From jeanjour at comcast.net Fri Jan 1 05:24:38 2016 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 08:24:38 -0500 Subject: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet In-Reply-To: <7AF5FC853F014222A4B296DA69C12678@Toshiba> References: <7AF5FC853F014222A4B296DA69C12678@Toshiba> Message-ID: ;-) I remember that Russian coup. Hilarious. What a joke. For anyone who had read Luttwack?s Coup d?etat: A Practical Handbook, it was obvious it would fail from the start. The last thing you do in a coup is take the legislature. It has no power. I was joking as it collapsed that someone should send them copies of the book to read in prison. ;-) A decade earlier I had made the same prediction about the Spanish coup attempt. A friend ran into my office saying there was coup going on in Spain and they had captured the legislature. I looked up from what I was doing and said it would fail. He demurred he wasn?t so sure. I explained why. ;-) Sure enough. It sure made Juan Carlos look good. ;-) > On Dec 31, 2015, at 17:05, Ian Peter wrote: > > Seems like there were a few parallel initiatives underway in late 1980's > early 1990's - the one I remember was Glasnet from 1991 > > http://www.friends-partners.org/oldfriends/telecomm/nato/zaytsev.html > > And its hard to forget the excitement of "The Tanks are coming, The Tanks > are coming" newsgroup entries of August 1991 carried on APC networks at the > time the tanks moved into Red Square. > > But yes - as someone mentioned the Tiananmen Square events of June 1989 was > an earlier example of citizen journalism - and worldwide student activism. > Although not many students had internet access, many used telephone links > from around the world to dial in and jam China's "dob in a protester" > hotline set up by the government. > > There was also a substantial global network on line of key rainforest > activists and organisations by 1987, with capabilities to organise worldwide > protests. > > Ian Peter > > > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From julf at julf.com Fri Jan 1 06:00:46 2016 From: julf at julf.com (Johan Helsingius) Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 15:00:46 +0100 Subject: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet In-Reply-To: <7AF5FC853F014222A4B296DA69C12678@Toshiba> References: <7AF5FC853F014222A4B296DA69C12678@Toshiba> Message-ID: <5686868E.2070806@julf.com> > Seems like there were a few parallel initiatives underway in late 1980's > early 1990's - the one I remember was Glasnet from 1991 What actual physical network did Glasnet use? Julf From dburk at burkov.aha.ru Fri Jan 1 12:08:26 2016 From: dburk at burkov.aha.ru (Dmitry Burkov) Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 23:08:26 +0300 Subject: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet In-Reply-To: <5686868E.2070806@julf.com> References: <7AF5FC853F014222A4B296DA69C12678@Toshiba> <5686868E.2070806@julf.com> Message-ID: <258457AE-AED7-4B77-9FB7-65389806F881@burkov.aha.ru> > On Jan 1, 2016, at 5:00 PM, Johan Helsingius wrote: > >> Seems like there were a few parallel initiatives underway in late 1980's >> early 1990's - the one I remember was Glasnet from 1991 > > What actual physical network did Glasnet use? Originally was based on X.25 network of VNIIPAS and SFMT, later also use Relcom/Demos and Sprint, finally Sovam Teleport For national access they used multiple X.25 networks. It was also uucp based with bbs-style conference access, later migrated to TCP/IP. From 1993 - commercial provider. It was bought by Sovam Teleport in 1998 > > Julf > > > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. From ian.peter at ianpeter.com Fri Jan 1 12:53:15 2016 From: ian.peter at ianpeter.com (Ian Peter) Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2016 07:53:15 +1100 Subject: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <515F8050B8FD440A83272726612DAF86@Toshiba> >What actual physical network did Glasnet use? I am not sure - but it connected via Nordnet in Sweden (at that stage it might have been PNS Sweden) James Walch in his early book "In the Net" writes about this in detail and was personally involved- but apparently the 1990 END (European Nuclear Disarmament Conference) was held for the first time in the Soviet bloc, (jointly in Tallinn Estonia and Helsinki Finland). Infrastructure was set up for this from 1989 with modernisation of the Tallinn exchange. This made it easier to connect USSR and the west apparently, without needing a manual connection via an exchange operator. So all of USSR could connect to Tallinn apparently, and the new infrastructure there allowed setting up a link to the rest of the world without anyone knowing an overseas connection had been made. Others might know more. Ian Peter -----Original Message----- From: internet-history-request at postel.org Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2016 7:00 AM To: internet-history at postel.org Subject: internet-history Digest, Vol 99, Issue 1 Send internet-history mailing list submissions to internet-history at postel.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to internet-history-request at postel.org You can reach the person managing the list at internet-history-owner at postel.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of internet-history digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet (Ian Peter) 2. Re: How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet (John Day) 3. Re: How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet (Johan Helsingius) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 09:05:19 +1100 From: "Ian Peter" Subject: Re: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet To: Message-ID: <7AF5FC853F014222A4B296DA69C12678 at Toshiba> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Seems like there were a few parallel initiatives underway in late 1980's early 1990's - the one I remember was Glasnet from 1991 http://www.friends-partners.org/oldfriends/telecomm/nato/zaytsev.html And its hard to forget the excitement of "The Tanks are coming, The Tanks are coming" newsgroup entries of August 1991 carried on APC networks at the time the tanks moved into Red Square. But yes - as someone mentioned the Tiananmen Square events of June 1989 was an earlier example of citizen journalism - and worldwide student activism. Although not many students had internet access, many used telephone links from around the world to dial in and jam China's "dob in a protester" hotline set up by the government. There was also a substantial global network on line of key rainforest activists and organisations by 1987, with capabilities to organise worldwide protests. Ian Peter ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 08:24:38 -0500 From: John Day Subject: Re: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet To: Ian Peter Cc: internet-history at postel.org Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" ;-) I remember that Russian coup. Hilarious. What a joke. For anyone who had read Luttwack?s Coup d?etat: A Practical Handbook, it was obvious it would fail from the start. The last thing you do in a coup is take the legislature. It has no power. I was joking as it collapsed that someone should send them copies of the book to read in prison. ;-) A decade earlier I had made the same prediction about the Spanish coup attempt. A friend ran into my office saying there was coup going on in Spain and they had captured the legislature. I looked up from what I was doing and said it would fail. He demurred he wasn?t so sure. I explained why. ;-) Sure enough. It sure made Juan Carlos look good. ;-) > On Dec 31, 2015, at 17:05, Ian Peter wrote: > > Seems like there were a few parallel initiatives underway in late 1980's > early 1990's - the one I remember was Glasnet from 1991 > > http://www.friends-partners.org/oldfriends/telecomm/nato/zaytsev.html > > And its hard to forget the excitement of "The Tanks are coming, The Tanks > are coming" newsgroup entries of August 1991 carried on APC networks at > the > time the tanks moved into Red Square. > > But yes - as someone mentioned the Tiananmen Square events of June 1989 > was > an earlier example of citizen journalism - and worldwide student activism. > Although not many students had internet access, many used telephone links > from around the world to dial in and jam China's "dob in a protester" > hotline set up by the government. > > There was also a substantial global network on line of key rainforest > activists and organisations by 1987, with capabilities to organise > worldwide > protests. > > Ian Peter > > > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20160101/c65764c8/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 15:00:46 +0100 From: Johan Helsingius Subject: Re: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet To: internet-history at postel.org Message-ID: <5686868E.2070806 at julf.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 > Seems like there were a few parallel initiatives underway in late 1980's > early 1990's - the one I remember was Glasnet from 1991 What actual physical network did Glasnet use? Julf ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ internet-history mailing list internet-history at postel.org http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. End of internet-history Digest, Vol 99, Issue 1 *********************************************** From larrypress at gmail.com Fri Jan 1 16:19:48 2016 From: larrypress at gmail.com (Larry press) Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 16:19:48 -0800 Subject: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet in 1982 In-Reply-To: <56851288.6000201@gih.com> References: <5684F2AB.3090608@gih.com> <4FF20B87-411D-4917-8757-7A871A1A6FDC@burkov.aha.ru> <56851288.6000201@gih.com> Message-ID: Olivier, I don't believe we've ever met, but your connectivity list was/is great. > china Good point. Did the communication move beyond Beijing? > Although this message was published in a discussion list at the time, I have not found it archived anywhere on the Web. Has there been a subsequent archive? We pulled one together after the Soviet Coup attempt -- it's at http://www.cs.oswego.edu/~dab/coup/ We are leaving a lot of tracks for historians these days. Larry From julf at julf.com Sat Jan 2 02:51:55 2016 From: julf at julf.com (Johan Helsingius) Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2016 11:51:55 +0100 Subject: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet In-Reply-To: <515F8050B8FD440A83272726612DAF86@Toshiba> References: <515F8050B8FD440A83272726612DAF86@Toshiba> Message-ID: <5687ABCB.7020007@julf.com> Hi, Ian, > I am not sure - but it connected via Nordnet in Sweden (at that stage it > might have been PNS Sweden) Nordnet or nordUnet? If the latter, wouldn't they have connected through the Finnish part of Nordunet (FUNET) rather than SUNET? > James Walch in his early book "In the Net" writes about this in detail and > was personally involved- but apparently the 1990 END (European Nuclear > Disarmament Conference) was held for the first time in the Soviet bloc, > (jointly in Tallinn Estonia and Helsinki Finland). I hope you aren't implying Finland was part of the Soviet bloc? :) > Infrastructure was set up > for this from 1989 with modernisation of the Tallinn exchange. This made it > easier to connect USSR and the west apparently, without needing a manual > connection via an exchange operator. So all of USSR could connect to Tallinn > apparently, and the new infrastructure there allowed setting up a link to > the rest of the world without anyone knowing an overseas connection had been > made. Others might know more. Funny enough, in the 90's I came across an Estonian company that wanted a high-capacity Internet connection (and a large address space) to a point in the middle of nowhere on the Finnish south coast - to a peninsula that had briefly housed a Soviet naval base in the immediate post-war years, and that is pretty much straight across from Tallinn, 30 km away on the other side of the Gulf of Finland. They refused to tell what they needed the connectivity for... :) Julf From dburk at burkov.aha.ru Sat Jan 2 03:49:38 2016 From: dburk at burkov.aha.ru (Dmitry Burkov) Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2016 14:49:38 +0300 Subject: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet In-Reply-To: <5687ABCB.7020007@julf.com> References: <515F8050B8FD440A83272726612DAF86@Toshiba> <5687ABCB.7020007@julf.com> Message-ID: > On Jan 2, 2016, at 1:51 PM, Johan Helsingius wrote: > > Hi, Ian, > >> I am not sure - but it connected via Nordnet in Sweden (at that stage it >> might have been PNS Sweden) > > Nordnet or nordUnet? If the latter, wouldn't they have connected > through the Finnish part of Nordunet (FUNET) rather than SUNET? No - it was connection to KTH. All terrestrial digital connections used microwave system between Tallinn and Helsinki. I mentioned previously that we (Relcom) used this system for 64K to your premises later in 1992. The problem was that there were no other digital lines from Tallinn to the East. Nordunet(KTH) also had very strict policy. Jaak Lipmaa can tell the whole story. Dima > >> James Walch in his early book "In the Net" writes about this in detail and >> was personally involved- but apparently the 1990 END (European Nuclear >> Disarmament Conference) was held for the first time in the Soviet bloc, >> (jointly in Tallinn Estonia and Helsinki Finland). > > I hope you aren't implying Finland was part of the Soviet bloc? :) > >> Infrastructure was set up >> for this from 1989 with modernisation of the Tallinn exchange. This made it >> easier to connect USSR and the west apparently, without needing a manual >> connection via an exchange operator. So all of USSR could connect to Tallinn >> apparently, and the new infrastructure there allowed setting up a link to >> the rest of the world without anyone knowing an overseas connection had been >> made. Others might know more. > > Funny enough, in the 90's I came across an Estonian company that wanted > a high-capacity Internet connection (and a large address space) to a point > in the middle of nowhere on the Finnish south coast - to a peninsula that > had briefly housed a Soviet naval base in the immediate post-war years, > and that is pretty much straight across from Tallinn, 30 km away on the > other side of the Gulf of Finland. They refused to tell what they needed > the connectivity for... :) > > Julf > > > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. From julf at julf.com Sat Jan 2 04:22:04 2016 From: julf at julf.com (Johan Helsingius) Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2016 13:22:04 +0100 Subject: [ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet In-Reply-To: References: <515F8050B8FD440A83272726612DAF86@Toshiba> <5687ABCB.7020007@julf.com> Message-ID: <5687C0EC.8020005@julf.com> Dmitry, > No - it was connection to KTH. Do you remember why that was? Did Nordunet refuse transit through the actual Nordunet backbone? > All terrestrial digital connections used microwave system between Tallinn and Helsinki. > I mentioned previously that we (Relcom) used this system for 64K to your premises later in 1992. Ah, that is the problem with human memory - I somehow remembered that being a leased line connection. Julf From joly at punkcast.com Mon Jan 11 06:10:24 2016 From: joly at punkcast.com (Joly MacFie) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 09:10:24 -0500 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia Message-ID: Ingrid Burrington is on a personal mission to explore the physical presence of the Internet, including its history.. I video'd her presentation at the Radical/Networks conference a few months back. https://livestream.com/internetsociety/radicalnetworks/videos/102810644 ?Her latest piece is for NextGov, mainly about Amazon Data Centers?. Excerpt. http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2016/01/70-percent-global-internet-traffic-goes-through-northern-virginia/124976/ The fact that northern Virginia is home to major intelligence operations and to major nodes of network infrastructure isn?t exactly a sign of government conspiracy so much as a confluence of histories (best documented by Paul Ceruzzi in his criminally under-read history *Internet Alley: High Technology In Tysons Corner, 1945-2005*). To explain why a region surrounded mostly by farmland and a scattering of American Civil War monuments is a central point of Internet infrastructure, we have to go back to where a lot of significant moments in Internet history take place: the Cold War. Postwar suburbanization and the expansion of transportation networks are occasionally overlooked, but weirdly crucial facets of the military-industrial complex. While suburbs were largely marketed to the public via barely concealed racism and the appeal of manicured ?natural? landscapes, suburban sprawl?s dispersal of populations also meant increased likelihood of survival in the case of nuclear attack. Highways both facilitated suburbs and supported the movement of ground troops across the continental United States, should they need to defend it (lest we forget that the legislation that funded much of the U.S. highway system was called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956). Both of these factors were at play in the unincorporated area of northern Virginia known as Tysons Corner, an area just far away enough from Washington to be relatively safe from nuclear attack but close enough to remain accessible. One of the region?s earliest military outposts was actually a piece of communications infrastructure: a microwave tower built in 1952 that was the first among several relays connecting Washington to the ?Federal Relocation Arc? of secret underground bunkers created in case of nuclear attack. The particular alignments of highways that eventually connected Dulles International Airport in Virginia to the Capitol Beltway basically made this pocket of northern Virginia the first and last place for any commercial activities between the airport and D.C. This led to an outcropping of office parks that housed not only defense contractors, but also government IT and time-sharing services and, later, companies like MCI, AOL, and UUNet. Thanks to that concentration of network companies and a whole lot of support from the National Science Foundation, Tysons Corner became home to MAE-East, one of the earliest Internet exchanges and home to the foundation of what would become that Internet backbone. Networks build atop networks, and the presence of this backbone in Tysons Corner led to more backbone, more tech companies, and more data centers. Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic *worldwide* travels through this region, as the Loudon county economic-development board cheerfully notes in its marketing materials. -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Joly MacFie 218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast -------------------------------------------------------------- - -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From joly at punkcast.com Mon Jan 11 06:27:00 2016 From: joly at punkcast.com (Joly MacFie) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 09:27:00 -0500 Subject: [ih] The Atlantic on Email Message-ID: A new article on email replacements notes the protocol's resiliency, and quotes Zittrain: ?Email is the last great unowned technology,? said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in an episode of the podcast Codebreaker in November, ?and by unowned, I mean there is no CEO of email... it?s just a shared hallucination that works.? There is a potted history included: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-comes-after-email/422625/ The computer engineer Raymond Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971. He can?t remember what it said, but people keep asking him anyway. ?It was completely ephemeral, so any trace of it is gone,? he said. ?There may be a machine that has some memory that was hooked up at the time, but you?d never be able to find it.? Back then, Tomlinson was developing applications and protocols for the ARPANET, the early network that today?s Internet is based on.* (Today, he?s a principal scientist at BBN Technologies, a research and development arm of the defense giant Raytheon.) In 1971, the idea that anyone other than Tomlinson?s coworkers would want to use email was out of the question. ?The computer was not personal,? Tomlinson said. ?It was time-shared amongst several dozen users. Most computers were quite expensive?tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.? Email arrived at a time before mobile phones, when it was much harder to reach someone who wasn?t right there with you. ?Getting ahold of people, especially those in other time zones, was very difficult,? Tomlinson said. ?If they didn't answer the telephone, if you were lucky, maybe they had a secretary?or an answering service if they were really important.? In building apps for the ARPANET, Tomlinson and his colleagues had talked about some sort of mailbox protocol. One idea was to establish numbered electronic mailboxes so that messages could be printed out then hand-delivered to cubbies with the corresponding numbers. ?I looked at that and said, ?Well, it?s an interesting idea, but it?s way too complicated,?? Tomlinson told me. A simpler method, he thought, would be address messages to individuals. Though the goal was to be able to communicate with engineers working on the ARPANET at other universities, the first email Tomlinson sent was from one computer to another, both standing ?literally side by side? in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, lab. Between the roar of the computers and the whir of the air conditioner required to cool them down, the room was noisy. And the machine Tomlinson used to hit send barely resembled today?s computers. ?Brace yourself for a sharp turn,? Tomlinson told me, ?There was no monitor.? Instead, he used a beige terminal the size of a large typewriter, without a mouse or trackpad, for inputting instructions. The terminal itself was something like a Teletype Model 33 KSR, and it was hooked up to a printer that spit out 10 characters per second, all capital letters. Which means: The first email had to be printed out in order to be read. Tomlinson?s the one who selected the @ symbol for email addresses, and it stuck?despite a brief period in the 1980s when some service providers experimented with exclamation points and percent signs instead. In the early days, checking email required a person to log onto a computer and use the keyboard to enter a ?type mailbox? command. ?The mailbox was just a file and the type command typed the contents of the file onto the paper in the terminal,? Tomlinson said. ?Some systems would check the user?s mailbox after they logged in, and if it was not empty, a message like, ?YOU HAVE MAIL,? would be printed.? A separate program had to be used to compose outgoing messages, before inbox-outbox functionalities were eventually integrated. ?By the end of the 1970s, most of the features of email we take for granted were present,? Tomlinson said. At first, email was useful, but it wasn?t widely used?it would be decades before electronic mail entered the mainstream. In the 1980s, early adopters flocked to networked services like CompuServe and Prodigy, both of which offered email access, though not necessarily as a central feature. Tim Berners-Lee outlined his idea for the World Wide Web in 1989 at a time when most adults in the United States didn?t own a personal computer. That quickly changed. By 1995, about one-third of Americans owned computers and 14 percent of them reported having a home Internet connection?mostly sluggish dial-up. As Internet adoption steadily climbed, email became its cultural touchstone, and the inbox became a phenomenon. ?If you don?t have an Internet address,? a then-37-year-old New Jersey man told *The New York Times* in 1994, referring to email, ?it marks you as a nobody, as someone who?s over 40. It?s reaching the point that you get socially ostracized.? America Online, the company that helped millions of Americans explore the web for the first time, was built around the experience of checking mail. Which meant that for millions of people, the experience of going online, from the very beginning, was fundamentally about checking your email. By 1997, electronic mail crept into workplaces and across college campuses. Email became a central plot device in the romantic comedy ?You?ve Got Mail? in 1998, and was the subject of the Britney Spears song ?Email My Heart? in 1999. -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Joly MacFie 218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast -------------------------------------------------------------- - -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jcurran at istaff.org Mon Jan 11 06:50:35 2016 From: jcurran at istaff.org (John Curran) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 06:50:35 -0800 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jan 11, 2016, at 6:10 AM, Joly MacFie > wrote: > > Thanks to that concentration of network companies and a whole lot of support from the National Science Foundation, Tysons Corner became home to MAE-East, one of the earliest Internet exchanges and home to the foundation of what would become that Internet backbone. It?s a minor detail, but worth noting that the MAE-East exchange point established at MFS Tysons corner by UUNET, PSI, and Sprintl-ICM in 1992, and hence was already in up and in operation _prior_ to NSF?s involvement. The zero-dollar Network Access Point (NAP) concept in NSF Solicitation 93-52 was modeled after MAE-East, and MAE-East was anointed at the time of the award as one of the 4 official ?NAPs?, even though it was pre-existing and operational already. /John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From patrick at ianai.net Mon Jan 11 07:01:44 2016 From: patrick at ianai.net (Patrick W. Gilmore) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:01:44 -0500 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> At the very top of the article: UP TO 70 PERCENT OF GLOBAL INTERNET TRAFFIC GOES THROUGH NORTHERN VIRGINIA She lost all credibility before I got past the first sentence. -- TTFN, patrick > On Jan 11, 2016, at 9:10 AM, Joly MacFie wrote: > > Ingrid Burrington is on a personal mission to explore the physical presence of the Internet, including its history.. I video'd her presentation at the Radical/Networks conference a few months back. https://livestream.com/internetsociety/radicalnetworks/videos/102810644 > > ?Her latest piece is for NextGov, mainly about Amazon Data Centers?. Excerpt. > > http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2016/01/70-percent-global-internet-traffic-goes-through-northern-virginia/124976/ > > > The fact that northern Virginia is home to major intelligence operations and to major nodes of network infrastructure isn?t exactly a sign of government conspiracy so much as a confluence of histories (best documented by Paul Ceruzzi in his criminally under-read history Internet Alley: High Technology In Tysons Corner, 1945-2005). To explain why a region surrounded mostly by farmland and a scattering of American Civil War monuments is a central point of Internet infrastructure, we have to go back to where a lot of significant moments in Internet history take place: the Cold War. > Postwar suburbanization and the expansion of transportation networks are occasionally overlooked, but weirdly crucial facets of the military-industrial complex. While suburbs were largely marketed to the public via barely concealed racism and the appeal of manicured ?natural? landscapes, suburban sprawl?s dispersal of populations also meant increased likelihood of survival in the case of nuclear attack. Highways both facilitated suburbs and supported the movement of ground troops across the continental United States, should they need to defend it (lest we forget that the legislation that funded much of the U.S. highway system was called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956). > Both of these factors were at play in the unincorporated area of northern Virginia known as Tysons Corner, an area just far away enough from Washington to be relatively safe from nuclear attack but close enough to remain accessible. One of the region?s earliest military outposts was actually a piece of communications infrastructure: a microwave tower built in 1952 that was the first among several relays connecting Washington to the ?Federal Relocation Arc? of secret underground bunkers created in case of nuclear attack. > The particular alignments of highways that eventually connected Dulles International Airport in Virginia to the Capitol Beltway basically made this pocket of northern Virginia the first and last place for any commercial activities between the airport and D.C. This led to an outcropping of office parks that housed not only defense contractors, but also government IT and time-sharing services and, later, companies like MCI, AOL, and UUNet. > Thanks to that concentration of network companies and a whole lot of support from the National Science Foundation, Tysons Corner became home to MAE-East, one of the earliest Internet exchanges and home to the foundation of what would become that Internet backbone. Networks build atop networks, and the presence of this backbone in Tysons Corner led to more backbone, more tech companies, and more data centers. Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region, as the Loudon county economic-development board cheerfully notes in its marketing materials. > > -- > --------------------------------------------------------------- > Joly MacFie 218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast > -------------------------------------------------------------- > - > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jcurran at istaff.org Mon Jan 11 07:24:37 2016 From: jcurran at istaff.org (John Curran) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 07:24:37 -0800 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> Message-ID: On Jan 11, 2016, at 7:01 AM, Patrick W. Gilmore > wrote: > > At the very top of the article: > > UP TO 70 PERCENT OF GLOBAL INTERNET TRAFFIC GOES THROUGH NORTHERN VIRGINIA > > She lost all credibility before I got past the first sentence. It?s not uncommon for sensational headlines to be written by publication editors (sometimes even over reporters objections to same), so I?m willing to give the benefit of the doubt unless we know otherwise. /John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon Jan 11 07:34:02 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:34:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ih] The Atlantic on Email Message-ID: <20160111153402.52EC018C0A1@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Joly MacFie > At first, email was useful, but it wasn't widely used Probably worth noting that that was because the number of people who had access to it was limited; not that many people had ARPANet access. Among that group, though, it was pretty widely used; it was pretty much the original 'killer app'. Noel From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon Jan 11 07:52:59 2016 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:52:59 -0500 Subject: [ih] The Atlantic on Email In-Reply-To: <20160111153402.52EC018C0A1@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160111153402.52EC018C0A1@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: Agree with Noel, it was widely used within the ARPANET . . . almost immediately as I remember. You have to wonder about a historian who can?t interpret the historical record in context. > On Jan 11, 2016, at 10:34, Noel Chiappa wrote: > >> From: Joly MacFie > >> At first, email was useful, but it wasn't widely used > > Probably worth noting that that was because the number of people who had > access to it was limited; not that many people had ARPANet access. Among that > group, though, it was pretty widely used; it was pretty much the original > 'killer app'. > > Noel > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. From johnl at iecc.com Mon Jan 11 08:38:25 2016 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 11 Jan 2016 16:38:25 -0000 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> Message-ID: <20160111163825.48427.qmail@ary.lan> In article <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56 at ianai.net> you write: >-=-=-=-=-=- >-=-=-=-=-=- > >At the very top of the article: > >UP TO 70 PERCENT OF GLOBAL INTERNET TRAFFIC GOES THROUGH NORTHERN VIRGINIA > >She lost all credibility before I got past the first sentence. It says "UP TO". Are you saying that more than 70% of global Internet traffic goes through Tyson's Corner? Arithmetically, John From woody at pch.net Mon Jan 11 09:38:32 2016 From: woody at pch.net (Bill Woodcock) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 09:38:32 -0800 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> Message-ID: <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> > On Jan 11, 2016, at 7:01 AM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote: > > At the very top of the article: > > UP TO 70 PERCENT OF GLOBAL INTERNET TRAFFIC GOES THROUGH NORTHERN VIRGINIA > > She lost all credibility before I got past the first sentence. Up to 70% also runs through Aaron Hughes? house, as he just pointed out. Up to 70% runs out my, uh? Anyway. ?Up to? is a definition of range, not a specific individual quantity. And as John Curran just pointed out, the author of the piece doesn?t write the headline, to the credibility of the two aren?t connected. I have no opinion on the credibility of the article. -Bill -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: From patrick at ianai.net Mon Jan 11 09:55:09 2016 From: patrick at ianai.net (Patrick W. Gilmore) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 12:55:09 -0500 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> Message-ID: On Jan 11, 2016, at 12:38 PM, Bill Woodcock wrote: > On Jan 11, 2016, at 7:01 AM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote: >> >> At the very top of the article: >> >> UP TO 70 PERCENT OF GLOBAL INTERNET TRAFFIC GOES THROUGH NORTHERN VIRGINIA >> >> She lost all credibility before I got past the first sentence. > > Up to 70% also runs through Aaron Hughes? house, as he just pointed out. Up to 70% runs out my, uh? Anyway. ?Up to? is a definition of range, not a specific individual quantity. > > And as John Curran just pointed out, the author of the piece doesn?t write the headline, to the credibility of the two aren?t connected. As I told John Levine privately when he pointed out something similar: Pthhhhhhh. This is not a peer-reviewed journal, being that pedantic implies you are ignoring the rest of the article. (Wait, that might be good?.) Communication is about getting an idea from my head into your head. To any normal human being conversant in the English language, the idea being communicated is clear. And the factual basis for it - or lack thereof - is just as clear. As for the headline not matching the article, the text includes: Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region In fairness, I should say the rest of that sentence is "as the Loudon county economic-development board cheerfully notes in its marketing materials.? So the reporter took at quote from a source with clear and deep reasons to exaggerate, puts that into an article un-critically, and even follows the quote (very next sentence) with: "An unfathomable amount of that traffic is from AWS.? Look, it doesn?t really matter. Journalists are nearly always spreading some misinformation, especially when dealing with topics which require specialized knowledge. I just get annoyed when people who should and can trivially easily know better spread stupidity. > I have no opinion on the credibility of the article. The article is essentially a long-form ad for AWS. -- TTFN, patrick -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 872 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: From leo at vegoda.org Mon Jan 11 10:31:56 2016 From: leo at vegoda.org (Leo Vegoda) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 18:31:56 +0000 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> Message-ID: <20160111183156.GA25177@vegoda.org> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 12:55:09PM -0500, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote: [...] > Look, it doesn?t really matter. Journalists are nearly always spreading some misinformation, Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. They are just people and exist on a continuum that runs from the superb to the execrable. As long as we are able to apply critical reading faculties we should all be fine. Regards, Leo From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon Jan 11 10:35:17 2016 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 07:35:17 +1300 Subject: [ih] The Atlantic on Email In-Reply-To: References: <20160111153402.52EC018C0A1@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <5693F5E5.1050005@gmail.com> On 12/01/2016 04:52, John Day wrote: > Agree with Noel, it was widely used within the ARPANET . . . almost immediately as I remember. Not to mention the uucp world, and email over rscs became very big between IBM mainframes in academia. So the meme spread well before there was a real Internet. Brian > > You have to wonder about a historian who can?t interpret the historical record in context. > > >> On Jan 11, 2016, at 10:34, Noel Chiappa wrote: >> >>> From: Joly MacFie >> >>> At first, email was useful, but it wasn't widely used >> >> Probably worth noting that that was because the number of people who had >> access to it was limited; not that many people had ARPANet access. Among that >> group, though, it was pretty widely used; it was pretty much the original >> 'killer app'. >> >> Noel >> _______ >> internet-history mailing list >> internet-history at postel.org >> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. > > > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. > From andrew at blum.net Mon Jan 11 11:19:47 2016 From: andrew at blum.net (Andrew Blum) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 14:19:47 -0500 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <20160111183156.GA25177@vegoda.org> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <20160111183156.GA25177@vegoda.org> Message-ID: <59208ADC-2C6F-47A7-A480-5116980BC811@blum.net> I?ll leave the journalism discussion to the network folks. But I thought it was worth drawing attention to Ingrid?s entire series for The Atlantic, of which this article is only one part. In particular I?d recommend her piece on Point Arena, submarine cable tapping and the digital divide: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/where-the-cloud-rises-from-the-sea/415236/ As well as her requisite ?Utah? piece, which has some new (to me) details on David Evans and the U of U, which will be particularly relevant to this list: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/a-visit-to-the-nsas-data-center-in-utah/416691/ The entire series is here: http://www.theatlantic.com/author/ingrid-burrington/ Regards to all, Andrew > On Jan 11, 2016, at 1:31 PM, Leo Vegoda wrote: > > On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 12:55:09PM -0500, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote: > > [...] > >> Look, it doesn?t really matter. Journalists are nearly always spreading some misinformation, > > Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. They are just people > and exist on a continuum that runs from the superb to the execrable. > As long as we are able to apply critical reading faculties we should > all be fine. > > Regards, > > Leo > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jack at 3kitty.org Mon Jan 11 11:40:58 2016 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 11:40:58 -0800 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> Message-ID: <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> > the text includes: > Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region I don't understand how anyone can make any quantitative statement about worldwide characteristics of the Internet. I'm curious how people actually measure "Internet traffic worldwide" in order to be able to draw such conclusions. If you accept Vint Cerf's definition of the Internet - paraphrasing as "communications between devices using TCP/IP" - how does someone measure that traffic? For example, I have lots of devices on my own LANs which send terabytes of information around the house over TCP. I bet you do too. And the company you work for. Who's measuring all that traffic...? And how are they doing it? Same question about other "worldwide" statistics, like number of attached computers, number of users, etc. Yes, it is sad that marketing-generated "factoids" like "up to xxxx" is so easily interpreted as hard facts. Back in the 80s when the Internet was young, we didn't have the capability to take such measurements with any confidence of accuracy or completeness. When did that change.....? /Jack Haverty From patrick at ianai.net Mon Jan 11 11:57:50 2016 From: patrick at ianai.net (Patrick W. Gilmore) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 14:57:50 -0500 Subject: [ih] Total Internet traffic [was: Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia] In-Reply-To: <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> Message-ID: <9BD49738-9CA5-49B2-8809-103D208783E3@ianai.net> On Jan 11, 2016, at 2:40 PM, Jack Haverty wrote: > >> the text includes: >> Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region > > I don't understand how anyone can make any quantitative statement about > worldwide characteristics of the Internet. > > I'm curious how people actually measure "Internet traffic worldwide" in > order to be able to draw such conclusions. > > If you accept Vint Cerf's definition of the Internet - paraphrasing as > "communications between devices using TCP/IP" - how does someone measure > that traffic? For example, I have lots of devices on my own LANs which > send terabytes of information around the house over TCP. I bet you do > too. And the company you work for. Who's measuring all that > traffic...? And how are they doing it? > > Same question about other "worldwide" statistics, like number of > attached computers, number of users, etc. > > Yes, it is sad that marketing-generated "factoids" like "up to xxxx" is > so easily interpreted as hard facts. > > Back in the 80s when the Internet was young, we didn't have the > capability to take such measurements with any confidence of accuracy or > completeness. When did that change.....? Not much. Just got harder. But what hasn?t changed is the fact some people are willing to make shit up. And many others can?t tell when someone is making up stuff. That said, there are measurements which can be made, and which are actually useful. For instance, if you sample a large enough set of ?broadband? ISPs in certain countries, you can find that the vast majority of traffic going down DSL/Cable modems come from 3 companies (Google, Netflix, Akamai). Is that ?all? traffic? Of course not, but it is a valid, useful statistic. What tweaks my brain is whether Google sending traffic from a Google-owned machine in DC1 to a Google-owned machine in DC2 over Google-owned fiber counts as ?Internet traffic?? Does it matter if those machines have globally unique, publicly accessible addresses? Suppose the machines have 1918 addresses, but the link between the two DCs is on the ?public? Internet? I could go on, but you get the point. Lather, rinse, repeat for all the less obvious but similar companies / situations. Which is why I prefer to look at things like total traffic to eyeball / broadband / access networks. (Or maybe just ?cause that?s what I used to do for a living. :) -- TTFN, patrick From julf at julf.com Mon Jan 11 12:03:26 2016 From: julf at julf.com (Johan Helsingius) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 21:03:26 +0100 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> Message-ID: <56940A8E.6020003@julf.com> On 11/01/16 20:40, Jack Haverty wrote: > If you accept Vint Cerf's definition of the Internet - paraphrasing as > "communications between devices using TCP/IP" - how does someone measure > that traffic? I am not sure I agree with his definition. To me, "Internet" traffic, as opposed to local LAN traffic, has to cross between networks - so to be really strict, between AS's. > Back in the 80s when the Internet was young, we didn't have the > capability to take such measurements with any confidence of accuracy or > completeness. When did that change.....? https://atlas.ripe.net/ Julf From craig at aland.bbn.com Mon Jan 11 12:38:46 2016 From: craig at aland.bbn.com (Craig Partridge) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:38:46 -0500 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <56940A8E.6020003@julf.com> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> <56940A8E.6020003@julf.com> Message-ID: <20160111203846.9F22E420119@aland.bbn.com> Johan Helsingius writes: > I am not sure I agree with his definition. To me, "Internet" traffic, as > opposed to local LAN traffic, has to cross between networks - so to > be really strict, between AS's. My phone is in my carrier's AS and my laptop is in my employer's/home ISP's AS -- and they also communicate directly with each other... I think there's a desire here to measure something that is not well defined. (What is well-defined is how much data flows across a cut point -- e.g. sometimes in the Internet's life it has been useful to ask how much traffic crossed the Missippippi river as that bisects most of the US). Craig From johnl at iecc.com Mon Jan 11 12:40:41 2016 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 11 Jan 2016 20:40:41 -0000 Subject: [ih] The Atlantic on Email In-Reply-To: <5693F5E5.1050005@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20160111204041.49013.qmail@ary.lan> >> Agree with Noel, it was widely used within the ARPANET . . . almost immediately as I remember. > >Not to mention the uucp world, and email over rscs became very big between IBM mainframes >in academia. So the meme spread well before there was a real Internet. >> You have to wonder about a historian who can?t interpret the historical record in context. If you look at the online article again, there's now an asterisk next to the 1971 date which links to a footnote which says that the origins of e-mail are contentious and links to a bunch of reasonable other sources, including one debunking the guy who claims he invented EMAIL in 1982. From randy at psg.com Mon Jan 11 13:11:38 2016 From: randy at psg.com (Randy Bush) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 06:11:38 +0900 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <56940A8E.6020003@julf.com> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> <56940A8E.6020003@julf.com> Message-ID: [ warning: measurement research digression ] >> Back in the 80s when the Internet was young, we didn't have the >> capability to take such measurements with any confidence of accuracy >> or completeness. When did that change.....? > https://atlas.ripe.net/ i am not aware of any research effort using atlas or atlas style technology which measures traffic as opposed to topology, reachability, and content. folk such as renesys (their dyn incarnation is less sinful) repeatedly misused the word 'traffic' when, in fact, all they were measuring was bgp. we should not repeat that mistake when using technology such as atlas probes. [inter provider] traffic measurement at scale is a researcher unicorn. randy From julf at julf.com Tue Jan 12 01:13:01 2016 From: julf at julf.com (Johan Helsingius) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 10:13:01 +0100 Subject: [ih] malicious removal requests? In-Reply-To: <20160111203846.9F22E420119@aland.bbn.com> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> <56940A8E.6020003@julf.com> <20160111203846.9F22E420119@aland.bbn.com> Message-ID: <5694C39D.9020609@julf.com> I guess somebody doesn't like me being on this list - I have now received for the second time a message asking me to confirm a request to remove my email address from the list... Julf From vint at google.com Tue Jan 12 06:21:06 2016 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 09:21:06 -0500 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> Message-ID: on the assumption that not much traffic is black holed (could be a bad assumption, I know), then the total traffic injected into any network that is part of the Internet could be considered "Internet traffic." The low black hole assumption means that the injected traffic comes out somewhere on a network of the Internet, so you only need the one measurement to avoid double counting. That could include local traffic on a WiFi LAN if the LAN is connected to the Internet. As far as I know, no one has any ability to measure all that traffic that because not all the devices or networks of the Internet are monitored for traffic. The 70% figure reminds of long ago estimates of traffic going through the MAEs. When the Internet was basically any network connected to NSFNET (after the retirement of the ARPANET), NSF made public the amount of traffic injected into or ejected from the NSFNET. That would be like Craig Partridge's cutpoint (the boundary of the NSFNET). So for a short time there might have been a somewhat credible notion of total Internet traffic but that time is long gone. On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 2:40 PM, Jack Haverty wrote: > > the text includes: > > Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels > through this region > > I don't understand how anyone can make any quantitative statement about > worldwide characteristics of the Internet. > > I'm curious how people actually measure "Internet traffic worldwide" in > order to be able to draw such conclusions. > > If you accept Vint Cerf's definition of the Internet - paraphrasing as > "communications between devices using TCP/IP" - how does someone measure > that traffic? For example, I have lots of devices on my own LANs which > send terabytes of information around the house over TCP. I bet you do > too. And the company you work for. Who's measuring all that > traffic...? And how are they doing it? > > Same question about other "worldwide" statistics, like number of > attached computers, number of users, etc. > > Yes, it is sad that marketing-generated "factoids" like "up to xxxx" is > so easily interpreted as hard facts. > > Back in the 80s when the Internet was young, we didn't have the > capability to take such measurements with any confidence of accuracy or > completeness. When did that change.....? > > /Jack Haverty > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. > -- New postal address: Google 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor Reston, VA 20190 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From faber at lunabase.org Tue Jan 12 07:37:23 2016 From: faber at lunabase.org (faber at lunabase.org) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:37:23 +0000 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: References:

<86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> Message-ID: January 12 2016 6:46 AM, "Vint Cerf" wrote: on the assumption that not much traffic is black holed (could be a bad assumption, I know), then the total traffic injected into any network that is part of the Internet could be considered "Internet traffic." As with most definitions, the definition should depend on the question you're trying to answer. I don't get the feeling that the writer of this article is investigating a question in a scholarly way. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrew at blum.net Tue Jan 12 09:03:48 2016 From: andrew at blum.net (Andrew Blum) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 12:03:48 -0500 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: References:

<86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> Message-ID: This would seem an important point to bring up with the Loudon County marketing team, not to mention those at Equinix, AWS and the other major players in the region?all of whom have everything to gain from the statistic. For me, the issue here isn?t the inability to measure Internet traffic, nor journalists parroting incorrect and unverifiable marketing numbers, but the very fact that ?facts? about data centers in Northern Virginia are so hard to come by. We all know why that?s the case. But if we?re talking about getting Internet history right, then all this secrecy is obviously an ongoing problem. One consequence could be the loss, or at least the diminution, of the Internet as a public good?which is a key theme of Burrington?s articles, and an idea I?d think this list would grok. > On Jan 12, 2016, at 10:37 AM, faber at lunabase.org wrote: > > January 12 2016 6:46 AM, "Vint Cerf" >> wrote: > on the assumption that not much traffic is black holed (could be a bad assumption, I know), then the total traffic injected into any network that is part of the Internet could be considered "Internet traffic." > > As with most definitions, the definition should depend on the question you're trying to answer. I don't get the feeling that the writer of this article is investigating a question in a scholarly way. > > > _______ > internet-history mailing list > internet-history at postel.org > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cos at aaaaa.org Tue Jan 12 13:41:06 2016 From: cos at aaaaa.org (Ofer Inbar) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:41:06 -0500 Subject: [ih] Total Internet traffic [was: Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia] In-Reply-To: <9BD49738-9CA5-49B2-8809-103D208783E3@ianai.net> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> <9BD49738-9CA5-49B2-8809-103D208783E3@ianai.net> Message-ID: <20160112214105.GK1577@mip.aaaaa.org> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 02:57:50PM -0500, "Patrick W. Gilmore" wrote: > For instance, if you sample a large enough set of > ???broadband??? ISPs in certain countries, you can > find that the vast majority of traffic going down DSL/Cable modems > come from 3 companies (Google, Netflix, Akamai). Is that > ???all??? traffic? Of course not, but it is a > valid, useful statistic. And most of that traffic is edge-cached. Netflix, Google (it's mostly YouTube I'm pretty sure), and I think Akamai as well, place their most popular highest-volume data in file servers co-located in a lot of ISPs. So most of that traffic probably never crossed an AS boundary or went over a backbone. Yet it wouldn't make sense to measure overall Internet traffic volume without counting the majority of YouTube+Netflix, would it? In other words, using reasonable common-sense definitions, most Internet traffic doesn't go over the Internet :) -- Cos From patrick at ianai.net Tue Jan 12 14:33:08 2016 From: patrick at ianai.net (Patrick W. Gilmore) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 17:33:08 -0500 Subject: [ih] Total Internet traffic [was: Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia] In-Reply-To: <20160112214105.GK1577@mip.aaaaa.org> References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> <9BD49738-9CA5-49B2-8809-103D208783E3@ianai.net> <20160112214105.GK1577@mip.aaaaa.org> Message-ID: <43800406-761D-40CA-97D5-07F3F366B817@ianai.net> On Jan 12, 2016, at 4:41 PM, Ofer Inbar wrote: > On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 02:57:50PM -0500, "Patrick W. Gilmore" wrote: >> For instance, if you sample a large enough set of >> ???broadband??? ISPs in certain countries, you can >> find that the vast majority of traffic going down DSL/Cable modems >> come from 3 companies (Google, Netflix, Akamai). Is that >> ???all??? traffic? Of course not, but it is a >> valid, useful statistic. > > And most of that traffic is edge-cached. Netflix, Google (it's mostly > YouTube I'm pretty sure), and I think Akamai as well, place their most > popular highest-volume data in file servers co-located in a lot of ISPs. > So most of that traffic probably never crossed an AS boundary or went > over a backbone. Yet it wouldn't make sense to measure overall Internet > traffic volume without counting the majority of YouTube+Netflix, would it? > > In other words, using reasonable common-sense definitions, most > Internet traffic doesn't go over the Internet :) Actually, a very large percentage (40? 60? 80?) of Akamai / Google / Netflix traffic does cross an AS boundary. Akamai has put out stats about how much traffic traverses 0 (on-net), 1 (direct peering), and higher number of AS boundaries. Not sure if they still do, or if the other two publish those stats. Since this is the Internet History list, let?s just give a nod to Akamai for being the first to put servers -inside- eyeball networks at scale. I know for a fact Google copied the Akamai idea down to the contract since I personally handed the Google person Akamai?s AANP contract. Did the same for Verisign, but while Verisign is clearly ?core? to the Internet, their traffic volume is not relevant. Netflix obviously copied the idea as well, but I did not hand Dave the contract. One could claim these companies would have come up with the idea on their own, and one would probably be right. But Akamai did it first, and by quite a few years. Credit where credit is due and all that. For a while Akamai was the largest source of traffic on the ?Net. They are now probably third. However, the top three are the same order of magnitude, dozens of Tbps, while number 4 is probably low single digit Tbps. Which isn?t surprising. If the top 3 are 60-80%, there isn?t much left for anyone else. -- TTFN, patrick P.S. Before anyone thinks I?m tooting my own horn, I did not come up with the AANP idea. It was well established by the time I joined. I think Avi Freedman had a hand in its inception, but could not swear to that. From touch at isi.edu Wed Jan 13 11:28:03 2016 From: touch at isi.edu (Joe Touch) Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 11:28:03 -0800 Subject: [ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia In-Reply-To: References: <86136D61-06B5-488C-838E-E485B5D47C56@ianai.net> <90036EF4-3CE0-4110-BA6C-1656435E8A1C@pch.net> <5694054A.2070307@3kitty.org> Message-ID: <5696A543.1000601@isi.edu> On 1/12/2016 6:21 AM, Vint Cerf wrote: > on the assumption that not much traffic is black holed (could be a bad > assumption, I know), then the total traffic injected into any network > that is part of the Internet could be considered "Internet traffic." The > low black hole assumption means that the injected traffic comes out > somewhere on a network of the Internet, so you only need the one > measurement to avoid double counting. Yes, but even without persistent black-holes, the Internet also drops packets occasionally (e.g., routers that reboot or die while packets are in transit, as well as more common buffer overloads). So, as Ted suggested, we're back to definitions. Is "traffic" a packet that used the Internet at some point or one that successfully traversed it? There's also other traffic that isn't "injected" into a net but uses it anyway, e.g., signaling traffic - i.e., do ICMPs count? How about ARPs? and routing protocols, not typically visible at the edge? IMO, these "dark packets" are hard to determine. Joe From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Thu Jan 14 11:21:25 2016 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2016 08:21:25 +1300 Subject: [ih] Fwd: IETF turns 30 In-Reply-To: <74E2721D-0B39-456A-9DA1-A2F0D6DBA012@ietf.org> References: <74E2721D-0B39-456A-9DA1-A2F0D6DBA012@ietf.org> Message-ID: <5697F535.6060407@gmail.com> -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: IETF turns 30 Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2016 12:43:50 +0200 From: IETF Chair Reply-To: ietf at ietf.org To: IETF Announcement List CC: IETF Discussion This week marks the 30th anniversary of the meeting that became the very first edition of IETF meetings now held three times per year. On 16-17 January 1986 in San Diego, California, 21 people attended what is now known as IETF 1. As we work on the day-to-day tasks needed to make the Internet work better, from time-to-time it is useful to consider our work on longer timescales. Here are my thoughts about the occasion: https://www.ietf.org/blog/2016/01/30-years-of-engineering-the-internet/ And happy birthday, IETF, on Saturday! What are your thoughts? Jari Arkko, IETF Chair . From chris.leslie at nyu.edu Mon Jan 18 16:20:59 2016 From: chris.leslie at nyu.edu (Christopher Leslie) Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2016 08:20:59 +0800 Subject: [ih] CFP: International Communities of Invention and Innovation (New York City, May 2016; deadline 8 January) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, We have extended our deadline for the spring IFIP computer history conference until February 12. Please let me know if you have any questions about the conference. I hope many of you will consider attending. Please feel free to forward this message as appropriate. Chris Leslie > > International Communities of Invention and Innovation > IFIP Working Group 9.7 Conference > NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY > 25-29 May 2016 > > Analog and digital computers were developed by individuals aware of an > international scientific community. Likewise, although sometimes thought of > as solely national projects, the first computer networks were built in an > age of growing interconnectivity among nations. This meeting of IFIP > Working Group 9.7 in New York City gathers historians and other > professionals to reflect on histories that foreground the international > community. Participants with an interest in this historical context for > computers and computer networks may present academic papers or join in > roundtable discussions. > > In accordance with this theme, we hope to blur the dichotomy between core > and periphery and complicate simplistic notions of linear technological > progress. Far from a deterministic view that computers and computer > networks were developed in isolation and according to their own technical > imperatives, we will show the history of pre-existing relationships and > communities that led to the triumphs (and dead ends) in the history of > computing. This broad perspective will help us to tell a more accurate > story of important developments like the Internet, to be sure, but also it > will provide us with a better understanding of how to sponsor future > invention and innovation. > > At the conference, we seek to foster a conversation about internationalism > in the history of computers and computer networks along four broad themes: > > 1. Invention: > ? communities where analog computers were developed > ? communication about and competition for early devices > ? innovations brought in from the supposed periphery > ? failed, forgotten, or thwarted efforts to develop > networks or industries > > 2. Policy: > ? trade and treaties supporting computers and networks > ? organizations like IFIP with a mission to promote > collaboration > ? long trajectories of digital divides > ? case studies revealing ethical considerations > ? cross-national comparisons of gender or ethnic diversity > in industry and education > > 3. Infrastructure: > ? communication and data networks before the Internet > ? development and diffusion of TCP/IP > ? connectivity efforts before NSFNET, NSFNET, and beyond > ? resistance to and success of the WorldWideWeb > > 4. Social History: > ? differences and similarities in international impacts > on general society > ? antecedents (Wells's World Brain) and visions (Human-Nets's > WorldNet) > ? individuals who championed connections between nations > ? historiography of internationalism in computing > ? representations of international computing communities > in film or literature > > It is hoped that the conference will be of interest to a broad range of > people who study computing and computer networks, including academic > scholars and graduate students, but also those who have a professional or > technical interest in computing. Accordingly, there are two ways to > participate: > > 1. Academic Papers > > For consideration, please submit your draft paper via the conference > website (http://wp.nyu.edu/ifip_wg97/). Enquires are welcome in advance > of your submission (wg9.7conference at nyu.edu). Draft papers will be > circulated before the conference in order to encourage a meaningful > discussion. At the conference, each selected participant will be allotted > time to present an overview of his or her paper. It is our intention to > publish selected conference papers in an anthology by Springer, and > hopefully the conference feedback will be useful as presenters complete > their final drafts. > > 2. Roundtable Discussions > > In order to welcome technical professionals and others who may not desire > to prepare a full paper, the conference will also feature roundtables of > 10?15 minute, relatively informal presentations related to the conference > theme. These presentations could focus on key figures, historical > anecdotes, or observations on particular projects. We hope that these > roundtables will spark lively conversation and, perhaps, generate research > partnerships between historians and technical professionals. For > consideration, send a 250-word summary of the topic and your interest in it > via the conference website (http://wp.nyu.edu/ifip_wg97/). Enquires are > welcome in advance of your submission (wg9.7conference at nyu.edu). > > The conference will be held at New York University's Polytechnic School of > Engineering in MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, New York 11201. About 20 minutes > away by subway from NYU's Greenwich Village location, MetroTech Center is > located in the heart of Downtown Brooklyn and within walking distance of > the Brooklyn Bridge as well as the iconic neighborhoods of DUMBO, Fort > Greene, and Brooklyn Heights. In order to help make the conference more > affordable, we will offer accommodations in the school's dormitory, > adjacent to the conference venue, at a competitive price for those who do > not wish to stay in a nearby hotel. > Further details will be made available at http://wp.nyu.edu/ifip_wg97/ > > About IFIP WG 9.7: IFIP, the International Federation for Information > Processing, was founded in 1960. It is a nongovernmental organization > dedicated to information and communication technologies and sciences. It > sponsors fourteen committees primarily of a technical nature. Technical > Committee 9, however, is dedicated to ICT and Society. The organizer of > this conference is TC9?s Working Group 7, which focuses on the history of > computing. > > Important Dates > ? Deadline for consideration: January 8, 2016 ... extended until Feb. 12 > ? Early deadline for payment of registration fee: March 1 > ? Revised papers and abstracts due: April 1 > ? Last day to reserve a room in the dormitory: April 10 > ? Papers and abstracts made available to participants: May 1 > ? Revised papers due for consideration in proceedings: July 1 > > > -- > Christopher S. Leslie, Ph.D. > Co-Director of Science and Technology Studies > Faculty Fellow in Residence for Othmer Hall and Clark Street > Vice Chair, IFIP Working Group 9.7 - History of Computing > > NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering > 5 MetroTech Center, LC 131 > Brooklyn, NY 11201 > (646) 997-3130 > -- Christopher S. Leslie, Ph.D. Co-Director and Lecturer, Science and Technology Studies Faculty Fellow in Residence for Othmer Hall and Clark Street Vice Chair, IFIP History of Computing Working Group 9.7 NYU Tandon School of Engineering 5 MetroTech Center, LC 131 Brooklyn, NY 11201 (646) 997-3130 Office Hour Signup: http://tinyurl.com/chrisleslie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: