The United States has lost one of its most ardent proponents of IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, with the death of Jim Bound earlier this week. Bound was a Senior Fellow with HP, Chair of the North American IPv6 Task Force and CTO of the IPv6 Forum.
U.S. loses IPv6 leader - Network World
An article from way back when, but still an amazing read …
In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired.
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001), an American electronic engineer and mathematician, was “the father of information theory”.
Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. But he is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master’s student at MIT, he wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. It has been claimed that this was the most important master’s thesis of all time.
Claude Shannon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Markoff writes …
SAN FRANCISCO — The era of the American Internet is ending.
Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.
Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.
Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S. - NYTimes.com
Vint Cerf writes …
The internet is still very young. It was only November 1977 when a group of computer scientists successfully connected three networks around the world, including one at University College London. It took until 1989 for the internet to become commercially available and about another decade after that for it to achieve widespread household use in Europe and the United States. Only then did we emerge from what I think of as the ‘internet comma’ days, when its mention in the media was always followed by a comma and a short description.
From there, we’ve got to the point where I, because of my long history with the technology, now run afoul of The Observer style guide. I remain convinced that as a unique entity the word requires capitalisation. You’ll see that the newspaper is so comfortable with the term that it doesn’t.