I attended a fun talk at UCLA recently by Vint Cert, who is Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, and considered by many as one of the fathers of the Internet. Through humor, interesting stories, and wise perspective, he shared his thoughts on the history and the future of the Internet. You can watch the full video at the CNSI website.

Cerf actually studied at both Stanford and UCLA and was a co-designer of TCP/IP, a foundational protocol for the Internet. Of his many honors, he received the Alan Turing award for his influential work.

Below are my notes on the talk.

• Al Gore wrote the bill that funded the backbone and created an organization to connect all government funds for networking and IT research.
  
• Key was convincing private sector of business use case.
  

• First 4 nodes of ARPANET: UCLA, UCSB, SRI, Utah
  
• Military needed satellite and radio nets to interconnect with wired
  

• Internet completely voluntary
  
• No one required to connect or use TCP/IP
  
• Completely distributed
  
• Not designed for anything specific
  
• Huge flexibility
  
• Not over-designed
  

• 888 million machines
  
• 5.5B mobiles
  
• 1.2B PCs
  

• Asia and Europe have more Internet users than North America
  
• Asia 1B
• Eur 500M
• North America 273M
  
• Latin America 235M
  

• IPv6 critical
  

• New generic and internationalized domain names (non-ascii Latin script like Arabic, Cyrillic)
  

• Origins of security weaknesses
  
• Weak OS
  
• Naive browsers with too much privilege
  
• Poor access control practices
  
• Improper configuration of hosts and clients
  
• Compromised clients and servers
  
• Hackers, organized crime, state-sponsored cyber warfare
  

• Security problems of the Internet not all cryptographic
  

• Security responses
  
• Improved OS and browsers
  
• Software defenses reinforced with hardware
  
• BIOS signature
  
• Internal and external firewalls
  
• Stronger auth inside net
  
• DNSSEC and RPKI
  
• User training
  
• StopBadware
  

• Trends
  
• All media digital
  
• Increased collaboration in all contexts
  
• Increased info sharing
  
• Online digital publication
  
• Bit rot hazard (keeping around binary files without the apps/versions to read them)
  
• Need for revision of intellectual property concepts
  

• Google Translate
  
• Google Goggles
  
• Google self-driving cars: no accidents in 200K miles; not autononous, use Internet and feeding back to Google and other cars what seen; allow other cars to use data/experience gained from each car
• Medical diagnosing: pulling context back in from other experiences
  
• Refrigerator on Internet: uses RFID to know what's inside, fetches you recipes, tells you in grocery store not to forget milk
  
• internet bathroom (connected to Internet fridge to caution/lock you out on diet)
  
• Internet-enabled light bulb, LED: monitors usage
  
• Internet-enabled surfboard: surf while surfing
  
• Internet sensor network in house: sampling room temperature, data on how well A/C works; Arch Rock PhyNet Server to monitor wine cellar example
  

• Medical apps
  
• Continuous monitoring now enabled by tech
  
• Temp, blood pressure, pulse can be feasibly measured all the time
  
• Remote diagnosis using handheld devices; can project medical diagnosis through the net
  
• Less skilled techs/nurses can do test remotely while analysis done centrally
  
• Google pandemic analysis through query analysis
  
• Google can detect flu outbreak 30 days before CDC gets doctor reports
  
• Virtual drug trials enabled
  
• If we had adequate med records, could select from population automatically and simply analyze the data
  
• Da Vinci robot helping surgeon do surgery
  
• E-911: dialing a phone when you need help is archaic; sensors around you should detect you have a problem (or you just push panic button on your phone); call is automatic; having much more info for emergency call
  
• Individualized treatment; genetics
  
• Craig Venter, Harvard films of cell function; have changed cell DNA from one species to another successfully