Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. This is Carl Malamud. We’re in Amsterdam with Rob Blokzijl, who is network manager at NIKHEF, that’s the Dutch High Energy Physics Institute. He’s also the chairman of RIPE, which is the Reseaux IP Europeens, which is an IP users group for Europe. Rob, welcome to …read the full transcript.
Carl Malamud (Page 4 of 5)
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. This is Geek of the Week and we’re talking with Christian Huitema, who’s a researcher at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique. Did I do that anywhere close? Christian Huitema: No, that’s quite correct. Malamud: Well thank you. Welcome to Geek of the Week, Christian. …read the full transcript.
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. This is Geek of the Week and we’re talking with Peter Deutsch, who is president of Bunyip Information Systems. Peter, welcome to Geek of the Week. Peter Deutsch: Glad to be here. Malamud: You’re best known as the originator of Archie, or one of the originators of Archie. …read the full transcript.
I think it’s interesting to note that computer science has paid relatively little attention I think to some of the problems that come up with very-large scale library automation and public access to information. I think that these are hard problems and also fruitful problems from a computer science point of view.
The Internet Toaster started out as sort of a partially practical joke and partially a way of demonstrating some things you could do with SNMP and computer networks that most people didn’t tend to think about.
I was interested in computer security when I first showed up at MIT as an undergraduate. I just found it an intellectually interesting field of study. But indeed because we have the students that we have I have an interesting perspective on it. In fact at MIT I like to say we have only two kinds of computer security. We have very good computer security, and we have…none at all. Because nothing in between is of any consequence.
One of the ways that we’re very distinct from US networking is that in some sense EUnet and most of the rest of Europe started out with regionals and is today realizing an NSFNET equivalent. In EUnet’s case we had sort of very loose institutional national networks.
I think if the Internet really becomes a public data network in the true sense of the word, something that equals Telenet or something like that, or surpasses it in capability, but it’s being used that way then I think in general the mission agency networks will become much more private, and not have to go off and pull capability to places.
Clearly encryption gets you into all sorts of political minefields having to do with export controls and so on. And there’s a lot of traffic on the Internet. There’s no particularly strong reason to encrypt it.
I hear these arguments and read these arguments on the mailing list that say oh, we’ve got to make sure we choose the right technology, the best technology, this should not be a political decision, blah blah blah and all those sorts of things. Well… I… That sounds wonderful. But it’s not being real.