Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. This is Geek of the Week and we’re talking to Bernhard Stockman who is technical director of EBONE, the European backbone. Welcome to Geek of the Week Bernhard Stockman: Okay, thank you. Thank you. Malamud: Why don’t you tell us what EBONE is? Stockman: Okay. EBONE is a consortium of …read the full transcript.
Archive
There was really no real security built, other than things like passwords and maybe some encryption here or there. And the attitude that my boss had at National Science Foundation was, “That’s not our concern. This is for the academics. People want to build in all kinds of security, that’s somebody else’s problem.” I think that was a very valid point at that time, but that was 1990.
The Internet by itself is not valuable for anybody. The Internet is valuable if it impacts in the life of the people. So this is what we have to work on every day.
I think my role for the Internet was that I was lucky to be part of the people who spread the Internet through Southeast Asia. I brought the Internet to Thailand.
I was participating in a European Commission project, and it was really a surprising period. In less than ten years, the whole Internet changed.
I would hope that ten or twenty years from now we live in a world in which Internet access is taken almost for granted, and that it’s conceivable that the Internet—the name “Internet”—will actually fade and we’ll just consider it part of the infrastructure that we’re used to just like you know, there’ll be a plug in the wall for information services over the Internet.
Where did this evil stuff come from? Are we evil? I’m perfectly willing to stipulate you are not evil. Neither is your boss evil. Nor is Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And yet the results of our work, our best most altruistic work, often turns evil when it’s deployed in the larger world. We go to work every day, genuinely expecting to make the world a better place with our powerful technology. But somehow, evil is sneaking in despite our good intentions.
Some of my artist friends think what I’m doing isn’t art, and I’ve given up on art. It’ll take care of itself. You know. I mean it’s always been there, it will always be there, and we always know that new art never looks like art at first, ever. So why should this be any different? We just have to trust the process. And I would say that must be true for every other discipline.