I’ve recently read two books relating to World War II. The first was Ike: An American Hero, a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower by Michael Korda, which is a near idolizing tale of Ike, in which the man can seemingly do no wrong. The other is saga of Winston Churchill’s life, starting from the day he becomes Prime Minister in 1940. This is the third of The Last Lion trilogy by William Manchester. These are two very different perspectives on how WWII was won.
In the case of Churchill, Manchester describes his Mediterranean strategy as somewhere between nibbling around the edges, a war of opportunity, or an attempt to coax Turkey into the melée, while at the same time placing blame on Americans for delaying the end of the war, first by not entering it earlier, and second by not being more aggressive in the taking of Italy.
On the other side, Korda points out that Eisenhower took his strategy directly from Grant, which was to destroy the enemy’s ability to make war. That necessitated the destruction of all German armies the hard way, under the belief that so long as they had armies that could fight, they would fight.
What is stunning about the difference in points of view is that neither seems to acknowledge the others at all. As an American I found Manchester’s book helpful to understand the British perceptions of history, while at the same time having some understanding of the history of the Americans involved.
If you had an account on this system, I’ve had to delete it. It has nothing to do with how well I know you or anything like that, but that there is a raging botnet war, and any account on this system is a risk to the community.
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Right? Not if you are known at all. Those days are gone. As if to prove the point, one of my favorite web sites is on the wrong side of this issue. An actress unsuccessfully sued imdb.com for lost wages for having included her age on their site. There is a well known axiom in Hollywood that starlets have a half-life, and age is something that is best kept secret. IMDB countered that what matters is not an actress’ age but her ability to play a certain age.
My point is this: she sued and was unable to have information about her removed. Is age something that you believe should be private? I do. I especially do for people born after 1989 where a birthday and a home city can lead to someone guessing your Social Security Number.
But what about other physical attributes one might consider private? “He has a mole that you can only see if he’s naked.” How about illness? “This actor cannot lift his arm due to a stroke.” Once the information is out there, there’s no way to get rid of it. And this in the UK, which is subject to the European Data Privacy Directive. The situation is considerably bleaker for your personal information in the United States.
Related to this is The Right To Be Forgotten. In Europe they are considering new rules that say that you have a right to have information about you removed. This has some American firms in an uproar, arguing that a lack of transparency only increases risk and inefficiency. But what are the limits? What about this actress who doesn’t want her age known? How did her age provide for market efficiency?
These people are, quite simply put, wackos with nuclear weapons, each dictator worse than the last. The people they least endanger is America, and the people they most endanger are themselves, and their brothers, sisters, and cousins to the south. Not far behind them are the Chinese to the north. Clearly basketball diplomacy hasn’t helped at all.
The United States has a tendency to clean up messes all around the world. We get yelled at for doing so, and then people privately thank their lucky stars we do. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone else did the dirty work for once? As it happens the Chinese have been flexing their muscles all over the region, from Japan to Malaysia. They’ve even breached South Korean waters. But the North they leave alone.
With lots to lose and the fact that the Chinese have been propping up this government for six decades, the Chinese will have to deal with the consequences far more so than we will. It is a problem that the United States cannot solve. Our having sent B-2s was a nice show, but if we end up in an armed conflict with North Korea, mostly South Koreans, Chinese, and maybe Japanese get hurt. That region must resolve the matter. B-2s shouldn’t do it.
You don’t get to be a leader by simply showing military might. You have to use that might to address real problems. The Chinese have feared above all that if they intervene in the affairs of others, some day it will be their turn to be on the receiving end of such interference. Their turn may come, but not because they’ve done the right thing with North Korea.
A new experimental approach to routing on the Internet is maturing. It’s called Locator-Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP), and I am proud to have worked on it with people like Dino Farinacci, Vince Fuller, Dave Meyer, Scott Brim, Darrel Lewis, Wolfgang Riedel, and Greg Schudell.
Number of BGP Routes, Courtesy cidr-report.org
In 1993 and 1994, Paul Traina, Tony Li, and Yakov Rehkter led a rag tag effort to quickly get all the service providers to BGP 4 so that CIDR-based aggregation could save Cisco routers from hitting the dreadful 20,000 route limit. This involved a substantial operational change over a very short period of time, where people like Sean Doran at Sprint and Vince Fuller at BARRNET (who I think still used Proteons back then) as well as others went from router to router, quickly bringing up the new version of very fresh code. Talk about stress!!
Courtesy: Conscious/Wikimedia
Today, that number of routes looks like a blip, and in fact you can barely see the drop in the graph. In 1994, there were already 21 million users, representing a scaling factor of just over 1000. With over 2.4 billion people using the network today and 440,000 routes in the system, that represents a scaling factor of just under 5,500. Put another way, for one route, on average 5,500 people use the Internet. It’s a lot more complex than that because generally speaking only sites that have more than one Internet connection show up in the routing table. Still, based on that scaling factor, to get to today’s entire world population of 7 billion would require an additional 835,000 routes or so, and all the associated processing, which still makes some of us nervous. In the so-called Internet of Things(what connected before that term?), that number becomes a bit more unhinged in as much as it is not directly tied to the population. Tony Li has continually cautioned us on the risks of feeling good about Moore’s Law, and how it generally doesn’t apply to specialized routing devices..
LISP’s work, as well as that of ILNP, considered these issues. LISP functions as an overlay, not requiring the core of the Internet to have edge routes, effectively pruning any given routing tree by one level.
Is it possible to make a separation between operational state and provisioned state within the routing system, on the basis that (a) the core of the network is extremely stable and (b) edge instability could be managed through the Locator Status bits in LISP to reduce the amount of managed operational state?
Is LISP’s mapping function properly separated from the core? Having multiple mapping system makes it possible to test the abstraction. Other mapping systems would have served this purpose equally well.
I still encourage the development of LISP and alternatives like ILNP under the assumption that even though 835,000 sounds like a small number, there are many restrictions built into that number, specifically that will either undo themselves, or prevent us from selling more gear (and I’m specifically thinking about multihoming in the home).
I’ve recently read two books relating to World War II. The first was Ike: An American Hero, a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower by Michael Korda, which is a near idolizing tale of Ike, in which the man can seemingly do no wrong. The other is saga of Winston Churchill’s life, starting from the day he becomes Prime Minister in 1940. This is the third of The Last Lion trilogy by William Manchester. These are two very different perspectives on how WWII was won.
On the other side, Korda points out that Eisenhower took his strategy directly from Grant, which was to destroy the enemy’s ability to make war. That necessitated the destruction of all German armies the hard way, under the belief that so long as they had armies that could fight, they would fight.
In the last two weeks we’ve heard about how the North Koreans have, well, let’s see…