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By STEVE LOHR from nytime.com
Any conversation with Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web’s bedrock software standards, tends to be fast-paced and nonlinear. When he worked at the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, colleagues tried to get him to speak French instead of English, in hopes of slowing him down.
No surprise, then, that a half-hour dialogue with Mr. Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and these days a professor at M.I.T., at a symposium on the future of technology last Thursday, fit that mold. I started, just for fun, with a historical question. If he were do it over again today, would he do anything differently? Any regrets?
Mr. Berners-Lee smiled and admitted he might make one change — a small one. He would get rid of the double slash “//†after the “http:†in Web addresses.
The double slash, though a programming convention at the time, turned out to not be really necessary, Mr. Berners-Lee explained. Look at all the paper and trees, he said, that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years — not to mention the human labor and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes. (Today’s browsers, of course, automatically fill in the “http://†preamble when a user types a Web address.)
With history dispatched, Mr. Berners-Lee focused on his current enthusiasm — getting more government data on the Web, in the interest of openness, transparency and efficiency. Mr. Berners-Lee is working with the British government in its efforts to do so, and at the symposium he cited some favorite examples of benefits of simple mash-ups like combining roadway maps with bicycle accident reports. The result, he said, helps bikers know which roads to avoid to reduce their chances of being hit by a car.
In a separate interview at the symposium in Washington, sponsored by the Finnish government and the Technology Academy Foundation, Mr. Berners-Lee said this was the year when governments around the world, led by Britain and the United States,are beginning to put vast amounts of information they collect on the Web. It is often seemingly mundane data in raw form, he said, including traffic, local weather, public safety and health data.
But the lesson of the Web, Mr. Berners-Lee said, is that making information and simple online tools freely available inevitably fuels innovation. If you liberate the data, he asked, who knows what applications people will create?
“Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make,†he said. “But the openness, transparency and new uses of the data will make government run better, and that will make business run better as well.â€
From Cordis – ICT Results
Part of the internet’s potential lies in its ability to link hundreds, thousands, or even millions of devices.
Whether a user is downloading a video from a peer-to-peer service, performing scientific research on a grid, or using “cloud computing†to manage a business, programs that let many devices and applications work together are crucial.
The problem, says Peter Van Roy, coordinator of the EU-supported SELFMAN project, is that it’s getting harder to keep those systems working.
“The central challenge when you build big internet applications is how to keep them running without having to tweak and manage them all the time,†he says.
The SELFMAN team set out three years ago to solve that problem by finding out how to build programs that take care of themselves in the rough-and-tumble internet environment.
“We wanted to make big internet applications easy,†Van Roy says, “so that all the management problems you normally have are handled by the system itself.â€
The payoff, he says, will be huge. “It will take the internet to the next level.â€
The SELFMAN researchers identified four vital functions for a distributed application to manage itself – self-configuring, -tuning, -healing and -protecting.
Software is continually being patched, updated or replaced. For a distributed system to configure itself, it needs to keep track of all its components, update them as needed, and make sure that all parts of the system can still talk to each other.
“Our system can ask a component, what version are you? Who are you talking to? It can then replace an old version with a new one as needed,†says Van Roy.
Self-tuning means that the system can instantly adjust to changing loads and to components leaving or joining the network.
“Suppose one node is getting overloaded,†says Van Roy. “Our load-balancing algorithm allocates new nodes close to that hotspot. It spreads the heat to the other nodes and the hotspot cools down.â€
The internet is an unpredictable environment. Routers crash, cables get cut, parts of the system overload and grind to a stop, and components come and go.
“With SELFMAN,†Van Roy says, “each node stores some of the data and each piece of data is replicated a certain number of times. If a node crashes, the other nodes detect the crash, find a new node and give it the missing data. The system heals itself.â€
One of the biggest problems SELFMAN tackled was self defence.
The researchers discovered that a system’s security depends on its topology – how nodes are linked to each other. They found that “small world†networks – in which most nodes are not directly linked, but in which any node can communicate with another in a few steps – were the safest.
“With a small world network, it’s easier to detect, isolate, and eject bad nodes,†says Van Roy. “The security service observes the system’s behaviour. If it notices that certain parts of the network are acting abnormally, it takes action.â€
The SELFMAN team found that building these advanced capabilities into useful applications required a highly structured approach.
The foundation of each application is a structured overlay network. That’s a program – itself replicated across the network – that keeps track of all the nodes and connections between them, and can decide when and how to fix problems.
The next level is a replicated storage system. It makes sure that each node has access to the same data, and that data are always replicated to ensure they do not disappear.
The third level houses SELFMAN’s transactional problem-solver. It relies on a sophisticated algorithm called Paxos to provide a systematic way of reaching consensus among any number of fallible components.
Van Roy uses the analogy of a transfer between two bank accounts. “If you want to reduce one bank account by 100 euros and add that 100 to another, you want both or nothing,†he says. “Each node must see the same data.â€
“Getting all this fluid behaviour – where even if nodes are crashing or new nodes are coming in or the network has problems it never blocks the system – was a big technical problem,†says Van Ray. “We needed Paxos to get it to work.â€
The SELFMAN architecture and components have been used to build some impressive applications. These include a prize-winning distributed Wikipedia that can handle far more queries than the current version, a commercially successful media streaming service, and a graphics program that lets multiple users collaborate on a design.
Van Roy believes that SELFMAN opens the door to a host of high-powered, flexible, and “unbreakable†internet applications. “Right now we’re just scratching the surface,†he says.
Sites: http://www.ist-selfman.org http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults IST Project Fact Sheet
The ‘father’ of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was today revealed as the most influential person in technology from the last 150 years, following a vote by a panel comprised of experts, including academics, journalists and independent third parties.
Berners-Lee won out because of his impact on society and ground-breaking technology, according to Intel who organised the panel event to ascertain the 45 most influential individuals in technology.
He was followed at two and three by Sergey Brin and Larry Page respectively, the co-founders of Google. Guglielmo Marconi, inventor if the radiotelegraph system and Jack Kilby, the man behind the integrated circuit and calculator were awarded fourth and fifth place respectively in the roll call of honours.
“It was a very difficult task to rate so many excellent candidates and there was a very lively debate amongst the panel,” said chair of the judging event, Professor Clive Holtham of Cass Business School.
“I think all the judges had a personal favourite who they wanted to see higher up the list. I was backing Douglas Englebart, whose groundbreaking inventions influenced the whole of office automation, although Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a worthy winner.”
The results of the poll showed that computing and the internet are now the driving forces behind industry success, with the top three names being involved with web-based technologies and the founders of Intel (Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, at number six and Robert Noyce, also co-founder of Intel, at number eight) and IBM’s Don Estridge, who led development of the IBM computer, making the top 10.
“It’s fitting that the people who have influenced the internet turn up in the top three of the list,” Sean Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president. “This emphasises the way the world is heading and that the internet is our industry’s demand driver.”
The judging panel started off with a shortlist of 69 individuals, but Richard Branson, Charles Dunstone and Trevor Bayliss were given the chop by the panel in favour of Dennis Ritchie (who created the C programming language), Don Estridge and Jack Kilby (inventor of the microchip). Douglas Engelbart, who created the computer mouse, was also added to the shortlist, bringing the list of individuals to be judged to a total of 70.
Judges cast their votes on a scale of one to 10 using criteria of innovation, ground-breaking technology, industry success, impact on society and influence.
The 45 most influential people in technology
1.Tim Berners-Lee
2.Sergey Brin
3.Larry Page
4.Guglielmo Marconi
5.Jack Kilby
6.Gordon Moore
7.Alan Turing
8.Robert Noyce
9.William Shockley
10.Don Estridge
11.Doug Engelbert
12.Robert Metcalfe
13.Vint Cerf
14.Steve Jobs
15.Andrew Grove
16.Seymour Cray
17.Pierre Omidyar
18.Shawn Fanning
19.Dennis Ritchie
20.Ted Hoff
21.Linus Torvalds
22.Shuji Nakamura
23.Dave Packard
24.Jean Hoerni
25.William Hewlett
26.John Logie Baird
27.George Boole
28.Martin Cooper
29.John Pinkerton
30.Grace Hopper
31.Bill Gates
32.Herman Hollerith
33.Thomas Watson
34.Jeff Bezos
35.Meg Whitman
36.Ada Lovelace
37.Nolan Bushnell
38.Claude Shannon
39.Charles Babbage
40.John Chambers
41.Philo Farnsworth
42.Steve Wozniak
43.Larry Ellison
44.Michael Dell
45.Maurice Wilkes
By Patrick Thibodeau from Computerworld
WASHINGTON – The co-designer of the Internet’s basic architecture, Vinton Cerf, said the Internet “still lacks many of the features that it needs,” particularly in security, in a blunt talk to a tech industry crowd here.
Cerf, who is a vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google Inc., co-designed with Robert Kahn the TCP/IP protocols that underpin the Internet. That was in 1973. And despite becoming operational in 1983, and commercially available in 1989, the Internet remains incomplete, he said.
Cerf is influential because of his accomplishments, but he may be even more so today because of his affiliation with Google. President Obama’s administration has appointed a number of Google employees, including CEO Eric Schmidt, to important positions.
One of the most critical needs is authentication, Cerf said, and he told the crowd at a TechAmerica gathering Wednesday that anyone who performs transactions over the Internet – which is everyone – should “should be deeply concerned about that technology.”
The lack of authentication is pervasive and is even a problem in simple cases, such as authenticating entries in the domain name system, he said.
“Authentication isn’t available on an end-to-end basis at all layers of the architecture,” Cerf said. While users are good “at building concrete tunnels” using simple SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) techniques, they don’t identify the end points and just secure the channel, he said. You can have an e-mail with an attached virus, thoroughly encrypted, and send it through an encrypted tunnel, and once it gets to the other end “it gets decrypted and then, of course, does its damage,” he said.
Mobile is another problem. “We do a terrible job serving up mobile,” Cerf said, referring to the ever broadening use of the Internet via mobile devices. He said protocol work is needed to address it.
Asked later what the White House should be doing in regard to this issue, Cerf cited the work that’s been assigned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in coordinating standards on the smart grid and health IT. However, he said he would anticipate that Obama’s new CTO and CIO will “have some things to say about what the U.S. government hopes will emerge in the infrastructure of our digital communications system.”
The Obama administration recently released a report on cyberspace security and has promised to make this issue a priority. The actions have been met with cautious optimism by the security industry.
From ZDNet by Tom Spiner
Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said that the Semantic Web will make the privacy of online communcations stronger, and will allow people to control who can use their data.
The Semantic Web, a project overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), seeks to make the World Wide Web intelligently interpret what people are looking for when they are searching the internet. For example, computers would data-tag photographs and combine those tags with information from a desktop calendar, so people would be able to ask the web what the people in the photograph were doing on a particular day.
However, researchers have warned that the combination of personal information could lead to privacy compromises, including increased data mining.
Berners-Lee, who is director of W3C, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that the teams working on the Semantic Web project are making sure privacy principles are included in its architecture.
“Certainly, Semantic Web technology will [enhance privacy],” said Berners-Lee. “The Semantic Web project is developing systems which will answer where data came from and where it’s going to — the system will be architectured for a set of appropriate uses.”
Another principle of the Semantic Web is that people who make a web request for personal information being held by third parties, such as companies and government agencies, will be able to see all the data those organisations hold on them, according to Berners-Lee.
“W3C wants to help make sure data use is appropriate,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s a serious question who should have what access [to information].”
In addition, the project will include accountable data-mining components, which let people know who is mining the data, and its teams are looking at making the web adhere to privacy preferences set by users. The whole project was geared towards privacy enhancement, Berners-Lee said. The teams “are building systems to be aware of different data uses”, he said.
ZDNet UK spoke to Berners-Lee at an event at the House of Lords designed to draw attention to the use of deep packet inspection by internet service providers and third parties. The technique intercepts data packets sent over the internet to analyse their content, which Berners-Lee likened to the postal service opening the mail it is charged with delivering.
“When people built the internet, it was designed to be a cloud,” said Berners-Lee. “When routing packets, the system only looks at the envelope — it’s an important design principle. Now people find out what you write in your letters.”
From BBC News
The integrity of the internet is under threat if online “snooping” goes unchecked, one of the web’s most respected figures has told Parliament.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, said browsing habits could now be monitored as if someone had put a “TV camera in one’s room”.
Laws must be better enforced to ensure such “sensitive” data was not misused for commercial gain, he added.
Tory MP David Davis said privacy must be upheld without “crippling” the web.
‘Sensitive’
Sir Tim’s warning came at a meeting of MPs, peers and technology professionals, organised by the All Parliamentary Group on Communications, to address online privacy concerns.
Parliamentarians are worried about technology allowing firms to track which websites people visit and to share the information with companies for the purpose of sending what is known as “behavioural advertising”.
Google has become the latest firm to launch a system to send advertisements to web users based on their online activities.
Privacy campaigners have said the trend is dangerous and warned a new code of practice governing how consent is given is insufficient.
Sir Tim, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said people revealed “very sensitive” details through their web use and their privacy should be not be infringed
“We must not snoop on the internet,” he said.
“What is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium.”
The meeting, chaired by Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Baroness Miller, heard concerns from MPs and peers that existing laws on the interception of communications were either not being enforced or were ill-equipped to deal with the fast-moving online marketplace.
Lib Dem MP Susan Kramer said people were “really quite frightened at the ability to lose privacy through mechanisms we don’t understand”.
Mr Davis – a former shadow home secretary – said a solution was needed which was “protective of privacy but not crippling of the usefulness of the internet”.
He said “simple encryption” of web information could make a difference, a move that web experts have said would be hugely expensive and significantly reduce internet speeds.
It emerged in 2007 that BT had trialled certain “behavioural targeting” technology – to be used directly by internet service providers (ISPs) – without the agreement of its customers.
The practice led to complaints and resulted in a police investigation – which concluded no offence had been committed.
Since then, BT has continued with further trials.
The Home Office has said it is happy such technology conformed to EU data laws although Brussels is still considering whether to take any further action.
Phorm, which is working with BT on the service, said it had made strenuous efforts to inform web users about their rights.
Advertisers could not find out people’s identity because all information gathered was anonymous and could not be traced back to individuals, said chief executive Kent Ertugrul.
‘Misrepresented’
He said the purpose of its service had been “misrepresented”.
“We recognise the need for privacy,” he told Wednesday’s meeting. “We believe in it absolutely.”
Crossbench peer Lord Erroll said behavioural advertising could make many people’s lives easier and therefore should not be “rubbished” out of hand.
Campaigners insist such advertising should operate on an “opt-in” rather than an opt-out basis, a stance backed by the Information Commissioner last year.
This would mean that people only receive certain adverts if they have consciously signed up for them.
Richard Clayton, from the Foundation for Information Policy Research, said companies which breached such rules should be “made an example of”.
www.campusparty.com.br
The event started (09/01/19 Р22:43 РṢo Paulo).
It will have Tim Berners-Lee and Jon “Maddog” Hall.
Thanks Rubens Queiroz from dicas-l and Sérgio Amadeu. They gave me the Campus Party 2009 subscription. Thanks Caio Nakashima to give me the opportunity to go to the event.
The event provides 10 G/sec transfer rate. I’m getting 11724.1 KB/sec.
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