The researchers said they had set a transmission record for a fiber-optic message, sending it more than 7,400 miles in a laboratory experiment without having to regenerate the signal.
.. Such a network would be significantly less expensive and could carry more data. So far, the researchers have been able to increase the power of the lasers twentyfold to achieve transmissions over far greater distances, he said.
Net of Insecurity: A flaw in the design
“It’s not that we didn’t think about security,” Clark recalled. “We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them.”
.. When they thought about security, they foresaw the need to protect the network against potential intruders or military threats, but they didn’t anticipate that the Internet’s own users would someday use the network to attack one another.
“We didn’t focus on how you could wreck this system intentionally,” said Vinton G. Cerf, a dapper, ebullient Google vice president who in the 1970s and ’80s designed key building blocks of the Internet. “You could argue with hindsight that we should have, but getting this thing to work at all was non-trivial.”
.. Computers in that era were huge, costly behemoths that could fill a room and needed to serve multiple users at the same time. But logging on to them often required keeping expensive telephone lines open continuously even though there were long periods of silence between individual transmissions.
Davies began proposing in the mid-1960s that it would be better to slice data into pieces that could be sent back and forth almost continuously, allowing several users to share the same telephone line while gaining access to a remote computer.
.. As the ARPANET developed in its first years, soon connecting computers in 15 locations across the country, the key barriers were neither technological nor AT&T’s lack of interest. It simply wasn’t clear what the network’s practical purpose was. There was only so much file sharing that needed to be done, and accessing computers remotely in that era was cumbersome.
.. Debate remains, however, about whether widespread use of encryption was feasible in the early days of the Internet. The heavy computing demands, some experts say, could have made TCP/IP too difficult to implement, leading to some other protocol — and some network other than the Internet — becoming dominant.
“I don’t think the Internet would have succeeded as it did if they had the [encryption] requirements from the beginning,” Johns Hopkins cryptologist Matthew Green said. “I think they made the right call.”
Disconnect To Connect: How I’m Fixing My Addiction To The Internet
- I stopped myself from saying what I truly felt, and started writing status updates to be acknowledged.
- I stopped listening to valuable comments and opinions from others, and started focusing only on “likes” and ignoring “dislikes”.
- I read a lot about life hacks feeling good that I was learning something new, but I failed to implement what I was learning in real-life.
- I started ignoring advice from experienced people around me (in real-life), and used Google to find answers to my questions. I also failed to realize that the answers I found via Google searches were written by people just like you and me who may or may not be giving the best advice.
The Death of the Comcast Deal
Sure, they might be near-monopolies in many parts of the country, but the deal was simply about linking up regional monopolies, not increasing them.
.. the Justice Department decided, conceptually, to turn things around, and in economic jargon, to look at the other side of the “two-sided market.”
.. Stated differently, anyone who wants to reach one of Comcast’s customers—like Netflix delivering a film or Spotify delivering a song—has to go through it, and it alone. Looking at the deal this way forced the Justice Department to think about Comcast as something much more than just a regional cable company.