From: "Jim Higgins" <gordian238@hotmail.com>

| Researchers Explore Scrapping Internet
| http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1
|
| NEW YORK (AP) - Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get
| this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the
| federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.
| The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate"
| approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other
| challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock
| helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two
| machines on Sept. 2, 1969.
|
| The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely
| different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University
| professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle
| that it continues to work well today."
|
| No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high
| costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the
| Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing
| networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel
| future traffic over the existing pipes.
|
| Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co- developer of
| the key communications techniques, said the exercise was "generally healthy"
| because the current technology "does not satisfy all needs."
|
| One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests
| of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to
| toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this
| time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.
|
| There's no evidence they are meddling yet, but once any research looks
| promising, "a number of people (will) want to be in the drawing room," said
| Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor affiliated with Oxford and Harvard
| universities. "They'll be wearing coats and ties and spilling out of the
| venue."
|
| The National Science Foundation wants to build an experimental research
| network known as the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI,
| and is funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future
| Internet Network Design, or FIND.
|
| Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts
| Institute of Technology are among the universities pursuing individual
| projects. Other government agencies, including the Defense Department, have
| also been exploring the concept.
|
| The European Union has also backed research on such initiatives, through a
| program known as Future Internet Research and Experimentation, or FIRE.
| Government officials and researchers met last month in Zurich to discuss
| early findings and goals.
|
| A new network could run parallel with the current Internet and eventually
| replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major
| overhaul of the existing architecture.
|
| These clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and
| aren't expected to bear fruit for another 10 or 15 years-assuming Congress
| comes through with funding.
|
| Guru Parulkar, who will become executive director of Stanford's initiative
| after heading NSF's clean-slate programs, estimated that GENI alone could
| cost $350 million, while government, university and industry spending on the
| individual projects could collectively reach $300 million. Spending so far
| has been in the tens of millions of dollars.
|
| And it could take billions of dollars to replace all the software and
| hardware deep in the legacy systems.
|
| Clean-slate advocates say the cozy world of researchers in the 1970s and
| 1980s doesn't necessarily mesh with the realities and needs of the
| commercial Internet.
|
| "The network is now mission critical for too many people, when in the (early
| days) it was just experimental," Zittrain said.
|
| The Internet's early architects built the system on the principle of trust.
| Researchers largely knew one another, so they kept the shared network open
| and flexible-qualities that proved key to its rapid growth.
|
| But spammers and hackers arrived as the network expanded and could roam
| freely because the Internet doesn't have built-in mechanisms for knowing
| with certainty who sent what.
|
| The network's designers also assumed that computers are in fixed locations
| and always connected. That's no longer the case with the proliferation of
| laptops, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices, all hopping
| from one wireless access point to another, losing their signals here and
| there.
|
| Engineers tacked on improvements to support mobility and improved security,
| but researchers say all that adds complexity, reduces performance and, in
| the case of security, amounts at most to bandages in a high-stakes game of
| cat and mouse.
|
| Workarounds for mobile devices "can work quite well if a small fraction of
| the traffic is of that type," but could overwhelm computer processors and
| create security holes when 90 percent or more of the traffic is mobile, said
| Nick McKeown, co-director of Stanford's clean- slate program.
|
| The Internet will continue to face new challenges as applications require
| guaranteed transmissions-not the "best effort" approach that works better
| for e-mail and other tasks with less time sensitivity.
|
| Think of a doctor using teleconferencing to perform a surgery remotely, or a
| customer of an Internet-based phone service needing to make an emergency
| call. In such cases, even small delays in relaying data can be deadly.
|
| And one day, sensors of all sorts will likely be Internet capable.
|
| Rather than create workarounds each time, clean-slate researchers want to
| redesign the system to easily accommodate any future technologies, said
| Larry Peterson, chairman of computer science at Princeton and head of the
| planning group for the NSF's GENI.
|
| Even if the original designers had the benefit of hindsight, they might not
| have been able to incorporate these features from the get- go. Computers,
| for instance, were much slower then, possibly too weak for the computations
| needed for robust authentication.
|
| "We made decisions based on a very different technical landscape," said
| Bruce Davie, a fellow with network-equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc., which
| stands to gain from selling new products and incorporating research findings
| into its existing line.
|
| "Now, we have the ability to do all sorts of things at very high speeds," he
| said. "Why don't we start thinking about how we take advantage of those
| things and not be constrained by the current legacy we have?"
|
| Of course, a key question is how to make any transition-and researchers are
| largely punting for now.
|
| "Let's try to define where we think we should end up, what we think the
| Internet should look like in 15 years' time, and only then would we decide
| the path," McKeown said. "We acknowledge it's going to be really hard but I
| think it will be a mistake to be deterred by that."
|
| Kleinrock, the Internet pioneer at UCLA, questioned the need for a
| transition at all, but said such efforts are useful for their out-of-
| the-box thinking.
|
| "A thing called GENI will almost surely not become the Internet, but pieces
| of it might fold into the Internet as it advances," he said.
|
| Think evolution, not revolution.
|
| Princeton already runs a smaller experimental network called PlanetLab,
| while Carnegie Mellon has a clean-slate project called 100 x 100.
|
| These days, Carnegie Mellon professor Hui Zhang said he no longer feels like
| "the outcast of the community" as a champion of clean-slate designs.
|
| Construction on GENI could start by 2010 and take about five years to
| complete. Once operational, it should have a decade-long lifespan.
|
| FIND, meanwhile, funded about two dozen projects last year and is evaluating
| a second round of grants for research that could ultimately be tested on
| GENI.
|
| These go beyond projects like Internet2 and National LambdaRail, both of
| which focus on next-generation needs for speed.
|
| Any redesign may incorporate mechanisms, known as virtualization, for
| multiple networks to operate over the same pipes, making further transitions
| much easier. Also possible are new structures for data packets and a
| replacement of Cerf's TCP/IP communications protocols.
|
| "Almost every assumption going into the current design of the Internet is
| open to reconsideration and challenge," said Parulkar, the NSF official
| heading to Stanford. "Researchers may come up with wild ideas and very
| innovative ideas that may not have a lot to do with the current Internet."
|

Yeah, like I can really see going back to the idea of GOSIP ! < LOL >

--
Dave
http://www.claymania.com/removal-trojan-adware.html
http://www.ik-cs.com/got-a-virus.htm