chapter)


so social nets as graphs can see aggregates and individuals as properties of
the set of edges and verticies - so that lets us unify this model - provided we
capture sufficiently rich types of edges (kinship relationships, types of
friendships, encounters, co-membership of clubs, geo-spatial relations,
psycological, etc etc)

it also mighr help explain the dicomty in economics/history where most the
time, most effects are caused by large group behaviour (a la marxist analysis)
but from time to time, indivuduals wirled great influence and impact outcomes
(classical) - so this is just when someone is a hub at a time when opinions are
"hypercritical" ?-- balanced between one extreme and another -- when that
person can sway a large number around them because of their centrality and
degree....

hmm... .. ..

fits with the whole peer-progressive thing too

so this is where small data (and anecdotes and narratives) meet big data

and its also why the butterfly's wingflap causing a  hurricane could be something we'd eventually model properly (after all, a trillion butterfly wingflaps happen every year without hurricanes, so its a matter of modeling the right butterfly, or the right Genghis Kahn).

I'm also pointed at Sandra Gonzalez Bailon's paper on this:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2238198


I also like Kate Crawford's very nice talk on this topic ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irP5RCdpilc

from napster to friendster - its all still piracy - according to Jaron Lanier

Just reading Jaron Lanier's new tome, "Who Owns the Future", which is, unsurprisingly, pretty good - one nicely put argument is about money as information (and its transformation as a record of past work into a model of future promises) - but the more striking point for me, especially in view of recent arguments about privacy and micropayment systems for cloud (OSN) services instead of eyeball time and surveillance analytics, is that when
you download some music for free, your appropriation deprives the author and performer of potential future revenue, but when the OSN company decide they can monetize all your pictures, life story, and interests, this is no different in reality, yet if you do a lot of music/game/movie piracy, you will get in legal trouble, whereas when wholesale invasion of privacy and monetizing of your personal informational property occurs, the big corporate pirates are rewarded by Wall Street investment.....

note.. there is now some doubt being cast on what is being charged by these guys for your life - so this is interesting, as it calls into question the price we'd have to pay for a privacy preserving service (i.e. it isn't the revenue google and fb are currently making divided by the number of users, because they revenue reflects possibly absurd profit margins, which are completely unnecessary once we dispense with adverts and analytics - lets say it could be as little as 1/10th of their current revenue - that'd be peanuts


reference:-
paper estimating worthlessness of paying for boosting search rank result
plus press covverage

Robot Ethics

so there's a lot of guff about in recent techblogs droning on about robots (drones) and ethics

here's a very simple thought experiment which doesn't need Terminator/Skynet to present a dilemma Real Soon Now

Cars are being fittted with devices that detect if they are heading for an obstacle and actve the brakes automagically to safely stop.....

However, if not all cars have such a tech, then the car behind might re-end you

the front and rear impacts represent different risks (the crumple zones in a car are more designed to absorp impact in front, rather than rear)

so if you detect an obstacle ahead, and a car behind and (assuming cooperation) a car behind with, or without a robot safety braker...do you choose to brake less so that you amortize the impact over two cars?

so do you want a robot to act in the interests of ALL passengers in all vehicles, or "selfisly" on behalf of "this car only"???

I.e. if we design robot brakers according to Asimov's laws, do we want the 4th law as well as the usual 1st three
[see the 4th law for ethical synthetic humanism, #101]

CACM and the ACM Digital Library (&Open Access)

The february issue of the CACM contains a letter about proposals and trending ideas for ACM's digital library access in the current context where many academic/government research funding agencies are increasingly seeking free and open access to tax payers' funded work - the article skates over two possible  aspects - see Open Access position statement...

1. Some funding agencies will not pay for "gold" (author pays) - this is excluded if an institute has its own repository (e.g. Cambridge University has a copyright library and DSpace and other systems and has been around a bit longer than the ACM.....
2. Most of the DL content is authored, reviewed, edited, and even copies are hosted by ACM members - a very simple system would be to cover the costs of the DL completely from membership and conference/journal subscription income, but still allow 100% open access (open links and copies) - there's no evidence that systems that do this (Usenix, ArXiv, Wikipedia) fail. It behoves the ACM Publications Board to a) let us know what this would cost in terms of increases ACM and SIG membership annual fees and b) to estimate the impact (negative or possibly positive) on membership numbers....

Some SIGs (like SIGCOMM, since I was chair) have published fully open access to all the conference papers for a long time with no apparent negative impact on the SIG's membership or attendance at events (possibly positive, although that would be anecdotal only)

I think it would be interesting to canvas the entire ACM membership on this - there's a strong collegiate tradition in the ACM, and the idea of a "wholly membership owned not-for-profit free (green) open access digital library of the main repository of 75 years of Computer Science, would probably be very attractive to many people.

Looking at the rest of the issue, you can see many articles and papers of current interest that show what a lively and relevant organisation the ACM is and how timely much of the CACM material is - for example, earlier this week in Cambridge we had talks about dark silicon (and what ARM is doing about it), and lo and behold, there it is in the Research Highlights section, in the clearest and most accessible possible terms...and should be available to anyone in the world concerned with the future of our subject -

power, parallelism or reliability?

Mechanism Design, Incentives, and N-Sided Markets for N>2

I'd like to say that the Internet was born free, but everywhere is in
value-chains, but that would be naive and simplistic.

The purpose of this note is to elicit discussion and clarity on how we could
re-design existing systems in the Internet that use advertising to cover costs
(and make a profit) and replace the income by some other system. For example,
one could consider a system where people pay subscriptions (or even pay-per-use) to an
online service such as search, e-mail or social media. A simple economic
analysis would say that such a system could replace a 2-sided market (with the
service provider facing the customer for free, but advertisers for revenue -
i.e. a 3-body  system) with a single, simple market, where transparency,
competition and market efficiencies would find the right price.
Such a system would also not need to exploit side effects such as the
monetising users' personal data, to be viable and sustainable.

Such a view is naive in the extreme, and I have two reasons that I think why.

The first is micro-economic, and is about the value-chain of components in the
system. The second is macro-economic, and is more theoretical (and I'd like to
hear back from experts if it is technically correct).

Let's look at the first problem, which concerns the primary business of some of
the organisations involved in this complex world:

1. Let's think about a daily activity of a couple of billion of the worlds smart
phone carrying netizens, and see what stakeholders (at least in part) are involved.

Goods/Services -> Advertisers -> search/OSN -> ISP -> Cellular provider ->Handset -> Handset OS -> App/App SDK

                 <- analytics="" div="" nbsp="">

                                     v

                                 cloud infrastructure 

Obviously this is a hugely simplified picture. When you use an app on your

iDroid, (e.g. the HappyFrogs game), that you downloaded from an AppShop for

free, it presents you with adverts. These adverts come from the cloud and

provide revenue for the app implementer and the cloud provider. You probably

have a nearly-all-you-think-you-can-eat data plan with your cellular provider.

You probably also have a DSL line and WiFi at home - you might pay 30 zinglots

a month for the former and 10 for the latter. Occasionally (e..g once per

month), you get billed for going over your mobile data plan. Once in a while

(e.g once per year) you forget that while abroad, you might have to pay 50

zinglots to see a few adverts.

This is allegedly a 2-sided market. Obviously it isn't that simple since there

are payments for components in the system, and the people being paid are

incented to let you send/receive more data (to keep up with the latest speeds

and so on).  Hence as much as 30% of traffic to your phone maybe "unwanted"

adverts. And a lot of traffic from your phone is fed into analytics and sold as

market research.

Proponents of a subscription system for the services (and payment for games

either buying or renting) claim that this misguided incentive would go away and

the system would settle into some Utopic Adams/Hayak friendly perfect market.

This is pretty naive. The cost of the cellular system and its profits were

predicated on voice and SMS. (I'd note that when one of the largest companies

acquired its license for 3G spectrum, it paid 2-3% of the GDP of a large

European nation for it. It then wrote that down the next year. Spectrum

licenses of a decade or more are just another wrinkle in the picture).

So what you pay for your cell phone is a little high but not too much

(regulators in Europe have market tested the 3G providers and they are

competing - prices are decreasing, performance increasing - hey, they are even

competitive with fixed line broadband - there's some headroom in the backhaul

networks in some countries too, as the step-up increases in capacity sometimes

lead the increases in demand, although sometimes they lag too).

Another important facet of cellular is that, like the fixed line phone

companies before, the cell-phone net for voice is subject to lawful intercept

laws. The counter side is that people expect jolly-good-privacy. Cell phone

providers have not "failed" to deploy location based services - they have

actively avoided any service that might make them appear to their customers as

being Big Brother. Of course ,this laid them wide open to handset OS and App

vendors doing all sorts of cool location based services, but being in the

pocket of the user, the perception of Apple/Googledroid/Microbird's AGPS based checkin systems was as a friendly personal thing, not a cold brazen impersonal

corporate spy. So note that _privacy_ was a part of the value of the cellular

phone service providers business case.

The point here is that the cell phone business pre-dates and has businesses

which are separate from the 2-sided market of advert/game/user.

So the second outfit, the cloud service provider, also has other businesses.

Let's just think of search. Once upon a time there was google search. It beat

off Altavista by being better at stopping sites "gaming" the search ranking

algorithm. To do this, instead of pagerank, a whole slew of complex heuristics

had to be developed. In some sense, what Google (and any other eyeball catching

company) had to do was to predict what users really want. To do this, it has to

look at users AND in great detail at what they click on really, as opposed to

what order things show up on their search screen results. Bingo - click-on is

the true value. So now we have click-thru revenue from adverts for things and

auctions for positions of those things and rank order. A market in search, and

loss of data privacy.

So note that loss of privacy was also an essential side effect of a cloud

service provider's business case.

So in all this, the users personal data, the value of any and all the little

people's identity is a tiny tiny piece. Indeed, the additional price to be

extracted from users if we were to switch them to subscription

is a minuscule step up from what is currently being paid every month by them

(both phone/home side and big data/cloud side customers). It ain't worth

getting out of bed for. It doesn't matter how small you make the transaction

overheads either. Clearly they can be made zero given you already have user

accounts and payments for going over data plan volume caps etc etc...

2. N-Side markets, for N>2

Combinatorial Auctions, Collusion, and Confusion

My second argument is that we don't now how to do mechanism design

for a system of more than 3 customers. I claim this because I've read some of

the literature on combinatorial auctions, and see that the problem is

computationally hard. This means that all sorts of heuristics/approximations

and even machine learning have to be used to try and solve problems. However,

the key difficulty is that we don't have any algorithms that have explanatory

value. We don't know what the outcome will be and when we get it, we don't know

why we have it. This is no use for a regulator - this has already stalled 4G

spectrum Auctions in some countries where the set of potential licensees and the

government couldn't figure out whether a particular structure of auction would

lead to any companies buying (e.g. this bit of spectrum in these states, that

bit in those states) going bankrupt, or getting a white elephant or what have

you. This matters, as businesses like to plan.

I claim that even without the value chain flow of personal data from the user

edge into the analytics cloud, the system is a many-sided market and we cannot

propose any mechanism that would incrementally line up all the pieces, 

unless we have a flag day and say we declare all the systems to have to operate

transparently from a given instant, and how likely is that to happen.

We could hope for some simplifying step - for example, if we were to force some

of the components in the network to combine (e.g. cellular+ISP+cloud), then

there would be a 2-sided system which could be collapsed down easily through

incentive alignment (e.g .simple vickrey auction of service between customer

and advertiser would determine price of privacy:).

There are many cloud providers and many ISPs and Cellular providers. However,

some of them are already implicated - for example, google and apple both build

handset OSs, run online services, control AppShop developers, and to some

extent, dictate terms to cellular providers (at least implicitly). Perhaps a

gently nudge could get us the rest of the way there....surreally, t his might

be a Good Thing.

3. Unintended consequences.

There would be many. I leave it as an exercise for you, dear reader, to think

of as many as you like.

Who Are We - Who am i++

So I've updated my reflections on both Eric Schmidt's visit (see the Humanitas video of Google Chief's talks in Cambridge early 2013) plus my take on some of the discussions at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Decentralised Privacy and OSNs (see Dagstuhl's excellent Website for more info there) and here's the document that resulted....

My cousin Antony (a trained ANthropologist and Computer Scientist!) pointed me at this interesting revival of Tarde's use of the Monad notion, which seems somewhat relevant!

who am i

draft for later today....

Who am i ( & why do we care?)?

Who am i - a person - a behavour
        Jackie Chan, philospher, martial artist, buffoon
        character - despite no id, behaves morally
        a SET of relationships

The rise of the robots
        Golem & rabbi of prague
                on/off meth/emeth, peace/killer
        Frankenstein's monster - no soul, but moral
        Asimiv++ laws of robotics/robish - programming errors...and ais

Weapons and software - provenance and liability
        semtex (those bouncing czechs again) - watermark
                s/w - originators & users - can also watermark/fingerprint
        botnets for hire
                follow the money (click trajectory) - ok for crims
                mad people, however, -- follow god -- no money :) ?

Who cares?

Prurient public interest in celebs - minor celebs - ...
        who really was marilyn monroe...etc etc
        interrogators/torture/brainwashing
        porn

Commercial interest in little ole me?
        adverts/recommendations - targetted
        click through (click fraud - bots again:)
        analytics == market research

Government and big data...
        evidence based health, energy and other policies
        finding the bad guys (cliques in social graph)
        panopticon - mission creen

Is the past 12 years "typical" or just a brief mad interlude ?
        do we want to base a future on a small window
        think 1780 "buy canals, young boy"... :-)

Social
        Dunbar - not just a number (150:)
        Social Nets project::- (Oxford (parent of) & Cambridge:-)
        also a law - 3^6 - circles of trust
                theory of mind -> endorphins ->shared experience-> trust
                family, close friends, acquaintaces
                gossip
                forgetting
        Autism spectrum - are cloud companies just
                high functioning aspergers/stalkers

Tech change
        differential privacy
        homomorphic crypto
        privay preserving
                search,
                advertising,
                analytics
        offers poss. of users "giving" MORE data:)
        tbd

Policy change
        Privacy Law - Make It So!
        Only hold data that is pertinent, for so long as relevant

        Go further - don't hold data at all.
        I "hold' my data.
        I give you a capability to ask me for my data
        for so long as I allow...

        Audit trail tells me who looked at it when.

        Now no need for one single identity
        (which is an illusion anyhow)

        Me jon(a(than) = work, friends, close family
        My kids - two last names = parents, nationilty

        Future - same as past (but not present) -

        Exploit unique UK position
        -- 1 id per relationship
                bank, tescos, amazon, doctor, school work, friends, family
        with associated keys to data
        -- Data owned by me (replicated encrypted in a million clouds)
        -- no aggregation allowed by others (only me:)

Consequence of tech + law:-
        Allows +me+ to monetize my person

        Tell how much value my store loyalty card is worth

        Provenence - digital footprint/breadcrumbs
        can track s/w
        and robots (or more importantly their programmers or priests)
        and AIs too

Who pays
        I do - because its peanuts--

        Total facebook or google revenue/number of users

        Subscription instead of panopticon
        music high quality content already heading that way

        Note celebs (who am i) aren't on facebook...

        Do you really want to be low quality, marginal profit, product?

Internet of Senses

as blogged elsewhere, i've recently been upgraded so I now have better eyesight than for a long time due to intra-ocular implants (placcy lenses to you:)
and digital hearing tech - the digital hearing tech is cool - the aids have a 16 band grahpic eq programme you can set - in principle, this can be done "over the air" and also you can stream audio to them so they are the ultimate in-the-ear headphones too:)

however, on a much simpler front. I've been trying to obtain the simplest phone for my 90yr old mum and (as I'd like to not have to wear the hearing aids 24*7) for myself - what I want would have NOTHING but a standard good old fashioned big-button phone interface and handset (corded, not cordless, as finding lost handsets in a 4 story house is already consuming a non-sustainable amount of time) - but as well as big buttons, I'd like a customisable level of EQ/amplification on incoming and outgoing audio levels. the simplest thing would be a tone/gain control on the base of the phone under a sliding flap, which, once set, would be LEFT ALONE....a betterer thing might be a little web service i could access from an app on my cell phone to configure it, and (here's the personalisation bit) a setting to set it to switch to a given audio setting for each detected bluetooth device nearby (so the presence of my phone would switch it to higher gain) - alternatively (and even betterrerer, and as well as) would be to use speaker recognition to switch gain level up (e.g. my mum saying "hello, hello, anyone there")

all the phones I can find (e.g. via the action-on-hearing website) that do amplification AND big buttons, also have at least 9 more buttons than necessary, and many require you to click on the "amp" button each time you use the phone (doh!) rather than having a setpoint config, and one time button for exceptions...but my speakerer recog thing would be easy to program up, and I reckon such a phone could be done for <10 p="p" quid="quid">
the fact that it doesn't exist just proves the market in the area for elderly and challenged people is severely broken. severely.

such a phone would actually be nice for anyone if designed right too... ... ..

i suppose i could take apart a cheapoh (argos cheapest) big button phone and put an amp in, and a dsp chip and do the thing myself....but life's too short...

Some thoughts on/from the last 2 days.

1. The mix of people actually worked quite well,
but that was lucky - it would be
better to have more structure another time. When cool points came up,
we shoud facilitate them being captured, nailed down, aired...etc

2. Academics (professors) tend to profess -
they also tend to profess "their thing"
all the time without trying to listen to others
first and then re-structure their
thing to fit - this is worse with engineering minded folks
(the MIT gang) than with social/humanaties/user type folks -
hence interventions from Alan Blackwell
(despite or because of his strategy of being contrarian),
and especially from Aaron Sloman were most useful.
Surprisingly (in a very good way) John Doyle was awesomely good at this too,
as well as having presented the most thoughtful (along with Aaron) piece of the day.

3. Key take homes

Architecture is probably a badly wrong word, but we're probably stuck with it.
Constraints that Deconstrain are crucial - crucially, picking the right constraint
(e.g. IP, the narrow waist of the hourglass) was a constraint, which freed up
everything above and below...
It isn't clear whether evolution (natural selection, survival of fittest of multipledifferent species) is better or worse than intelligent design  - certainly bacteria
appear to use a mix in some sense, and networks (and other artefacts of
"architecting") appear to use a mix too...(there were _many_ precursors to the Internet Architecture - this is also true of
mobile phone tech,, operating systems (pre unix/OSX/Linux), utilities, etc)

Users are important - William Gibson didn't just say
"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed";
He also said that "the street finds its use for tech":
so when mobile phones added SMS as an after thought, people started to do gifting
(emoticons etc) - twitter followed suit - and people (*users*) revised twitter
to add #tags, retweets, mentions - this is true of use of email for filesharing, and
use of OSNs for photos

Elephants in the room

-- We didn't ask any architects (in the Frank Lloyd Wright sense)
   Actually it's not clear to me that that would have helped (much)

-- We didn't say much about ethics- there's not really such a thing as an "ethically
neutral technology" -- many of the early internet technology inventors appeared to
have a strong societal gifting ethic -- so (in my experience) from 1980 til at least 2000, much of the work towards manking the internet work and deploying it, was done by
people for free or for little personal gain in wealth terms (ok, so a lot of social
capital accrued, although often with people who didn't really do the main work) - youfind a lot of the internet architects also do other stuff they don't speak much about
(e.g. community nets in their home towns) - Bruce Maggs at Akamia/Duke, runs free
community wireless access - Kevin Fall  and other folks at Berkeley deploy wireless
mesh nets in develping countries ....

-- Creeping asymmetry (in the sense of apps, power, centralisation, access links, ability
to server as well as be a client) - we mentioned the "evil" that is centralisation andp0wning of personal data by Online Social Network behemoths but this is just part and parcel of the post gift-era Internet - and the failure to maintain symmetry of powerbetween all Internet uses goes right down to the wire (asymetric capacity on uplink &downlink for ADSL and for 3G/4G, lack of always on, globally reachable IP addresses,all the way up to stunning operating systems on appliance-like tablets and smart
phones so they can't act as servers or routers, blocking of P2P apps by ISPs, and so
on and so on...)

4. Future workshop possible themes

A. I agree having some social scientists study folks like clark/doyle/wroclaski
"doing architecture" to some new stuff
(my 3 examples, for example) might yield
useful some methodology for
re-use in education (in computer science/engineering courses).

B. doing something on what Jane Q. Public "think" the net is,
and how they (re-)invent uses for it would be good

C. It'd be good to get some people from industry (perhaps industrial design)
engaged too..


Quotes of the day:-

- the Internet is a Giraffe built out of fish parts.

- biological (bacteria's) and computers operating systems - create a facade of diversity.

- deconstraining constraints is important
(see also, layering,
 generative architectures,
 a la Turing M/C, ]
and the "art of programming language design.

We're mainly bacteria, but we're impressed with all the rest.


Aaron Sloman:

Ptolemy versus aristotle:
Philosophies that are closing versus opning up
(bit like closed v. open questions)

Alan blackwell:
Relevance is the enemy

A Waste of Mind

I was watching someone on the train the other day using an iPad - swooshing here, scrolling there, zooming here - they spend the best part of 45 minutes engaged in _navigating between and amongst apps - they spent very little time actually reading or viewing a given piece of content, or engaged in anything that looked even couch-potato-ish, let alone worthwhile productive intellectually stimulating pastimes - i.e. they were marginalised in the sense of being pushed to the margin of the universe of ideas by the sexiness of the UI, rather than pulled in to the actual creative work as a consumer or producer (as John Naughton has pointed out in his excellent memex blog, the iPad is a consumer device par excellence anyhow, not really a producer device, but nevertheless this person wasn't even consuming much, except in t he sense of being stimulated pointlessly by the whiz-bang-gee-core-lummyness of the groovy graphics Apple had devized.

This, coupled with adverts taking more and more eyeball time/screen real-estate, and attention, seems to me to be doing the very opposite of Mark Weiser's vision for calm computing.

I bet if you measure people's productivity (or their time spent gainfully involved in a fine ebook or movie or game even) it is falling lower and lower, whilst the bits of the brain that deal with being over-stimulated are going into over-drive - I bet if you measure people's stress-levels using this junk, you'll find that they are getting worse and worse.
I bet we could do a whole lot better - when I look at someone using a kindle (no, I am not trying to sell you amazon's gadget, nor do I have shares, I'm just using it as an example), with its ultra-stripped down UI, concentrating screen real estate and interface on one and one task only, you'd find calm, productive use of time and lower stress.

I reckon, as I've said elsewhere, that Apple (and others - Android phones and tablets are no better, since the Googleplex is just another PARC wannabe just like Apple), are basically at the point of Decline and Fall.

I bet a really good cultural historian could look at giant empires like Apple, and point to Gibbons fine work (or if you prefer, Isaac Asimov's re-setting of it in the Foundation "trilogy"), and see exactly the analogous signs of fin-de-siecle setting in - the concentration on the superficial (interface rather than content) the use of Ryan Air style tricks to turn a profit (change the plug/cable, instead of innovate like Nokia doing cordless charging:), basically decay, and rot and bloat and basically, decadence (love that word - say it slowly:- de-cadence).

There, that's better....

dilemma on your mind

so i was reading these fine papers due to a colleague pointing me at them:
and decided we need to re-christen these
the acursed dilemma,
the re-cursed dilemma
and
a theory of mindlessness

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/16/1206569109.full.pdf

this essentially then reduces to the ultimate game - viz

http://homepage.univie.ac.at/karl.sigmund/UltimatumScience00.pdf

Narrative Ark

Today's idea for a SF novel, entitled,
The Narrative Ark.

A collection of loosely linked tales about pairs of characters - bound together by representing the full range of human stories, being sent either as an education for aliens in other star systems, or else actually as a social-dna pool to rebuild all of earth as the old terra firma has been destroyed/stolen/lost - the ark
inhabitants (passengers) don't know....

 e.g.

The Laughing Cow and the Crying Wolf
The Tragicat and the Comidog
The Good and Bad Cops
etc

things to avoid
i) moses jokes
ii) too much similarity to the very excellent
Not Wanted on the Voyage
iii) any notion of god

un-Science Fiction and Dr Who

When I was growing up, a friend of mine, Josh Griefer, lived up the road and I'd go round a lot to lose at chess (worse, Go) and here stories - his father, Lewis Griefer, was a well known TV scriptwriter who penned words for the Avengers, the Prisoner, and a few Dr Who episodes- in the 1970s, when I was at University (first), in Trinity College every Saturday religiously, we'd gather in the junior common room to watch this - back in those days, it was nearly as good as now.

So what about the science? well, we'd laugh, because it was all so gloriously wrong - none so daft as the Sonic Screwdriver.

However, I distinctly remmeber going round to the Griefers' around that time and Josh's dad quizzing us about how you could make such a device work, and then mischiveously grinning when we said "you couldn't", saying "excellent, so I can use that plot device then".

Lewis was a very smart and amusing guy (sadly missed) and I believe that my memory is if not accurate, definitely in spirit with his work.

Dr Who continues to be gloriously wrong frequently. I don't think the current producers and writers are doing this out of ignorance, but in a great tradition of un-science fiction.

[oh, Lewis often signed his scripts "Joshua Adam" after his two sons, if you're looking things up on imdb or the like]

BGP and canals

who'd have think it, but there's a policy routing mechanism on your everyday british canal syste - when a richer canal company joined a lower one, they'd put in a gratuitous lock, to control the flow of water - i.e. tier 1 to tier 2 would make sure that people would always benefit the tier-1 in terms of water supply

so you get these itty bitty 6 inch high lock gates every now and then

of course, now its all british waterways board, so its one VPN sort of:)

The Psychology of Computer Programmers - Guest Posting by Libby Enstrom

The Psychology of Computer Programmers

Computer programmers understand human behavior from a goal-oriented, task-driven perspective. They assume that people want to accomplish the same tasks more quickly and receive benefits and satisfaction from improving processes. In short, programmers use applied psychology to add incentives for consumers to use their products. However, the incentives are often based in reality, not in cyberspace.

Saving time is one important goal that new applications strive to accomplish for their users. In addition to time, there are other “currencies” that coders can tap into. One recently developed website, called: “Confusometer,” helps students provide direct feedback to lectures.

Created by a professor at the University of Toronto, Liam Kaufman, the confusometer allows students with Internet access to record whether they understand the topic or do not. Users simply navigate to the website, either by laptop or mobile device, and press the red button if they do not understand. Once the material sinks in, they press the green button. Consequently, students no longer need to raise their hands to engage, which adds a ton of value to large lectures where many students do not want to interrupt such a large group.

The back end of the web site is another front end, of sorts. The website automatically forms a metric in real time, which visually represents the level of intelligibility of the subject to the class. The website is called “Understoodit.com.” It has been implemented successfully in over three undergraduate courses at the University of Toronto. Students love it. Professors swear by it. Business intelligence software developers could learn a lot from this simple program.

Professor Kaufman’s design demonstrates a number of important facets of a quickly emerging field: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Firstly, technology has improved to the point of allowing non-professionals to devise their own programs. This trend is likely to steepen in the near future, and it importantly saves programmers a lot of homework. Instead of devising particular apps that will perform one range of tasks, developers are focusing on creating platforms that support modification to the platform itself. Facebook, for instance, supports social applications. Spotify, one app that is integrated with Facebook, nests its own applications on top of that. Given the increased ease of designing applications, it may not take long before business software enables employees to devise their own programs to save time, money, and work.

More general applications rely on principles that guide human interaction. Just as the colors green and red are used by “Understoodit.com” to tap into students’ preconceived notions of go and stop, Apple uses other, even more basic assumptions to help consumers interact with products.

Note-taking and mind-mapping are two areas that facilitate understanding and are sometimes combined. Essentially, these apps help users to visualize the relationships between facts, ideas, pictures and concepts. Users can input notes, then connect them, break them apart, and otherwise manipulate them to accurately represent their ideas in a graphical format. In the construction of these programs, Apple taps into the popularity of visual thinking, the penchant that most people have for thinking visually. By giving its users the ability to see their ideas represented in a graphical environment, the company essentially allows consumers to play to their own mental strength.

For more specific applications, such as Professor Kaufman’s, programmers would need to have direct experience with the goals, values, and processes of the people they aim to help. By developing platforms that support programming innovations, coders are essentially saving themselves a lot of homework and working to give users the tools they need to improve their own lives, in whatever “currency” they deem most valuable.

The Net Ends

Not the net at all - just a blatant plea for sponsorship for this ride we;re doing in just over a week's time:)
https://www.justgiving.com/JonAndTeam

ACE Talk by Brian Carpenter

Nice talk about Turing's ACE report today in the Wednesday seminar series - nice to reflect on the delta between the ACE and the Raspberry PI (700-fold speedup in 60 years, but also a reduction in development costs of about 1Million:) Was interesting to reflect on people being told "do not do X"....viz Maurice Wilkes told us not to try building the Turing Switch idea, and the EPSRC told Peter Kirstein to stop building the internet.... some of them are not wrong, sometimes....

Dice and Decideability

Dice and Decideability,
or Just a Minute at the Institute for Advanced Studies
with apologies to Jane Austin


"It is a fact universally computed that a single man in possession
of a small fortune wheel, might not actually be in search of a
wife".

ALbert looked at Mrs Einstein over the breakfast table in the warm
Prince Town sunlight of late august with admiration.

"You're talking about Alan again aren't you my dear?" he asked her.
Alan Mathison Turing was the talk of the town, since he arrived
with his small travelling show in tow. Everyone had become addicted
to the game, where you had to discuss one of the 23 famous Hilbert
Challenges for 1 minute, without any hesitation (the halting problem),
repetition (the loop), or dangling pointers (relevance).

The Elephant in the Room was the undeniable fact that Alan had
already solved one of them, but had not had space on the limited
stone tablet that was all Cambridge University could afford him, to
write down the proof.

Mrs Einstein was pleased that Johnny von Neumann had finally
settled down and was getting on with that huge birdsnest of glowing
tubes that looked like it was going to make a great Christmas
Lights, or maybe decorate the Founders Hall for the Alumni Ball -
what fun that was, with old students and colleagues dressed to the
nines (often wearing leopard skin pillbox hats and accompanying
tails in satin). Even Albert usually brushed his hair for the
occasion, although Alan would probably make himself scarce. A few
thousand people was a lot to cater for, when counting Austrain
Pastries, but was a vanishingly small number when it came to
counting the number of ways that their gene's could combine, or
indeed, just the time it would take to fly to the stats in the
relativistically challenged Wright Brothers' phantastic new
machine.

What fun. All the fun of the fair. And with Alan's new infinite
wheel of fortune (or non-deterministic mill, as he rather strangely
called it), even if God didn't, Albert would be playing Dice once
more.

of course, all the best stories end after happily, ever tale recursive

The DNS is not a right. Oh yes It is. Oh no it isn't. Oh yes it is...

There has been a debate in the public recently about this. On the one
hand, the Interweb evangelist for the Houyhnhnms Corporation
has claimed that the DNS is not a right. On the other hand
Lord Waterloo of Sandwich has claimed that it is. On the other hand (if
you're a monkey like me) I claim this is just a bit more subtle than
either of these thinly disguised gentlemen admit.

Cory Doctorow of Boing-Boing fame has made a passionate plea
to comprehend the nature of arbitrary restrictions that various
agencies are trying to impose on General Computing, and, by extension,
on the end-to-end services of the Internet, in the name of Security or
DRM.

See this link for the video of his talk
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
at the Chaos Computer Convention at the end of 2011.

The core of his argument is that computers embody Turing machines,
which of course are, as Alan Turing pointed out, capable of arbitrary
computations. Placing extreme (e.g. remove any arbitrary recursion or iteration, or simply remove ability to re-programme) restrictions on these (reducing them to a mere
appliance capable of a single task) throws away their fundamental
value (adaptability/shared use). Anything less in restriction will
always be surmountable.

By analogy, the Internet is the most general form of communications
network one can envisage. The famous hour-glass model partly illustrates this. Previous attempts by vested interests (i.e. telcos) to control the vertical stack led to stovepipe monopolies with a tip of a pyramid. By contrast, the narrow waist of the hourglass allows arbitrary channels below, and an arbitrary inverted pyramid (a very wide divergence) of heterogeneous applications above.

Recently, various aberrations caused both by bad luck (lack of IPv4 address space) and bad design (lack of decent end system security) have appeared in the deployed internet. Because the core must still maintain some end-to-end services, workarounds for these aberrations (NATs, Firewalls, other broken-middle-boxes) always manage to appear. As (I believe) J. Noel Chiappa once said,
the Internet will route around damage.

So the only way that the Internet can be restricted as a right is to
make it a narrow pyramid structure rather than an hour glass - i.e.
remove the "Turing Complete" nature of the service.

Now, there are arguments for the agencies policing laws and carrying out intelligence services doing various things on the net to make sure that other human rights are not abused. However, these do not require the stunning of the Internet technology so that it can't provide an arbitrary range of technical communication activities. Such laws (and ethics) require those agencies to look at what people say (write) and do, in the same way they always have. And the require all of us as users to behave responsibly too.

So why have I titled this piece "The DNS is not a right". Well because
this is a reductio ad absurdum. It is well known that one of the most
extreme ways to route around damage is to run IP over DNS queries and
build a DNS server that de-capsulates the (Unicoded) IP packet from
the DNS Lookup and forwards it on native. To remove this capablity
would require an agency to own all the DNS servers in the world. Or to
remove the DNS itself.

To illustrate another aspect of the problem, lets think about
TCP-friendliness. TCP-friendliness is not a right. That is true -
you can send traffic in an uncontrolled way. However, pretty soon,
your ISP might disconnect you. or charge you a lot of money. Its not
that you can't send TCP-unfriendly traffic. Its just irresponsible.

And that's no joke.

You'll notice that I have not gone on to discuss different
notions of what a "right" is. There are some pretty important, but
subtle differences between what is considered a right in the
Bill of Rights that the US employs, versus other notions of Universal Human Rights such as those in the
UN declaration on same topic. US rights are operationally encoded
in the constitution, and crucially controlled by a set of checks and
balances. These are sufficient to understand that the same approach
can be taken to providing a TCP-friendly, Human Readably Named
Internet, that can embody the abstract notion of the Right to
communicate freely with whomsoever we wish on any subject they care to
hear about, in a concrete technology that is the communications
equivalent of a Turing Complete Difference Engine.

Reference
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

some SF MS found in a 3rd party cookie

1. Cache

boy from a primative tribe is playing in the woods and finds a
strange bulbous hand sized box which, when knobs are pushed, shows
funny poictures and sounds on the screen.....

after years of this, one day the battery falkls out (of the soloar
panel wears out) and the words "Psion 5a NC" fade for ever

the young man and his memories are now the sole remaining wireless web
Cache active on the planet


2. Stability

A tribe worship the route of all things, the ring that binds them,
the end to endless truth, but they get blackholed by a passing gibson

3. the end 2 end and hop by hop principles of go-betweens, young
lovers and their triangles


4.Connectivity
rashevskys number is the number of possible neural interconnects
in the human brain (permutations) - it is more than enough to number
al the atoms in the known universe and give their (floating in the
sky, point-less) position to the nearest heartbeat or caress, but not
both at the same time

Seven, 7, is the number of people it takes to reach across the human
population from any hermit to any recluse, mailman by rider, pony
express by next door neighbour

what have these two numbers in common except this story?

5. The Protocols of the Elders of ARPA, wearing Mitres, walking tall,
and Society of Blind CIDRs have written, on whatever it is that they
write it on up there, that
wot is writ is rot
wot is done is achieved
and what is recorded is restored
but never can the PCBs and TCP
be removed from the O-Zone

6. A Moo, is an ever changing world of the imaginmation, limited only
by your vocabulary and syntax ....

for many years, one moo sings louder and brighter than all others
and is a focus of strange attraction....one set of interactors become
the high priests of virtual personality fashion...

one day, the participants discover that in fact, they are all also
working in the day at the same chicken factory, canning mutant
salmonella (a safe, and highly nutritious form of something that used
to plague the poultry industry, until they reversed the role of
disease and foodstuff)....

7. statelessness is next to godliness
after e-mail, f-mail

f-mail is fumigated, and powered by certificates, but people develope
a yen for a new form of mail, c-mail. c-mail is clean, and uses only a
working set of 300 words, all harmless...

one day, the world is invaded by aliens, who have no trouble taking
over because noone can remember the word for

Cyverjaw - The Real Challenges

Yesterday I went to a fascinating event organised by the CSAP and students organisation, Conenctions - at http://dcsa.dar.cam.ac.uk/info/talks-lectures/connections/

In the talks, the speakers outlined their various views of the challenges - current mainstream dogma is split between the view that cyberwarfare takes place in a new dimension (not just land, sea or air), and the view that it is an additional aspect to the existing dimensions. This is real naval gazing (pun intended). For me, you need to consider the real, potential attacks, countermeasures, and whether you can even recognize cyberwar as such at all - so for example:...

You finally realized the fact that we are in the midst of World War III, and its a Cyberwar - the characteristic signature of a cyberwar is that you can't identify the assailant, and you probably wont get a chance to retaliate. So who bought down the government of iceland,force portugal, italty and gree to form governments of unity against the wish of the democratic peoples' majorities, imposed austerity...its budgets on half of the richest area of the world (the EU) causing unemployment to rise (hence wages to fall) at no risk to themselves? persons unknown in the IMF and the international globalized financial services community are running roughshod over sovereign states. This has all the hallmarks of warfare. so why aren't nation states fighting back? well, the Icelandic people did, but that's it. the Greeks tried, and failed. Not too big to fail: democracy. you know, communism fell before capitalism. Now we are all Chinese.

Some more thoughts:

1. you wake up tomorrow and your phone, radio, tv, internet dont work.
what are you going to do? what is your backup net? what is your reboot
plan? have you even tested how you would cold start everything safely.

2. what if the chinese already launched a cyberwar on Europe, and
bought down the Icelandic, Greek and Italian government by economic
market manipulation? how would you tell? who would you pin it on? how
would you retaliate (if at all)? Globalization trumps democracy, and allows a few small non-accountable agencies to override nation states' populations wishes.

3. the interconnectedness of everything (pace, douglas adams and dirk gently)
means that we live in ahypergrap$a(the hypernet, if you like) -

Once we had separate networks, now we have
information systems all connected to communications systems and to
banking systems. Now what if we connect them to things (sensors+
actuators) - for example, heating, lighting/ac systems are connected
to the net. energy systems are connected to the net. we have a
hypergraph where information and action flows over the system -we
understand how software and content update, and viruses flow over
the internet. we under stand how power flows from generators to
consumers via the grid. we understand how vehicles flow over
transport networks. Now link them. what do we understand? how
Frank Kelly's models of the internet interact with David Mackay's
models of the energy systems, interact with road systems and food
chains? I don't think so. this would represent several PhDs efforts
alone.

The body of network science (aka internet science, or web science) now is quite large and provides a tool chain from graph theory, diffusion/percolation/edpidemic/gossip processes, control theory, and other modelling, and a plethora of papers that show practical application of these models, not just to describe and understand processes in graphs (including games/markets/opinion dyanmics, graph growth/shrinkage) but also to design rules (e.g. agent behaviours) to achieve goals (viral marketting, distributed, reactive innoculation of software against malware, analysis of week spots, etc etc)...


We'd need economists and epidemiolgists in the loop too....

Some other thoughts from the meeting:
1. we should have a law requiring reporting of attachs similar to the notion of "Notifiable diseases" (highly infections, high mortailty)
2.We need a treaty that controls selling people weapons (e.g. population surveillance tools) but allows selling defensive measures (firewalls, IDS, and anonymizer technology like TOR).
3. We need treaties immediately that tell our allies, if they are attacked and turn off their external Internet, please don't turn off our defnses (e.g. Windows, Apple IOS, Cisco IOS, Linux, Blackberry and other software updates all run over CDNs rooted in the US - if the US was to disable external access (and it could easily do this at Internet Exchange Points), we'd cease to get bug fixes at the moment when we most need them - the UK (and anyone else, but thats there problem) should factor this in to the NATO (or the UK-US special relationship) immediately.

Attention Definict Social Disorder

We note that facebook (reported in recent F8 conf) are moving from "status" to "timeline" (presumably to better align with the mobile/twitter style user experience).

This means that even less will we be "blogging" (a la web log, a la old-school diary, in its ancient, worth, respectable and useful way of making our memories both more persistent and more personal), but we will be instead, merely living in the moment.

This is a diabolical imposition of global amnesia - just as the WWW obliterated all memories of "stuff" pre 1992 (until some heroic efforts by various archivists to scan/ocr/upload as much history as possible fixed that), this threatens to obfuscate everything from more than 3 minutes ago with a flood of social trivia.

It will be like collective alzheimers - imagine 500M people suddenly living like Memento!

TSB KTN Future Internet Report

The Technology Strategy Board has a Knowledge Transfer Network in ICT and it has a Future Internet Strategy Group which published a little noticed report on the "Future Internet" in May 2011 - there's been a lot more meetings of the TSB and its new
TIC (Technology and Innovation Centers). It is a bit of a mystery why these are not one and the samew with the three Digital Economy Hubs created a couple of years back such as Horizon, since those have a lot of industry traction already, but there yo ugo - joined up government seems like another oxymoron for our times.

See articles here and the report itself for background.

For me the report fails to deliver 3 things one would hope for, even in a white paper format such as this.

1. There is no coherent list of challenges which the UK specifically has the knowledge and skill base and economic frameworks to deliver - the DE Hubs all have lists of comanies they work with or would like to - these come with lists of size of companies, profits, employees, etc - this is the sort of thing we'd need in an actual government policy document on future UK internet strategy.

2. there is a mix of level of detail (e.g. mixing up comments on needs for IPv6 with comments on capacity needs for HD video, with vague generalities like "Internet of People and Things" and "Machine2Machine" networking. These are completely different layers of ideas and have quite different constituencies - the IPv6 deployment is a totally different beast from the need of the BBC and Sky for Internet capacity fo HD video. and there is absolutely no notion of the problems of latency for M2M or estimation of the (almost certainly very low) capacity needs for the Internet of Things.

3. Crucially, though, there is no real attempt to make the future
a) Real
or
b) Personal

a) Making the Future Internet Real - lets look at what the UK is good at - we have:
i) good infrastructures for many things
ii) very good software businesses in games, entertainment (graphics, CGI, etc)
iii) very good software businesses in middleware and applications for cloud, web and mobile devices
iv) lots of bio medical and medical instrument outfits
These first three are distribtued over very very many tiny companies (cottage industry) - don't let that fool you - some people estimate as many as 500,000 people, earning a LOT of money (and a lot of UK GDP)
v) a few specialized and vital largeish companies in aerospace and in mictoprocessors (BAe Systems and ARM)

What we don't have is an innovative telecom sector (please do not mention BT or Vodafone here ever:)
We do have the very fine BBC (and their shrinking but excellent research wing....)

So if one was to do this properly, there'd be a brealdown by Sector and by Opportunity (and risk/strength/weakness, if you like SWOT analyses)

Sector:\Opportunity: Optimisation, Behaviour Change, Analogy, Replacement, Other

Transport x y z w q
Energy
Education
Health
Entertainment
Retail/wholesale
Defense a b c d e

etc

So for example, can we use a future internet to optimise transport (obviously, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of safety). Can we usea future internet as an alternative to transport - yes, obviously video conf, teleworking etc

Or can we change people's behaviour in energy use using the Internet - of course we can

Or can we alter a utility (e.g. the energy grid) by analogy with the Internet (yes, we could, if we think of microgeneration and a p2p network instead of a centralised energy production system with a distribution net). See Keshav's work on energy systems for example

b) Making it personal

The biggest problem facing all these wonderful synergies of convergence and removal of silos that everyone mentions in these TSB docs is the personal

Here the problems are many, but are beautifully covered by the Digital Economy hubs (see dot rural and
horizon just for example), dealing with
accessibility,
digital divide
privacy and personal footprints

Most of the challenges of convergence are (as was discussed by the Communications CMI project with MIT and Cambridge for 5 years) not purely technological - so in a) we've looked at the tech side and in b) the DE hubs are looking at the human interface to the tech, the context- the reasons why pie-in-the-skie ideas like Tony Blair's broken NHS cradle to grave centralised database for personal health records was doomed from day 1. But what could (in a Future Internet true decentralised philosophical, technical and human centered way) work properly to achieve a coherent and affordable and sustainable vision.

So, TSB, Marks out of 10? I'd say 3 for effort.

crowdsourcing the source of the german e-coli outbreak - and finding friends

So i am trying to find someone I knew in france in the 1970s who went by the unlikely first name of Bronte (aka bobo) and looked like this

meanwhile, the source (not spanish cucumbers) of the german awful E-Coli outbreak seems to defeat traditional CDC methods - html>here's a note on why crowdsourcing isn't quite as easy as you might think

for me, the telling point is the 8 day incuation - that means the trail of data you have to look through is huge - on the other hand perhaps looking at location of users' search terms on google might help (and see how many of these people do online shopping - out of 2000, a lot must come from households where one could get that data)

note: privacy is not an issue in a notifiable disease outbreak..in most countries

Slow Start and Congestion Control for a Snowbound day

I am supposed to be en route to paris via the normally excellent and affordable Eurostar train. As it happens there has been some quite awful weather including temperatues hitting -10C on the northen french bit of the route yesterday, so there were some speed restrictions and some problems with trackside kit etc etc - this is not unreasonable, except that it is probably one of the busiest weekends in the year.

I'm guessing that during a normal holiday day,
they haveabout 6 operational trains on london<->paris,
given there's about 1 train an hour and
its 2.5 hours + buffer/turnaround...

So yesterday, what we had here could be modelled as a massive TCP
congestion event (rather than packet loss, we got train loss)
with > 1/2 a windows worth of trains cancelled, plus a sudden increase in RTT.

So now today (correctly) the window is down to 1 train per RTT,
whichis 6 times less than normal, and slow start is happening,
so in about ln(6) (say 3) RTTs we'll be back up to speed -
so thats 18 hrs.

In that time, some of the latent demand will fade
(people like me probably cancel trip as we have no alernative,
or some people postpone (e.g. "cancel christmas" or "convert to Islam", since they seem to get less snow, or
perhaps find alternative...

If i was desperate, I'd use this old

Boat Train service, although the crossing might be pretty dreadful at this time of year.

There don't appear to be any flights from anywhere today, and practically none tomorrow either.

A New Internet Theory

As many of you know,
I have been striving to apply a number of more
scientific approaches to networking in general,
and the Internet specifically.

To this end, I ended up teaching the final year
undergrads this year
(who of course may not be as final as they think
given the impending part III option)
a whole bunch of underpinning theories, including
Information, Graph, Control, Queueing, and Optimisation

Now, these are all fine theories,
but they all have the twin massive disadvantages of:
1. being to hard to apply in any realistic scenario
2, being empirically falsifiable

What we need truly to model the Internet is a
simple, powerful, and incotrovertable Grand Unified Theory -
in Physics, they have such a theory and it is String.

So can we apply string theory to the Internet?

Yes, I think we can.

Firstly, obviosuly, the Internet looks a lot like string.
But (as physicists like doing) we can play cats cradle with the string.
Thus we can model the static and dyanmical evolution of the Internet
Lopology.

Closed Loops of string could be used to model packets.
Forwarding packets would be like "throwing someone a line".
Indeed, fowarding table entries, Link State Advertisement packets, AS
Path announcements, and packets themselves would all be elegantly
caputured using the same flixible little ring-like structure.

Elasticity ("how long is a piece of string" == QoS)
can finally be used to model traffic control and pricing
in a pleasingly coherent way.

String is a veryful thing in models.
Although Robust Operational Parameterized Estimators
are thicker, string is very quick to apply. And of course it
can offer a perfectly good model for multiplexing, as well as
giving straightforward explantory and predictive techniques for
understanding Kandinsky Network Operational Tantrums
which have resisted all previous analysis.

If nothing else,
when under persistent cyberattack,
the whole Internet unravels,
we can use the residue to help
wrap up christmas presents.

I shall be working on this over the break
and hope to bring convincing results
back from the brink in the new year.

The Terrible Internet Buffer Overrun Disaster of 2012

Jim Gettys was visiting here recently and we spent most of the day discussing the terrible Buffer Overrun Disaster of 2012 - Young folks probably wont remember this, but back in those days, we used to overprovision buffers everywhere, and I mean everywhere, even between a socket and a protocol wrench, a bolt and a spanner , and the nick and the stack. This meant TCPs all around the world would get all pumped up and full of themselves, which was ok when there were just those old internet creeks which you couldn't fit a paper boat down, but as soon as the floodgates opened on the old fiber to the hip, everything went pearshaped, and I mean without a paddle.

The congestive flu-like collapse of 1987 was as nothing to this - noone could get their mutter feeds, everyone was stalled on their 3HDIPTV Christmas participatory viewing of Avatar III, and the world economy tanked, again.

This was a classic xen-koan story - less is more - by simply introducing the deliberate-memory-leak virus in her TCP-Budapest, Magda (von) Kiss was able to "take out" all that unnecessary buffering at one swell foop. Later upgrades to the hardware recovered the now-wasted DRAM, and recycled it as Casino tokens in Vegas and Reno, closing the loop on a very, very old joke.