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A New Way to Look at Networking
Journal written by samjensen (1098285) and posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun May 06, 2007 08:20 AM
from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
Van Jacobson gave a Google Tech Talk on some of his ideas of how a modern, global network could work more effectively, and with more trust in the data which changes many hands on its journey to its final destination.
Watch the talk on Google's site
The man is very smart and his ideas are fascinating. He has the experience and knowledge to see the big picture and what can be done to solve some of the new problems we have. He starts with the beginning of the phone networks and then goes on to briefly explain the origins of the ARPAnet and its evolution into the Internet we use today.
He explains the problems that were faced while using the phone networks for data, and how they were solved by realizing that a new problem had risen and needed a new, different solution. He then goes to explain how the Internet has changed significantly from the time it started off in research centres, schools, and government offices into what it is today (lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed to many consumers, where broadcast would be more appropriate and efficient).
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8 months ago (Score:1, Informative)
Re:8 months ago (Score:4, Funny)
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3 hours ago (Score:1)
eh... (Score:2)
If this means airwaves, same as TV, sure. Why not, since the whole thing is one big info-mercial swamp already. Otherwise, it also means guaranteed next -packet delivery, without any pauses, re
Multicasting on a segmented network (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm confused.. (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Decline of text (Score:5, Informative)
Then I started watching, and at some point noticed I watched the whole thing, without skipping anything.
I think he gives a good talk, and it kept me interested the whole way.
Its a very nice insight he has there, too bad it flies way over Slashdotters head (well, its just that almost all of them probably didn't even read the whole thing).
By the way, I summarized [google.com] his ideas (as I understood them, which may not be the same as he explained them).
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But
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Internet is not TV (Score:5, Insightful)
The first part is true, but does not necessarily lead to the conclusion in the second. There is a huge, very important IF that belongs between them. Specifically, "if the recipients are all prepared to receive those bytes at the same time". The problem with the conclusion is that the evaluation of the "if" part is nearly always "they're not". This is yet another case of "if the internet were like television, it'd be more efficient". Yes, but it would then no longer be the internet people like. The great promise of the internet is information on demand. All this bullcrap about broadcast, push, and the like, it's all the efforts of 20th century throwbacks trying to fit the internet into their outdated worldview of "producers" and "consumers". They need to quit it. Broadcast is a square peg and the internet is a round hole. Every time anyone suggests putting the two together, they simply look like a bloody idiot.
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bittorrent (Score:2)
I think bittorrent is the internet answer to the broadcast problem. Bittorrent is intrinsically adapted to
Re:!!!! (Score:1)
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My personal take on this... (Score:2)
let major choke points choke due to not wanting to spend money on equipment,
share the costs like a Co-op if necessary amongst Tier1's to keep the backbones
and choke poin
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I haven't watched the video (hey, this is slashdot), but a system which required me to have ~500GB of local cache wouldn't be out of the question for me. My pipe isn't too big because of where I live, but I've got plenty of storage. If I could keep that
Re:Internet is not TV (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that in order to see the benefits of the broadcasting of data, you have to take the ISPs and service providers point of vie, not the final user's. Today, the ISP transmit every request from their users to the service provider, and the service providers answer to each user request. In the case of a dynamic web like online shops or search engines, there are no alternatives. But in the case of semi-static websites like news sites, having a system of cache synchronized at the ISP level thanks to a regular broadcast from the server can actually save a lot of bandwidth to the ISP and the service provider.
Remember the problem slashdot had with softwares like NewsTicker when it first provided a RSS feed. This is the kind of problems this wants to solve if I understand correctly.
Disclaimer : I didn't watch the one-hour long video with no transcript. Give me a text and save this bandwidth already, dammit !
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Congratulations, your just inve
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You are totally right that the recipients will want those bytes at different times, BUT this is not like current television or radio broadcasts, where once broad casted they no longer exist. The data which is intended to be broad casted (in the example,
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Good ideas (Score:4, Interesting)
A bit off topic, but there are two things that I want to see happen: a complete upgrade to IPv6 and the creation of an alternative 'public Internet' based on emerging long distance wifi and software that lets people volunteer to be part of this new open grid, and optionally share some bandwidth bridging the 'real' Internet.
It may seem pointless to want both higher performance (multi-casting UDP, essentially infinite IP address space) and low performance and ad-hoc systems, but please consider: the UK and USA seem to be going down the wrong path of surveillance and citizen control, the Internet may someday be viewed as something that the public just should not have because it is too free a source of information. I hope that I am wrong about this, but this unpleasant possible repressive future is a possibility.
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I disagree with last second point however: I try to find good sources of information to share with people I know that contradict the spin that we see on the news. A small effect, but e
Broadcasting (Score:1)
Van Jacobson's quotes (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone educate me please. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, sending identical packets to everyone is somehow more bandwidth efficient than sending packets to only those who want them? Doesn't that seem backwards to anyone else? Furthermore, couldn't you define broadcasting as precisely the act of sending identical bytes to many consumers?! I'm teh confused.
TLF
Re:Someone educate me please. (Score:4, Informative)
I think he's trying to push the internet into a bittorrent/usenet type of model. Instead of everyone grabbing a copy from the original server and eating up the bandwidth on the major backbones, we get the information from a more local server that have a cached copy. I believe from an ISP level, he's trying to reduce the WAN usage and keep things on the LAN. To an extent I think ISP are favoring this already, bittorrent is kinda frowned on, but they allow you download tv shows off the usenet server with a nzb file.
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Transcript? (Score:1)
lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed (Score:1)
Item potent, oc, you hear? (Score:2)
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And if it did try distributing trackers, you'd be in the Nutella world, where...
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"When Copernicus first wrote his paper on planetary motions, the predictions that he gave were really crummy, compared to the tomaic[...] predictions"
Somebody forgot the 'p'.
Superb talk: "data dissemination" not mcast/cache (Score:5, Informative)
The article submitter didn't seem to "get" what Van Jacobson was saying though, as the talk had almost nothing to do with broadcasting or multicasting. Indeed, Van Jacobson actually pointed out why multicasting and broadcasting were inappropriate in most situations in this new world (they carry implicit time sync), so only use them as accelerators on LANs or in other special cases. The slightly wrong article description may have misdirected some of the posts here since not everybody reads TFA, and even fewer sit through an extended talk. It wasn't about broadcast or multicast at all, except in passing.
Maybe it'll help to summarize his thrust briefly.
What he said was that the network underneath doesn't actually matter, and that the wires and fibre underneath don't actually matter either -- TCP/IP has abstracted away from them. However, the client-server model on which TCP/IP is based is no longer strictly relevant either, because it is founded on a somewhat obsolete concept, the "conversation". The vast bulk of our Internet traffic is no longer "conversations", but "data dissemination" (the migration of identified data objects from place to place), and actual conversations are just a special case of that.
Data dissemination is utterly different to conversation as a communications paradigm, and that's what he's getting at. Fully identified, self-validating items of data as discrete entities are really where our focus needs to be, and how they get to us is rather immaterial, or abstracted away. *Where* they come from (ie. the actual server to which we connect) is quite immaterial too --- getting it from a passing plane would be as good as from a known server, when you can rely on data identity. Furthermore, if the data items were fully self-descriptive then many of the current problems like spam would go away as well. What's more, the nodes of the network would be able to work more intelligently too (and hence efficiently), if they were aware of data identity rather than just treat everything as a conversation.
That's a very brief summary and can't hope to do the talk justice. Go listen! He's dead right.
mod parent up! (Score:4, Informative)
One thing I pulled most out of it was the analogy to 60s and 70s networking and how it is only after technology has been adopted that we see what its used for.
When the telephone was invented Bell didn't know what it would be used for, its a strange concept but he really didn't know what a "phone call" was. He just knew he could transmit voice. Not only that but you had to have wires to connect people, so there was this very expensive business of putting wires everywhere. What happened was that people used those wires to make conversations. To establish a conversation you had to have a path between two nodes. This encouraged a monopoly because the best known way to make paths was to have control of all the wires.
When the idea of what TCP/IP was to become was introduced people thought it was lunacy. What they were proposing was adding all this crap onto your data to explicitly name your destination so that it could travel any path to get to its conversation partner. All the networking researchers didn't get it because they already had implicit addresses by way of making the path. Turns out that the supposed innefficiency solved several problems simply by construction. Being able to take any path meant not caring about the underlying topology.
What Van Jacobsen is proposing is another abstraction. Essentially adding another layer of "crap" that will allow us to ignore the underlying network. He mentions how several technologies are working towards these ends to some degree like bittorrent and akami CDN, but I think he is advocating for something like a new protocol. This new protocol would then end up solving some of our current problems simply by construction. Broadcast and one-to-one will become the same thing. Whether you are sending a secure email (pgp signed and named) or downloading the front page of the nytimes you could rely on the nature of the new protocol to deliver you authentic data, no matter where it comes from.
Personally I think its genius, I'd like to follow the progress of such a protocol if it exists. I just got done watching the talk so I'll be googling around for a little I suppose.
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It's not a protocol. It's a bunch of ideas meant for researchers (or grad
Re:Superb talk: "data dissemination" not mcast/cac (Score:2, Insightful)
Corporations make money by restricting access to information.
It doesn't seem that it will be possible for them to continue to do that with this model, so I don't think any of this will
Fairly interesting talk... (Score:3, Insightful)
Basicly, he's speaking of named resources, that an URL would be key like KSKs in Freenet
Content would self-verify, that's basicly CHKs in Freenet
Then you need add security into it which pretty much amount to SSKs
Only in his case, it wasn't talk about making the end nodes treat information this way but rather the core of internet, and it didn't involve anonymity. But the general idea was the same, to grab content from a persistant swarm of hosts who doesn't need a connection to the original source. Unfortunately, most of the examples he gives are simply false, like the NY Times front page. If I want up-to-the-minute news everybody need to pull fresh copies off the original source all the time, reducing it down to a caching proxy. Any sort of user-specifc content, or interactive content won't work. For example take slashdot. I've got my reading preferences set up, which means my content isn't the same as yours. Also my front page contains a link to my home page, which is not the same as yours. Getting a posting form and making a comment wouldn't be possible. Making any kind of feedback like digg, youtube, article feedback etc. isn't possible. Counters wouldn't be possible. The only thing where it'd work is reasonably static fire-and-forget content, and even then there's the problem of knowing what junk to keep. Notice that when asked about BT he said that only worked for big files, so the idea is that everyone will have some datastore where they keep small files until someone needs them. The only good example is the Olympic broadcast, which is exactly the same content at exactly the same time. Oh wait, that's classic broadcast. Classic broadcast works best in a broadcast model? Who'd think that.
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Akamai (Score:2)
Akamai Technologies is really very much in the business of solving the main problem Jacobson describes. Yes, lots of people want the same information. Jacobson is a ve
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I didn't watch the video, but usually when people talk about "dynami
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Also at 7:01 he says "I'm an old fart" but the subtitle gives this as "I'm an old part".
Who cares?