Cerfle

September 9, 2005 3:38 AM

Vint Cerf, "father of the internet", joins Google! It seems Google is going from strength to strength. Not content with buying up the world's dark fibre, they've now wooed Vint Cerf to work for them as "Chief Internet Evangelist" (what a great job title!) Vint's interview is here, and information on his major cause: the need for more IPs!
posted by tommyc (24 comments total)

What the hell does a "Chief Internet Evangelist" do?
posted by grouse at 3:54 AM on September 9, 2005

Seems a little ambiguous. Does he evangelise the Internet, or does he envangelise Google TO the Internet? If it's the latter, I think it makes more sense: who better to promote Google on the Internet than the guy who invented the Internet to begin with?
posted by reklaw at 3:58 AM on September 9, 2005

What the hell does a "Chief Internet Evangelist" do?

Evangelizes Soylent-Google:

"These search results are brought to you by Google red and Google yellow, high energy information concentrates, and new, delicious, Google green. The miracle food of high-energy information gathered from the intenets of the world. "
posted by three blind mice at 4:07 AM on September 9, 2005

Insert cheap Al Gore joke here.
posted by psmealey at 4:12 AM on September 9, 2005

IP enough already, thank you.
posted by elpapacito at 4:34 AM on September 9, 2005

Vint Cerf's beard is the source of all his power.
posted by ph00dz at 4:47 AM on September 9, 2005

Google is a flag of convenience for Cerf and he's a show horse for Google. His career in the past ten years or so is basically all about evangelizing for more IPs. Don't expect him to stay very long.

Likewise, Google is reeling from their recent PR gaffes. They need the mojo from a "father of the internet" to beef up the Cult of Sergey and Larry.
posted by lodurr at 5:27 AM on September 9, 2005

Vint Cerf's beard is the source of all his power.

Hey, it's nice when a graybeard actually has a graybeard.
posted by sexymofo at 5:28 AM on September 9, 2005

BBC article here

'He will also maintain his position as chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) which oversees the net's addressing system.'

Professional conflict of interests? Kind of like the roadbuilder saying which businesses the road will go to first?
posted by rawfishy at 5:30 AM on September 9, 2005

Conflict of interest? Appears so. If it were anyone but Cerf, I'd worry. More worrisome to me is that Google can, by virtue of Cerf's presence on their payroll, imply that whatever they do has ICANN's (and Cerf's) blessing.

Like I said, don't expect him to stay long. It occurs to me as I type this that this could end up backfiring on Google. Vint Cerf isn't Eric Schmidt. His motivations aren't money and business victory. They won't be able to manipulate him as easily as they would some random pseudo-geek alpha-manager type, like that guy they recently wooed away from MS.
posted by lodurr at 5:44 AM on September 9, 2005

When I worked for UUNET/WorldCom at the Ashburn, VA campus (now MCI HQ), I occasionally saw Vint eating lunch in the cafeteria with us mere mortals. He brought a sense of technical legitimacy to an organization that was otherwise floundering in its attempt to reposition itself as an Internet company. Even with someone like Vint on board, the upper-level executives seemed to have trouble understanding the importance of IP and the value of the UUNET backbone, and failed to "leverage" (gag) it early on. I am surprised he stayed there as long as he did after the financial troubles were made public.
posted by candyland at 6:13 AM on September 9, 2005

What happened to UUNET makes me cry they had the best network in the world. Worldcom destroyed everything it touched and then self-imploded.

I think Vince was also working on a space-based IP network with NASA at some point (those were champagne days, then the bubbles burst and the party was over.)
posted by stbalbach at 6:30 AM on September 9, 2005

"Vince"? Is that what his buds call him [g /]?
posted by lodurr at 6:43 AM on September 9, 2005

I'm not a big fan of Cerf. He's a total corporate whore.
posted by delmoi at 7:14 AM on September 9, 2005

There really is no pressing need for more IPs right now, with CIDR and the prevalence of private networks. Someone should tell him that.
posted by wakko at 7:33 AM on September 9, 2005

wakko: all that crap is hacks.
_{(I realize that was gramaticaly incorrect, but it sounded cool}

Seriously, one IP per device is the way to go.
posted by delmoi at 7:41 AM on September 9, 2005

The Federal government is moving ahead with IPv6; agencies are required to transition to IPv6 by June 2008. See OMB Memorandum M-05-22 (PDF) for details and timeline.
posted by candyland at 7:47 AM on September 9, 2005

Insert cheap Al Gore joke here.

I am taking the liberty of sending to you both a brief
summary of Al Gore's Internet involvement, prepared by
Bob Kahn and me. As you know, there have been a seemingly
unending series of jokes chiding the vice president for
his assertion that he "took the initiative in creating
the Internet."

Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant
credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has
become the Internet.

--Vint Cerf
posted by jbrjake at 9:07 AM on September 9, 2005

There really is no pressing need for more IPs right now, with CIDR and the prevalence of private networks. Someone should tell him that.

Ugh, the sooner NAT goes away, the better.
posted by cmonkey at 9:37 AM on September 9, 2005

delmoi, re. the corporate whore thing: I'm curious. Say more. Really. You're being a tease. (I've generally had a favorable impression, but then I can't honestly say I know a hell of a lot about him, really.)
posted by lodurr at 10:12 AM on September 9, 2005

cmonkey, sure, NAT's ugly, but it has certain security benefits. Nothing you couldn't work around, but then, you have work around them. What would you replace that layer with?

(... as thread deteriorates into tech-geek crap that most of the rest of MeFi doesn't care about...)
posted by lodurr at 10:14 AM on September 9, 2005

Alright, so nobody's reading anymore, but I still want to know.
posted by lodurr at 11:00 AM on September 9, 2005

NAT is an ugly hack. It breaks things. It should die. It has no security benefit that a firewall of equal intelligence (read: willingness to look into and corrupt modify the higher layers' data) can't have.

CIDR's a fine thing, though.

Every year or so I bug my ISP about IPv6 support. If they've been sold to a particularly clueful owner that year, then I might actually get a response, but it's always, "nah, nobody wants IPv6, so we're not going to provide it." So I stick with my he.net tunnel.

I'm also curious about delmoi's comment. I've had a generally positive impression of Cerf. (There better not be any skeletons in Postel's closet though.)
posted by hattifattener at 9:12 PM on September 9, 2005

NAT is an ugly hack. It breaks things. It should die. It has no security benefit that a firewall of equal intelligence (read: willingness to look into and corrupt modify the higher layers' data) can't have.

The one great benefit of NAT is that I don't have to rely on my ISP to delegate my address space for my necessarily wastefully numbered internal network (necessary because noone in the NFP that gets some hours of my time can tell me what the network demands are in +6 months) nor do I have to spend hours/days applying to ARIN/RIPE etc to get my PI space.

/inet admin rant
posted by keno at 5:56 AM on September 12, 2005