Mother of Internet Speaks Out

Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that Radia Perlman, sometimes called the "Mother of the Internet" for her invention of the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges and switches, recently gave a very candid interview with NetworkWorld. From the interview: "The taste of whoever is in the funding agencies tends to cause everyone to look at the same stuff at the same time. Often technologies get hot then go away. There was active networking for a while, which always mystified me and has now died. In security the money is behind digital rights management, which I think ultimately is a bad thing -- not that we need to preserve the right to pirate music, but because the solutions are things that don't solve the real problems in terms of security."

Layer 2 Protocols Run the Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spanning Tree is a Layer2 Protocol and not used for IP Routing... How would that make her the mother of the internet?

Re:Wrong anchortext: Mother of Internet

[patio11]

Doesn't Google use link text to heavily bias what it perceives as the content of an article? For example, if I were to do something malicious like say some politician I don't care for is a miserable failure [example.com] that primes a Google bomb for the search term "miserable failure" even if the target page doesn't have miserable or failure on it. Given that Slashdot is a high PR site (PR9?), its link text swings around quite a lot of weight. But who searches for things like "article" or "interview"?

This might be a quite radical conception about the hyperlink, but I think that the overwhelming majority of human users are using a browser which shows context around the link so it doesn't matter whether you say click here [example.com] or link [example.com] or "I found the most interesting description of how to build a Beowolf cluster of hot grits [example.com] while I was browsing Slashdot earlier today", the user will be able to know what the link pertains to regardless. The only major group of users who really need that extra reinforcement in the link text are spiders (and, because I should make at least a token effort to recognize that usability is important, folks with clients which have an extremely small "field of vision" whether thats because of their client not being on a traditional PC or because their client is non-visual). Both of these user groups benefit a heck of a lot more from "Mother of the Internet" than they do from "article".

Re:Layer 2 Protocols Run the Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it makes routing easier (it pretty much allows it to keep working), but that's not a very good way to explain STP, makes it sound like a routing protocol.

STP, in a nutshell, stops router loops from happening. When a router loop happens, all packets caught in the loop will just keep going and going and going, kinda like the energizer bunny, around in a circle amongst some routers not actually going anywhere useful. Once enough packets get caught in the loop either your routers die or there's so much traffic you would think your routers are dead. So anyways, because the Internet is so complex with all it's routers, routing loops would happen all the time. So without STP your precious IP packets would never get anywhere on the Wild Wild World, at least not for long.

Re:Layer 2 Protocols Run the Internet?

[z4pp4]

STP, in a nutshell, stops router loops from happening.

I call BS!
STP is a layer two protocol mostly implemented in Ethernet PHY switches to prevent SWITCHING loops from occurring. When more than one physical connection is present between switches, STP turns off a switching port to prevent the loop.
In modern telecoms networks, the switching architectures mainly use Frame relay, SDH / SONET, MPLS or ATM. These switching architectures do not use STP in any form, since they use virtual circuits to perform switching.
Also, consider this: IP packets have a hop count that is reduced accross routers. When it times out, the packet is dropped. This pretty much limits routing loops.