[NNagain] Brendan Carr: "Six years ago, Americans lived through one of the greatest hoaxes in regulatory history...

[NNagain] Brendan Carr: "Six years ago, Americans lived through one of the greatest hoaxes in regulatory history...

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

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➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
living as The Truth is True

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Re: [NNagain] Brendan Carr: "Six years ago, Americans lived through one of the greatest hoaxes in regulatory history...

[Dave Taht]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163

Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims on
this part of his post:

https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512

to be true. Any one question this?

I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load, and,
acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their own
rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs those
that didn´t.

The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied on
to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies, and
illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed towers,
produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late fighting
off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how to
make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -

Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do not
remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you Paul
Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and Simon
Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice" -
there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
working *right now* the way they expect.

There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are keeping
civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very irked
at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least, sometimes
asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my wifi.

If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other aspects
of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping the
Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love to
hear it.

[1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only achieve
then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129

> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain



-- 
Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Re: [NNagain] Brendan Carr: "Six years ago, Americans lived through one of the greatest hoaxes in regulatory history...

[Sebastian Moeller]

> On Oct 24, 2023, at 21:21, Dave Taht via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> 
>> ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
> 
> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims on
> this part of his post:
> 
> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
> 
> to be true. Any one question this?

	[SM] I question the inherent claim that this happened in a NN regulatory free environment though, e.g. California added its own NN regulation 2018. A regulation that had to first win the uphill struggle against the FCC order foregoing Title II (which also tried, finally unsuccessfully, to argue that states have no authority to regulate the internet, while at the same time giving up the FCC's will to regulate)... I also got reminded that the FCC only went for Title II in ~2015, as courts had reigned in on FCC attempts to regulate ISPs under Title I.

This is a bit of the "Preparedness paradox" where a dire situation is predicted, everybody and their dog works hard to avoid it happening, the big problem is avoided (due to the hard work) and uninformed folks call the initial prediction a hoax... think Y2K and similar instances... Carr might have a point that initial prediction might have been a tad to bleak, but come on this is how politics works: you make your solution look (slightly) better and the alternatives (slightly) worse and hope to convince enough so that your view prevails, no?


> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load, and,
> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
> success.

	[SM] But starting out in the first sentence painting the opposing view as a "hoax" makes it pretty unlikely that objective and reasoned data and analysis will follow... just an observation


> Also individual states had stepped up to institute their own
> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs those
> that didn´t.

	[SM] Also interesting, how many users ended up with state regulation and how many without... (trying to sell access to eyeballs gets tricky if the majority of the affluent ones end up in states with NN rules).


> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied on
> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies, and
> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed towers,
> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late fighting
> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how to
> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
> 
> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do not
> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you Paul
> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and Simon
> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice" -
> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
> working *right now* the way they expect.

	[SM] There are a lot of unsung heroes in most types of engineering.


> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are keeping
> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very irked
> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least, sometimes
> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my wifi.
> 
> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other aspects
> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping the
> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love to
> hear it.

	[SM] +1


> 
> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only achieve
> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
> 
>> --
>> Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
>> living as The Truth is True
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain

Re: [NNagain] Brendan Carr: "Six years ago, Americans lived through one of the greatest hoaxes in regulatory history...

[Vint Cerf]

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+1
v


On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >
> > ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
>
> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims on
> this part of his post:
>
> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
>
> to be true. Any one question this?
>
> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load, and,
> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
> success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their own
> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs those
> that didn´t.
>
> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied on
> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies, and
> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed towers,
> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late fighting
> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how to
> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
>
> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do not
> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you Paul
> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and Simon
> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice" -
> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
> working *right now* the way they expect.
>
> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are keeping
> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very irked
> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least, sometimes
> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my wifi.
>
> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other aspects
> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping the
> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love to
> hear it.
>
> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only achieve
> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
>
> > --
> > Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
> > living as The Truth is True
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Nnagain mailing list
> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
>
>
> --
> Oct 30:
> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>


-- 
Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
Vint Cerf
Google, LLC
1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
+1 (571) 213 1346


until further notice

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Re: [NNagain] Brendan Carr: "Six years ago, Americans lived through one of the greatest hoaxes in regulatory history...

[Livingood, Jason]

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On 10/24/23, 15:22, "Nnagain on behalf of Dave Taht via Nnagain" <nnagain-bounces@lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:nnagain-bounces@lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net>> wrote:



> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load,



Upstream usage in the US in 2020 increased 30% - 60% (https://www.bitag.org/documents/bitag_report.pdf). Then it reverted to a normal CAGR.



Also here are two charts of LUL changes across much of the US since 2021 FWIW (don’t have data before that, this is from the SamKnows system – which is pretty good). I don’t know how else to conclude that while there have been improvements, buffer bloat is still pretty atrocious on a national level.

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Re: [NNagain] Brendan Carr: "Six years ago, Americans lived through one of the greatest hoaxes in regulatory history...

[Frantisek Borsik]

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Indeed, Jason. Bufferbloat is still here and most of the people outside of
our little bubble even doesn't know the word itself.

My anecdotal evidence says that many people working in Wi-Fi, WLAN or
similar field still never heard even the term bufferbloat:

Been to https://www.thewlpc.com/conferences/prague-czech-republic-2023 this
week, there was ~200 guys that install, manage or survey Wi-Fi networks on
stadiums, hotels, campuses, universities and other venues, and there was NO
mention of bufferbloat at all, and the mentions of the words like latency
and jitter could be counted on 2 hands.

I have tried to ask about it every vendor there (e.g. Ruckus, Extreme
Networks...) and their product or engineering guys said they never heard of
it. Some of the guys in the attendance suggested that "it's just the ISP
thing, you know, for the ISP customers at home." Sad story.


All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik



https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik@gmail.com


On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 3:19 PM Livingood, Jason via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> On 10/24/23, 15:22, "Nnagain on behalf of Dave Taht via Nnagain" <
> nnagain-bounces@lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:
> nnagain-bounces@lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net>>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load,
>
>
>
> Upstream usage in the US in 2020 increased 30% - 60% (
> https://www.bitag.org/documents/bitag_report.pdf). Then it reverted to a
> normal CAGR.
>
>
>
> Also here are two charts of LUL changes across much of the US since 2021
> FWIW (don’t have data before that, this is from the SamKnows system – which
> is pretty good). I don’t know how else to conclude that while there have
> been improvements, buffer bloat is still pretty atrocious on a national
> level.
>
> [image: A graph with blue line Description automatically generated]
>
>
>
>
>
> [image: A graph with blue line Description automatically generated]
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>

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[NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

[Nathan Simington]

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Branching from Dave's thread because I don't want to get into the politics,
but I would like to very strongly endorse Dave's remarks about how the
incredible accomplishments of network engineers are totally unacknowledged
and misunderstood (e.g., note the public policy emphasis on line speed over
all else.) As such, I'd like to solicit the members of this list to suggest
some of the greatest accomplishments in network engineering that you've
never seen properly acknowledged or appreciated. I'd like to promote and
discuss them in speeches and papers to help get more sunlight on them.

*0. Let's get network engineering some applause, please!*
Both recent and historical accomplishments are welcome. I just want to help
get more people thinking about what a difference network engineering has
made to everyone's lives! All technologies, personalities and
accomplishments welcome!

Beyond this specific thing, in terms of public discourse, I'd love to get
more opinions about how to communicate to the public about the tech
underpinnings of the world we live in now, and I'd love comments on how to
discuss and promote any of these topics:

*1. Infrastructure advances*
It would generally do a lot of good if the public were to think of "tech"
less as purely the consumer-facing side and more in terms of fundamental
architecture and infrastructure. For example, there's really no point
talking about "AI" in the public-facing aspect of end-user LLM experiences
without first looking at how the cost of compute and transit has gone
through the floor compared to 15 years ago or so. I can't even disentangle
all the drivers, but they must include at least:

   - New uses for GPUs driving advances and slashing prices in GPU tech
   - Vast advances in back-end cloud (to pick one company,
   Sawzall/Lingo/GFS/Colossus plus associated datacenters is almost invisible
   to the public, and I have no idea what's powering Chinese AI back-ends)
   - Nuts-and-bolts development in ML/data science that are eroding the
   fuzzy boundary between ML done as a planned, discrete query by an expert
   over a small, curated dataset and ML as a quasi-autonomous system not
   requiring expert queries, given authority over physical devices, doing its
   own ingestion, etc -- "a sufficiently large difference in quantity is
   itself a difference in quality"

This stuff is particularly worth asking about because we are now at least
30 years into what I think of as "pervasive networked personal computing,"
now in wireless and appified form, and I think the public experiences this
as just advances that "happen by themselves" in the ordinary course without
seeing the jags in the step functions underwriting the apparent smooth
curve of progress.

*2. Security in real-world systems*
Getting hacked used to mean losing data, having devices bricked, maybe
getting co-opted into a botnet, etc. Now it's a lot scarier, because we are
increasingly surrounded by always-on, always-connected devices whose
security infrastructure is a black box and which may be trusted with
controlling physical equipment. It's bad enough if your household
appliances are phoning home (where?) with your credit card number. It's a
whole new level of scary if there are possible APTs in the power grid and
whoever manufactured the IOT modem in a transformer is about 8 degrees of
separation from the grid operators. Even if there's no malice intended,
modern grid balancing is a new level of challenging because you may have
multiple sources of generation with immense moment-by-moment fluctuations
in inbound generation, etc., and that's just one category, leaving
groceries, ports, financial markets, building security, whatever replaces
positive train control (PTC) down the road, vehicular autonomy, industrial
operations, etc. to one side...

Panic reactions are one thing, but it would be more productive for the
public to think about what their expectations are for how to react to these
new capabilities and challenges and then demand that the policy sector
cashes this out into new standards by consulting with technologists. I
would therefore love advice on what you think the public needs to know.
Maybe some kind of public forum that could get press or a white paper that
could get written up in an op-ed?

On that note, in addition to (or instead of) commenting on this posting,
please consider commenting on the US Cyber Trust Mark proceeding now open
at the FCC (comments close November 10th, commenting link here:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/23-239). If you'd like to
talk about this off-list, please drop me a line at NS@fcc.gov. I'll let you
know in advance if anything you want to say requires you to file an "ex
parte" statement so that you don't have to worry about going on the record
unintentionally. This is a fantastic opportunity for the network
engineering and computer security communities to air their concerns in a
federal forum in a way that may bind the federal government going forward.

*3. The future isn't evenly distributed*
Talking to a friend who does industrial devops reminded me of this
fantastic postmortem on healthcare.gov's rollout:
https://lobste.rs/s/igt4ez/10_year_anniversary_healthcare_gov. Obviously I
don't need to tell the career professionals this, but tech advances don't
necessarily propagate, and if they do, it may be at radically different
rates between different countries, companies, sectors... (If I needed a
reminder of this, I recently had to upload DICOM files to a hospital using
a terrible Java applet that was obviously written so long ago that it only
wanted to upload from CDs, i.e., at a time when you wouldn't have spent
hard disk space on DICOMs. I eventually managed to "persuade" it that a
flash drive was a CD.)

This ties into points 1 and especially 2, because if we want the full
social benefits of all the advances modern engineering has accomplished, we
need to get people in "nontraditional" sectors thinking about the benefits
of the communications and controls capabilities that are now on the table.
Everyone should be asking why we aren't doing ML to reduce the cost and
energy consumption for making breakfast cereal, totally pedestrian stuff
like that; if the answer is juice isn't worth the squeeze, that fine, but
that's going to run on a delay because, as the healthcare.gov example
shows, high-value new practices may be invisible to a sector that would
definitely benefit from them.

Sorry for the very lengthy post, and as they say on the artist formerly
known as Twitter, "my DMs are open." And thanks for everything you all do!

All the best--
Nathan

On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >
> > ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
>
> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims on
> this part of his post:
>
> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
>
> to be true. Any one question this?
>
> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load, and,
> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
> success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their own
> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs those
> that didn´t.
>
> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied on
> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies, and
> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed towers,
> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late fighting
> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how to
> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
>
> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do not
> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you Paul
> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and Simon
> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice" -
> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
> working *right now* the way they expect.
>
> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are keeping
> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very irked
> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least, sometimes
> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my wifi.
>
> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other aspects
> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping the
> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love to
> hear it.
>
> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only achieve
> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
>
> > --
> > Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
> > living as The Truth is True
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Nnagain mailing list
> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
>
>
> --
> Oct 30:
> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>


-- 
Nathan Simington
cell: 305-793-6899

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Re: [NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

[David Bray, PhD]

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Bravo Nathan and very well said - thank you for sharing this, especially:

>> the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are totally
unacknowledged and misunderstood

I concur that technical topics don't get a lot of adequate, nuanced
coverage. Meanwhile our (second?) Gilded Age seems to be missing three
important things as well - which would be great if more people took the
time to listen/seek to understand re: network engineering and IT
operations.

*1. Listen with Curiosity, Seek to Understand*

*2. Avoid Reducing Issues into Binary Positions *

*3. Walk a Mile In the Other Person's Shoes*

... here's to helping bridge the gaps!
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-communication-especially-on-going-david-bray-phd

-d.

On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 9:27 AM Nathan Simington via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> Branching from Dave's thread because I don't want to get into the
> politics, but I would like to very strongly endorse Dave's remarks about
> how the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are totally
> unacknowledged and misunderstood (e.g., note the public policy emphasis on
> line speed over all else.) As such, I'd like to solicit the members of this
> list to suggest some of the greatest accomplishments in network engineering
> that you've never seen properly acknowledged or appreciated. I'd like to
> promote and discuss them in speeches and papers to help get more sunlight
> on them.
>
> *0. Let's get network engineering some applause, please!*
> Both recent and historical accomplishments are welcome. I just want to
> help get more people thinking about what a difference network engineering
> has made to everyone's lives! All technologies, personalities and
> accomplishments welcome!
>
> Beyond this specific thing, in terms of public discourse, I'd love to get
> more opinions about how to communicate to the public about the tech
> underpinnings of the world we live in now, and I'd love comments on how to
> discuss and promote any of these topics:
>
> *1. Infrastructure advances*
> It would generally do a lot of good if the public were to think of "tech"
> less as purely the consumer-facing side and more in terms of fundamental
> architecture and infrastructure. For example, there's really no point
> talking about "AI" in the public-facing aspect of end-user LLM experiences
> without first looking at how the cost of compute and transit has gone
> through the floor compared to 15 years ago or so. I can't even disentangle
> all the drivers, but they must include at least:
>
>    - New uses for GPUs driving advances and slashing prices in GPU tech
>    - Vast advances in back-end cloud (to pick one company,
>    Sawzall/Lingo/GFS/Colossus plus associated datacenters is almost invisible
>    to the public, and I have no idea what's powering Chinese AI back-ends)
>    - Nuts-and-bolts development in ML/data science that are eroding the
>    fuzzy boundary between ML done as a planned, discrete query by an expert
>    over a small, curated dataset and ML as a quasi-autonomous system not
>    requiring expert queries, given authority over physical devices, doing its
>    own ingestion, etc -- "a sufficiently large difference in quantity is
>    itself a difference in quality"
>
> This stuff is particularly worth asking about because we are now at least
> 30 years into what I think of as "pervasive networked personal computing,"
> now in wireless and appified form, and I think the public experiences this
> as just advances that "happen by themselves" in the ordinary course without
> seeing the jags in the step functions underwriting the apparent smooth
> curve of progress.
>
> *2. Security in real-world systems*
> Getting hacked used to mean losing data, having devices bricked, maybe
> getting co-opted into a botnet, etc. Now it's a lot scarier, because we are
> increasingly surrounded by always-on, always-connected devices whose
> security infrastructure is a black box and which may be trusted with
> controlling physical equipment. It's bad enough if your household
> appliances are phoning home (where?) with your credit card number. It's a
> whole new level of scary if there are possible APTs in the power grid and
> whoever manufactured the IOT modem in a transformer is about 8 degrees of
> separation from the grid operators. Even if there's no malice intended,
> modern grid balancing is a new level of challenging because you may have
> multiple sources of generation with immense moment-by-moment fluctuations
> in inbound generation, etc., and that's just one category, leaving
> groceries, ports, financial markets, building security, whatever replaces
> positive train control (PTC) down the road, vehicular autonomy, industrial
> operations, etc. to one side...
>
> Panic reactions are one thing, but it would be more productive for the
> public to think about what their expectations are for how to react to these
> new capabilities and challenges and then demand that the policy sector
> cashes this out into new standards by consulting with technologists. I
> would therefore love advice on what you think the public needs to know.
> Maybe some kind of public forum that could get press or a white paper that
> could get written up in an op-ed?
>
> On that note, in addition to (or instead of) commenting on this posting,
> please consider commenting on the US Cyber Trust Mark proceeding now open
> at the FCC (comments close November 10th, commenting link here:
> https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/23-239). If you'd like to
> talk about this off-list, please drop me a line at NS@fcc.gov. I'll let
> you know in advance if anything you want to say requires you to file an "ex
> parte" statement so that you don't have to worry about going on the record
> unintentionally. This is a fantastic opportunity for the network
> engineering and computer security communities to air their concerns in a
> federal forum in a way that may bind the federal government going forward.
>
> *3. The future isn't evenly distributed*
> Talking to a friend who does industrial devops reminded me of this
> fantastic postmortem on healthcare.gov's rollout:
> https://lobste.rs/s/igt4ez/10_year_anniversary_healthcare_gov. Obviously
> I don't need to tell the career professionals this, but tech advances don't
> necessarily propagate, and if they do, it may be at radically different
> rates between different countries, companies, sectors... (If I needed a
> reminder of this, I recently had to upload DICOM files to a hospital using
> a terrible Java applet that was obviously written so long ago that it only
> wanted to upload from CDs, i.e., at a time when you wouldn't have spent
> hard disk space on DICOMs. I eventually managed to "persuade" it that a
> flash drive was a CD.)
>
> This ties into points 1 and especially 2, because if we want the full
> social benefits of all the advances modern engineering has accomplished, we
> need to get people in "nontraditional" sectors thinking about the benefits
> of the communications and controls capabilities that are now on the table.
> Everyone should be asking why we aren't doing ML to reduce the cost and
> energy consumption for making breakfast cereal, totally pedestrian stuff
> like that; if the answer is juice isn't worth the squeeze, that fine, but
> that's going to run on a delay because, as the healthcare.gov example
> shows, high-value new practices may be invisible to a sector that would
> definitely benefit from them.
>
> Sorry for the very lengthy post, and as they say on the artist formerly
> known as Twitter, "my DMs are open." And thanks for everything you all do!
>
> All the best--
> Nathan
>
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
>> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
>>
>> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims on
>> this part of his post:
>>
>> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
>>
>> to be true. Any one question this?
>>
>> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load, and,
>> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
>> success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their own
>> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs those
>> that didn´t.
>>
>> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
>> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
>> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied on
>> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
>> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies, and
>> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed towers,
>> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late fighting
>> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how to
>> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
>>
>> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do not
>> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
>> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
>> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you Paul
>> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and Simon
>> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
>> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice" -
>> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
>> working *right now* the way they expect.
>>
>> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
>> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are keeping
>> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very irked
>> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
>> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least, sometimes
>> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my wifi.
>>
>> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other aspects
>> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
>> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping the
>> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love to
>> hear it.
>>
>> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
>> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only achieve
>> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
>>
>> > --
>> > Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
>> > living as The Truth is True
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Nnagain mailing list
>> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Oct 30:
>> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>
>
>
> --
> Nathan Simington
> cell: 305-793-6899
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 14607 bytes --]

Re: [NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

[rjmcmahon]

I was an intramural ref in college. The best compliment I would get was, 
"You ref'd our championship game? I didn't notice." It indicates that 
others could play their game and the ref called a good game. Being 
noticed as a ref likely means you're getting in the way of the game.

I think much of life is this way. Being noticed is much less important 
than enabling others to fulfill their potential & talents without them 
having to deal with basics like reliable communications and 
infrastructure. That just seems fundamental to me and being part of 
helping with that is enough.

Just my $0.02,
Bob
> Bravo Nathan and very well said - thank you for sharing this,
> especially:
> 
>>> the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are totally
> unacknowledged and misunderstood
> 
> I concur that technical topics don't get a lot of adequate, nuanced
> coverage. Meanwhile our (second?) Gilded Age seems to be missing three
> important things as well - which would be great if more people took
> the time to listen/seek to understand re: network engineering and IT
> operations.
> 
> _1. Listen with Curiosity, Seek to Understand_
> 
> _2. Avoid Reducing Issues into Binary Positions _
> 
> _3. Walk a Mile In the Other Person's Shoes_
> 
> ... here's to helping bridge the gaps!
> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-communication-especially-on-going-david-bray-phd
> 
> -d.
> 
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 9:27 AM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> 
>> Branching from Dave's thread because I don't want to get into the
>> politics, but I would like to very strongly endorse Dave's remarks
>> about how the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are
>> totally unacknowledged and misunderstood (e.g., note the public
>> policy emphasis on line speed over all else.) As such, I'd like to
>> solicit the members of this list to suggest some of the greatest
>> accomplishments in network engineering that you've never seen
>> properly acknowledged or appreciated. I'd like to promote and
>> discuss them in speeches and papers to help get more sunlight on
>> them.
>> 
>> 0. Let's get network engineering some applause, please!
>> Both recent and historical accomplishments are welcome. I just want
>> to help get more people thinking about what a difference network
>> engineering has made to everyone's lives! All technologies,
>> personalities and accomplishments welcome!
>> 
>> Beyond this specific thing, in terms of public discourse, I'd love
>> to get more opinions about how to communicate to the public about
>> the tech underpinnings of the world we live in now, and I'd love
>> comments on how to discuss and promote any of these topics:
>> 
>> 1. Infrastructure advances
>> It would generally do a lot of good if the public were to think of
>> "tech" less as purely the consumer-facing side and more in terms of
>> fundamental architecture and infrastructure. For example, there's
>> really no point talking about "AI" in the public-facing aspect of
>> end-user LLM experiences without first looking at how the cost of
>> compute and transit has gone through the floor compared to 15 years
>> ago or so. I can't even disentangle all the drivers, but they must
>> include at least:
>> 
>> * New uses for GPUs driving advances and slashing prices in GPU
>> tech
>> 
>> * Vast advances in back-end cloud (to pick one company,
>> Sawzall/Lingo/GFS/Colossus plus associated datacenters is almost
>> invisible to the public, and I have no idea what's powering Chinese
>> AI back-ends)
>> * Nuts-and-bolts development in ML/data science that are eroding
>> the fuzzy boundary between ML done as a planned, discrete query by
>> an expert over a small, curated dataset and ML as a quasi-autonomous
>> system not requiring expert queries, given authority over physical
>> devices, doing its own ingestion, etc -- "a sufficiently large
>> difference in quantity is itself a difference in quality"
>> 
>> This stuff is particularly worth asking about because we are now at
>> least 30 years into what I think of as "pervasive networked personal
>> computing," now in wireless and appified form, and I think the
>> public experiences this as just advances that "happen by themselves"
>> in the ordinary course without seeing the jags in the step functions
>> underwriting the apparent smooth curve of progress.
>> 
>> 2. Security in real-world systems
>> Getting hacked used to mean losing data, having devices bricked,
>> maybe getting co-opted into a botnet, etc. Now it's a lot scarier,
>> because we are increasingly surrounded by always-on,
>> always-connected devices whose security infrastructure is a black
>> box and which may be trusted with controlling physical equipment.
>> It's bad enough if your household appliances are phoning home
>> (where?) with your credit card number. It's a whole new level of
>> scary if there are possible APTs in the power grid and whoever
>> manufactured the IOT modem in a transformer is about 8 degrees of
>> separation from the grid operators. Even if there's no malice
>> intended, modern grid balancing is a new level of challenging
>> because you may have multiple sources of generation with immense
>> moment-by-moment fluctuations in inbound generation, etc., and
>> that's just one category, leaving groceries, ports, financial
>> markets, building security, whatever replaces positive train control
>> (PTC) down the road, vehicular autonomy, industrial operations, etc.
>> to one side...
>> 
>> Panic reactions are one thing, but it would be more productive for
>> the public to think about what their expectations are for how to
>> react to these new capabilities and challenges and then demand that
>> the policy sector cashes this out into new standards by consulting
>> with technologists. I would therefore love advice on what you think
>> the public needs to know. Maybe some kind of public forum that could
>> get press or a white paper that could get written up in an op-ed?
>> 
>> On that note, in addition to (or instead of) commenting on this
>> posting, please consider commenting on the US Cyber Trust Mark
>> proceeding now open at the FCC (comments close November 10th,
>> commenting link here:
>> https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/23-239). If you'd like
>> to talk about this off-list, please drop me a line at NS@fcc.gov.
>> I'll let you know in advance if anything you want to say requires
>> you to file an "ex parte" statement so that you don't have to worry
>> about going on the record unintentionally. This is a fantastic
>> opportunity for the network engineering and computer security
>> communities to air their concerns in a federal forum in a way that
>> may bind the federal government going forward.
>> 
>> 3. The future isn't evenly distributed
>> Talking to a friend who does industrial devops reminded me of this
>> fantastic postmortem on healthcare.gov [1]'s rollout:
>> https://lobste.rs/s/igt4ez/10_year_anniversary_healthcare_gov.
>> Obviously I don't need to tell the career professionals this, but
>> tech advances don't necessarily propagate, and if they do, it may be
>> at radically different rates between different countries, companies,
>> sectors... (If I needed a reminder of this, I recently had to upload
>> DICOM files to a hospital using a terrible Java applet that was
>> obviously written so long ago that it only wanted to upload from
>> CDs, i.e., at a time when you wouldn't have spent hard disk space on
>> DICOMs. I eventually managed to "persuade" it that a flash drive was
>> a CD.)
>> 
>> This ties into points 1 and especially 2, because if we want the
>> full social benefits of all the advances modern engineering has
>> accomplished, we need to get people in "nontraditional" sectors
>> thinking about the benefits of the communications and controls
>> capabilities that are now on the table. Everyone should be asking
>> why we aren't doing ML to reduce the cost and energy consumption for
>> making breakfast cereal, totally pedestrian stuff like that; if the
>> answer is juice isn't worth the squeeze, that fine, but that's going
>> to run on a delay because, as the healthcare.gov [1] example shows,
>> high-value new practices may be invisible to a sector that would
>> definitely benefit from them.
>> 
>> Sorry for the very lengthy post, and as they say on the artist
>> formerly known as Twitter, "my DMs are open." And thanks for
>> everything you all do!
>> 
>> All the best--
>> Nathan
>> 
>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain
>> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff
>>> goodfellow via
>>> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
>>> 
>>> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims
>>> on
>>> this part of his post:
>>> 
>>> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
>>> 
>>> to be true. Any one question this?
>>> 
>>> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load,
>>> and,
>>> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
>>> success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their
>>> own
>>> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs
>>> those
>>> that didn´t.
>>> 
>>> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
>>> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
>>> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied
>>> on
>>> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
>>> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies,
>>> and
>>> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed
>>> towers,
>>> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late
>>> fighting
>>> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how
>>> to
>>> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
>>> 
>>> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do
>>> not
>>> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
>>> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
>>> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you
>>> Paul
>>> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and
>>> Simon
>>> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
>>> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice"
>>> -
>>> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
>>> working *right now* the way they expect.
>>> 
>>> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
>>> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are
>>> keeping
>>> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very
>>> irked
>>> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
>>> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least,
>>> sometimes
>>> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my
>>> wifi.
>>> 
>>> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other
>>> aspects
>>> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
>>> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping
>>> the
>>> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love
>>> to
>>> hear it.
>>> 
>>> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
>>> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only
>>> achieve
>>> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
>>>> living as The Truth is True
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Oct 30:
>>> 
>> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
>>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> Nathan Simington
>> 
>> cell: 305-793-6899 _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://healthcare.gov
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain

Re: [NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

[David Bray, PhD]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 14584 bytes --]

Agree 100% Bob, often the best sign of a job well done is no one noticed -
and for most things digital this is the case (because when IT works, it’s
near-invisible and taken for granted).

However as Nathan pointed out - this is less about being noticed and more
making sure that non-techies, when they think something isn’t right, can
appreciate the *broader nuances* to include the realpolitik of how bad
ransomware/cyberattacks are getting (sadly, increasingly a question of when
not if this will happen to an organization) as well as the challenges of
legacy systems and legacy data while the news cycle is fixated on
generative AI :-)

That said, I think networks and IT also are still working to evolve from
what was (for commercial entities at least) mostly finance support role in
the mainframe days, to operations support, to productivity, to increasingly
how an organization operates as a whole. Meanwhile most Boards or oversight
groups for organizations aren’t deep in networks, tech, and IT which
creates challenges within and across organizations too.


On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 13:44 rjmcmahon <rjmcmahon@rjmcmahon.com> wrote:

> I was an intramural ref in college. The best compliment I would get was,
> "You ref'd our championship game? I didn't notice." It indicates that
> others could play their game and the ref called a good game. Being
> noticed as a ref likely means you're getting in the way of the game.
>
> I think much of life is this way. Being noticed is much less important
> than enabling others to fulfill their potential & talents without them
> having to deal with basics like reliable communications and
> infrastructure. That just seems fundamental to me and being part of
> helping with that is enough.
>
> Just my $0.02,
> Bob
> > Bravo Nathan and very well said - thank you for sharing this,
> > especially:
> >
> >>> the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are totally
> > unacknowledged and misunderstood
> >
> > I concur that technical topics don't get a lot of adequate, nuanced
> > coverage. Meanwhile our (second?) Gilded Age seems to be missing three
> > important things as well - which would be great if more people took
> > the time to listen/seek to understand re: network engineering and IT
> > operations.
> >
> > _1. Listen with Curiosity, Seek to Understand_
> >
> > _2. Avoid Reducing Issues into Binary Positions _
> >
> > _3. Walk a Mile In the Other Person's Shoes_
> >
> > ... here's to helping bridge the gaps!
> >
> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-communication-especially-on-going-david-bray-phd
> >
> > -d.
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 9:27 AM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
> > <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >
> >> Branching from Dave's thread because I don't want to get into the
> >> politics, but I would like to very strongly endorse Dave's remarks
> >> about how the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are
> >> totally unacknowledged and misunderstood (e.g., note the public
> >> policy emphasis on line speed over all else.) As such, I'd like to
> >> solicit the members of this list to suggest some of the greatest
> >> accomplishments in network engineering that you've never seen
> >> properly acknowledged or appreciated. I'd like to promote and
> >> discuss them in speeches and papers to help get more sunlight on
> >> them.
> >>
> >> 0. Let's get network engineering some applause, please!
> >> Both recent and historical accomplishments are welcome. I just want
> >> to help get more people thinking about what a difference network
> >> engineering has made to everyone's lives! All technologies,
> >> personalities and accomplishments welcome!
> >>
> >> Beyond this specific thing, in terms of public discourse, I'd love
> >> to get more opinions about how to communicate to the public about
> >> the tech underpinnings of the world we live in now, and I'd love
> >> comments on how to discuss and promote any of these topics:
> >>
> >> 1. Infrastructure advances
> >> It would generally do a lot of good if the public were to think of
> >> "tech" less as purely the consumer-facing side and more in terms of
> >> fundamental architecture and infrastructure. For example, there's
> >> really no point talking about "AI" in the public-facing aspect of
> >> end-user LLM experiences without first looking at how the cost of
> >> compute and transit has gone through the floor compared to 15 years
> >> ago or so. I can't even disentangle all the drivers, but they must
> >> include at least:
> >>
> >> * New uses for GPUs driving advances and slashing prices in GPU
> >> tech
> >>
> >> * Vast advances in back-end cloud (to pick one company,
> >> Sawzall/Lingo/GFS/Colossus plus associated datacenters is almost
> >> invisible to the public, and I have no idea what's powering Chinese
> >> AI back-ends)
> >> * Nuts-and-bolts development in ML/data science that are eroding
> >> the fuzzy boundary between ML done as a planned, discrete query by
> >> an expert over a small, curated dataset and ML as a quasi-autonomous
> >> system not requiring expert queries, given authority over physical
> >> devices, doing its own ingestion, etc -- "a sufficiently large
> >> difference in quantity is itself a difference in quality"
> >>
> >> This stuff is particularly worth asking about because we are now at
> >> least 30 years into what I think of as "pervasive networked personal
> >> computing," now in wireless and appified form, and I think the
> >> public experiences this as just advances that "happen by themselves"
> >> in the ordinary course without seeing the jags in the step functions
> >> underwriting the apparent smooth curve of progress.
> >>
> >> 2. Security in real-world systems
> >> Getting hacked used to mean losing data, having devices bricked,
> >> maybe getting co-opted into a botnet, etc. Now it's a lot scarier,
> >> because we are increasingly surrounded by always-on,
> >> always-connected devices whose security infrastructure is a black
> >> box and which may be trusted with controlling physical equipment.
> >> It's bad enough if your household appliances are phoning home
> >> (where?) with your credit card number. It's a whole new level of
> >> scary if there are possible APTs in the power grid and whoever
> >> manufactured the IOT modem in a transformer is about 8 degrees of
> >> separation from the grid operators. Even if there's no malice
> >> intended, modern grid balancing is a new level of challenging
> >> because you may have multiple sources of generation with immense
> >> moment-by-moment fluctuations in inbound generation, etc., and
> >> that's just one category, leaving groceries, ports, financial
> >> markets, building security, whatever replaces positive train control
> >> (PTC) down the road, vehicular autonomy, industrial operations, etc.
> >> to one side...
> >>
> >> Panic reactions are one thing, but it would be more productive for
> >> the public to think about what their expectations are for how to
> >> react to these new capabilities and challenges and then demand that
> >> the policy sector cashes this out into new standards by consulting
> >> with technologists. I would therefore love advice on what you think
> >> the public needs to know. Maybe some kind of public forum that could
> >> get press or a white paper that could get written up in an op-ed?
> >>
> >> On that note, in addition to (or instead of) commenting on this
> >> posting, please consider commenting on the US Cyber Trust Mark
> >> proceeding now open at the FCC (comments close November 10th,
> >> commenting link here:
> >> https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/23-239). If you'd like
> >> to talk about this off-list, please drop me a line at NS@fcc.gov.
> >> I'll let you know in advance if anything you want to say requires
> >> you to file an "ex parte" statement so that you don't have to worry
> >> about going on the record unintentionally. This is a fantastic
> >> opportunity for the network engineering and computer security
> >> communities to air their concerns in a federal forum in a way that
> >> may bind the federal government going forward.
> >>
> >> 3. The future isn't evenly distributed
> >> Talking to a friend who does industrial devops reminded me of this
> >> fantastic postmortem on healthcare.gov [1]'s rollout:
> >> https://lobste.rs/s/igt4ez/10_year_anniversary_healthcare_gov.
> >> Obviously I don't need to tell the career professionals this, but
> >> tech advances don't necessarily propagate, and if they do, it may be
> >> at radically different rates between different countries, companies,
> >> sectors... (If I needed a reminder of this, I recently had to upload
> >> DICOM files to a hospital using a terrible Java applet that was
> >> obviously written so long ago that it only wanted to upload from
> >> CDs, i.e., at a time when you wouldn't have spent hard disk space on
> >> DICOMs. I eventually managed to "persuade" it that a flash drive was
> >> a CD.)
> >>
> >> This ties into points 1 and especially 2, because if we want the
> >> full social benefits of all the advances modern engineering has
> >> accomplished, we need to get people in "nontraditional" sectors
> >> thinking about the benefits of the communications and controls
> >> capabilities that are now on the table. Everyone should be asking
> >> why we aren't doing ML to reduce the cost and energy consumption for
> >> making breakfast cereal, totally pedestrian stuff like that; if the
> >> answer is juice isn't worth the squeeze, that fine, but that's going
> >> to run on a delay because, as the healthcare.gov [1] example shows,
> >> high-value new practices may be invisible to a sector that would
> >> definitely benefit from them.
> >>
> >> Sorry for the very lengthy post, and as they say on the artist
> >> formerly known as Twitter, "my DMs are open." And thanks for
> >> everything you all do!
> >>
> >> All the best--
> >> Nathan
> >>
> >> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain
> >> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff
> >>> goodfellow via
> >>> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >> ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
> >>>
> >>> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims
> >>> on
> >>> this part of his post:
> >>>
> >>> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
> >>>
> >>> to be true. Any one question this?
> >>>
> >>> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load,
> >>> and,
> >>> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
> >>> success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their
> >>> own
> >>> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs
> >>> those
> >>> that didn´t.
> >>>
> >>> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
> >>> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
> >>> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied
> >>> on
> >>> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
> >>> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies,
> >>> and
> >>> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed
> >>> towers,
> >>> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late
> >>> fighting
> >>> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how
> >>> to
> >>> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
> >>>
> >>> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do
> >>> not
> >>> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
> >>> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
> >>> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you
> >>> Paul
> >>> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and
> >>> Simon
> >>> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
> >>> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice"
> >>> -
> >>> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
> >>> working *right now* the way they expect.
> >>>
> >>> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
> >>> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are
> >>> keeping
> >>> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very
> >>> irked
> >>> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
> >>> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least,
> >>> sometimes
> >>> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my
> >>> wifi.
> >>>
> >>> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other
> >>> aspects
> >>> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
> >>> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping
> >>> the
> >>> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love
> >>> to
> >>> hear it.
> >>>
> >>> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
> >>> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only
> >>> achieve
> >>> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
> >>>
> >>>> --
> >>>> Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
> >>>> living as The Truth is True
> >>>>
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> Nnagain mailing list
> >>>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> >>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Oct 30:
> >>>
> >> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> >>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Nnagain mailing list
> >>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> >>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> >>
> >> --
> >>
> >> Nathan Simington
> >>
> >> cell: 305-793-6899 _______________________________________________
> >> Nnagain mailing list
> >> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> >> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> >
> >
> > Links:
> > ------
> > [1] http://healthcare.gov
> > _______________________________________________
> > Nnagain mailing list
> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 19682 bytes --]

Re: [NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

[rjmcmahon]

I liked your talk when you said the whole world will have sensors and 
that's a major change. This goes way beyond IoT and includes things like 
DSRC for vehicles and vehicular infra. I also think every historic 
building in every historic city, e.g. Boston, will have "cameras" with 
digital image correlation (DIC) watching them. History can't be rebuilt 
if it falls down per lack of awareness of what's going on at its 
foundations.

https://www.bostongroundwater.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_image_correlation_and_tracking

Early days of the digital evolution for sure. Broader nuances at every 
corner.

Good luck with non-techies and providing them with such awareness. Out 
of my league and out of my expertise ;)

Bob
> Agree 100% Bob, often the best sign of a job well done is no one
> noticed - and for most things digital this is the case (because when
> IT works, it’s near-invisible and taken for granted).
> 
> However as Nathan pointed out - this is less about being noticed and
> more making sure that non-techies, when they think something isn’t
> right, can appreciate the *broader nuances* to include the realpolitik
> of how bad ransomware/cyberattacks are getting (sadly, increasingly a
> question of when not if this will happen to an organization) as well
> as the challenges of legacy systems and legacy data while the news
> cycle is fixated on generative AI :-)
> 
> That said, I think networks and IT also are still working to evolve
> from what was (for commercial entities at least) mostly finance
> support role in the mainframe days, to operations support, to
> productivity, to increasingly how an organization operates as a whole.
> Meanwhile most Boards or oversight groups for organizations aren’t
> deep in networks, tech, and IT which creates challenges within and
> across organizations too.
> 
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 13:44 rjmcmahon <rjmcmahon@rjmcmahon.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> I was an intramural ref in college. The best compliment I would get
>> was,
>> "You ref'd our championship game? I didn't notice." It indicates
>> that
>> others could play their game and the ref called a good game. Being
>> noticed as a ref likely means you're getting in the way of the game.
>> 
>> I think much of life is this way. Being noticed is much less
>> important
>> than enabling others to fulfill their potential & talents without
>> them
>> having to deal with basics like reliable communications and
>> infrastructure. That just seems fundamental to me and being part of
>> helping with that is enough.
>> 
>> Just my $0.02,
>> Bob
>>> Bravo Nathan and very well said - thank you for sharing this,
>>> especially:
>>> 
>>>>> the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are totally
>>> unacknowledged and misunderstood
>>> 
>>> I concur that technical topics don't get a lot of adequate,
>> nuanced
>>> coverage. Meanwhile our (second?) Gilded Age seems to be missing
>> three
>>> important things as well - which would be great if more people
>> took
>>> the time to listen/seek to understand re: network engineering and
>> IT
>>> operations.
>>> 
>>> _1. Listen with Curiosity, Seek to Understand_
>>> 
>>> _2. Avoid Reducing Issues into Binary Positions _
>>> 
>>> _3. Walk a Mile In the Other Person's Shoes_
>>> 
>>> ... here's to helping bridge the gaps!
>>> 
>> 
> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-communication-especially-on-going-david-bray-phd
>>> 
>>> -d.
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 9:27 AM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
>>> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Branching from Dave's thread because I don't want to get into the
>>>> politics, but I would like to very strongly endorse Dave's
>> remarks
>>>> about how the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are
>>>> totally unacknowledged and misunderstood (e.g., note the public
>>>> policy emphasis on line speed over all else.) As such, I'd like
>> to
>>>> solicit the members of this list to suggest some of the greatest
>>>> accomplishments in network engineering that you've never seen
>>>> properly acknowledged or appreciated. I'd like to promote and
>>>> discuss them in speeches and papers to help get more sunlight on
>>>> them.
>>>> 
>>>> 0. Let's get network engineering some applause, please!
>>>> Both recent and historical accomplishments are welcome. I just
>> want
>>>> to help get more people thinking about what a difference network
>>>> engineering has made to everyone's lives! All technologies,
>>>> personalities and accomplishments welcome!
>>>> 
>>>> Beyond this specific thing, in terms of public discourse, I'd
>> love
>>>> to get more opinions about how to communicate to the public about
>>>> the tech underpinnings of the world we live in now, and I'd love
>>>> comments on how to discuss and promote any of these topics:
>>>> 
>>>> 1. Infrastructure advances
>>>> It would generally do a lot of good if the public were to think
>> of
>>>> "tech" less as purely the consumer-facing side and more in terms
>> of
>>>> fundamental architecture and infrastructure. For example, there's
>>>> really no point talking about "AI" in the public-facing aspect of
>>>> end-user LLM experiences without first looking at how the cost of
>>>> compute and transit has gone through the floor compared to 15
>> years
>>>> ago or so. I can't even disentangle all the drivers, but they
>> must
>>>> include at least:
>>>> 
>>>> * New uses for GPUs driving advances and slashing prices in GPU
>>>> tech
>>>> 
>>>> * Vast advances in back-end cloud (to pick one company,
>>>> Sawzall/Lingo/GFS/Colossus plus associated datacenters is almost
>>>> invisible to the public, and I have no idea what's powering
>> Chinese
>>>> AI back-ends)
>>>> * Nuts-and-bolts development in ML/data science that are eroding
>>>> the fuzzy boundary between ML done as a planned, discrete query
>> by
>>>> an expert over a small, curated dataset and ML as a
>> quasi-autonomous
>>>> system not requiring expert queries, given authority over
>> physical
>>>> devices, doing its own ingestion, etc -- "a sufficiently large
>>>> difference in quantity is itself a difference in quality"
>>>> 
>>>> This stuff is particularly worth asking about because we are now
>> at
>>>> least 30 years into what I think of as "pervasive networked
>> personal
>>>> computing," now in wireless and appified form, and I think the
>>>> public experiences this as just advances that "happen by
>> themselves"
>>>> in the ordinary course without seeing the jags in the step
>> functions
>>>> underwriting the apparent smooth curve of progress.
>>>> 
>>>> 2. Security in real-world systems
>>>> Getting hacked used to mean losing data, having devices bricked,
>>>> maybe getting co-opted into a botnet, etc. Now it's a lot
>> scarier,
>>>> because we are increasingly surrounded by always-on,
>>>> always-connected devices whose security infrastructure is a black
>>>> box and which may be trusted with controlling physical equipment.
>>>> It's bad enough if your household appliances are phoning home
>>>> (where?) with your credit card number. It's a whole new level of
>>>> scary if there are possible APTs in the power grid and whoever
>>>> manufactured the IOT modem in a transformer is about 8 degrees of
>>>> separation from the grid operators. Even if there's no malice
>>>> intended, modern grid balancing is a new level of challenging
>>>> because you may have multiple sources of generation with immense
>>>> moment-by-moment fluctuations in inbound generation, etc., and
>>>> that's just one category, leaving groceries, ports, financial
>>>> markets, building security, whatever replaces positive train
>> control
>>>> (PTC) down the road, vehicular autonomy, industrial operations,
>> etc.
>>>> to one side...
>>>> 
>>>> Panic reactions are one thing, but it would be more productive
>> for
>>>> the public to think about what their expectations are for how to
>>>> react to these new capabilities and challenges and then demand
>> that
>>>> the policy sector cashes this out into new standards by
>> consulting
>>>> with technologists. I would therefore love advice on what you
>> think
>>>> the public needs to know. Maybe some kind of public forum that
>> could
>>>> get press or a white paper that could get written up in an op-ed?
>>>> 
>>>> On that note, in addition to (or instead of) commenting on this
>>>> posting, please consider commenting on the US Cyber Trust Mark
>>>> proceeding now open at the FCC (comments close November 10th,
>>>> commenting link here:
>>>> https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/23-239). If you'd
>> like
>>>> to talk about this off-list, please drop me a line at NS@fcc.gov.
>>>> I'll let you know in advance if anything you want to say requires
>>>> you to file an "ex parte" statement so that you don't have to
>> worry
>>>> about going on the record unintentionally. This is a fantastic
>>>> opportunity for the network engineering and computer security
>>>> communities to air their concerns in a federal forum in a way
>> that
>>>> may bind the federal government going forward.
>>>> 
>>>> 3. The future isn't evenly distributed
>>>> Talking to a friend who does industrial devops reminded me of
>> this
>>>> fantastic postmortem on healthcare.gov [1] [1]'s rollout:
>>>> https://lobste.rs/s/igt4ez/10_year_anniversary_healthcare_gov.
>>>> Obviously I don't need to tell the career professionals this, but
>>>> tech advances don't necessarily propagate, and if they do, it may
>> be
>>>> at radically different rates between different countries,
>> companies,
>>>> sectors... (If I needed a reminder of this, I recently had to
>> upload
>>>> DICOM files to a hospital using a terrible Java applet that was
>>>> obviously written so long ago that it only wanted to upload from
>>>> CDs, i.e., at a time when you wouldn't have spent hard disk space
>> on
>>>> DICOMs. I eventually managed to "persuade" it that a flash drive
>> was
>>>> a CD.)
>>>> 
>>>> This ties into points 1 and especially 2, because if we want the
>>>> full social benefits of all the advances modern engineering has
>>>> accomplished, we need to get people in "nontraditional" sectors
>>>> thinking about the benefits of the communications and controls
>>>> capabilities that are now on the table. Everyone should be asking
>>>> why we aren't doing ML to reduce the cost and energy consumption
>> for
>>>> making breakfast cereal, totally pedestrian stuff like that; if
>> the
>>>> answer is juice isn't worth the squeeze, that fine, but that's
>> going
>>>> to run on a delay because, as the healthcare.gov [1] [1] example
>> shows,
>>>> high-value new practices may be invisible to a sector that would
>>>> definitely benefit from them.
>>>> 
>>>> Sorry for the very lengthy post, and as they say on the artist
>>>> formerly known as Twitter, "my DMs are open." And thanks for
>>>> everything you all do!
>>>> 
>>>> All the best--
>>>> Nathan
>>>> 
>>>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain
>>>> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff
>>>>> goodfellow via
>>>>> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>> ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
>>>>> 
>>>>> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these
>> claims
>>>>> on
>>>>> this part of his post:
>>>>> 
>>>>> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
>>>>> 
>>>>> to be true. Any one question this?
>>>>> 
>>>>> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load,
>>>>> and,
>>>>> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
>>>>> success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute
>> their
>>>>> own
>>>>> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs
>>>>> those
>>>>> that didn´t.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is
>> we
>>>>> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per
>> sec[1]
>>>>> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole,
>> relied
>>>>> on
>>>>> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
>>>>> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment
>> supplies,
>>>>> and
>>>>> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed
>>>>> towers,
>>>>> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late
>>>>> fighting
>>>>> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of
>> how
>>>>> to
>>>>> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
>>>>> 
>>>>> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do
>>>>> not
>>>>> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
>>>>> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after
>> a
>>>>> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you
>>>>> Paul
>>>>> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and
>>>>> Simon
>>>>> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get
>> it
>>>>> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t
>> notice"
>>>>> -
>>>>> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
>>>>> working *right now* the way they expect.
>>>>> 
>>>>> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
>>>>> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are
>>>>> keeping
>>>>> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very
>>>>> irked
>>>>> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
>>>>> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least,
>>>>> sometimes
>>>>> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my
>>>>> wifi.
>>>>> 
>>>>> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other
>>>>> aspects
>>>>> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share),
>> and
>>>>> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on
>> keeping
>>>>> the
>>>>> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really
>> love
>>>>> to
>>>>> hear it.
>>>>> 
>>>>> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012,
>> both
>>>>> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only
>>>>> achieve
>>>>> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
>>>>> 
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
>>>>>> living as The Truth is True
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>>>>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>>>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>>>> 
>>>>> --
>>>>> Oct 30:
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
>>>>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>>>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> 
>>>> Nathan Simington
>>>> 
>>>> cell: 305-793-6899
>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Links:
>>> ------
>>> [1] http://healthcare.gov
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://healthcare.gov

Re: [NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

[Dave Taht]

2 items: 1 - nathan's email ended up in my spam folder, and if david
had not replied I would not have seen even part of it. I had to search
on a key phrase "Branching from Dave's thread" to find it (A search
for "nnagain nathan" did not), and Google's filter described it as
"this email looks dangerous click here if you recognise the sender"...
where me I was delighted and *amazed* to see what he wrote. I imagine
he hit 90% of everyone's spam folders? Can some people check?

I was also on a 24hr  amtrak train to seattle with no connectivity,
meeting people, & playing music, and loving it. More on that later.
Stopping here overnight 'cause this californian did NOT pack clothes
suitable for my talk in canada!

A quick note as to who is worth talking to about the present and
future of the internet might be this list:
https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/ - most of 'em still
answer their email, when they get it.

More later. Thx for dropping in Nathan! There's lots to talk about!

On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 6:27 AM Nathan Simington <nsimington@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Branching from Dave's thread because I don't want to get into the politics, but I would like to very strongly endorse Dave's remarks about how the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are totally unacknowledged and misunderstood (e.g., note the public policy emphasis on line speed over all else.) As such, I'd like to solicit the members of this list to suggest some of the greatest accomplishments in network engineering that you've never seen properly acknowledged or appreciated. I'd like to promote and discuss them in speeches and papers to help get more sunlight on them.
>
> 0. Let's get network engineering some applause, please!
> Both recent and historical accomplishments are welcome. I just want to help get more people thinking about what a difference network engineering has made to everyone's lives! All technologies, personalities and accomplishments welcome!
>
> Beyond this specific thing, in terms of public discourse, I'd love to get more opinions about how to communicate to the public about the tech underpinnings of the world we live in now, and I'd love comments on how to discuss and promote any of these topics:
>
> 1. Infrastructure advances
> It would generally do a lot of good if the public were to think of "tech" less as purely the consumer-facing side and more in terms of fundamental architecture and infrastructure. For example, there's really no point talking about "AI" in the public-facing aspect of end-user LLM experiences without first looking at how the cost of compute and transit has gone through the floor compared to 15 years ago or so. I can't even disentangle all the drivers, but they must include at least:
>
> New uses for GPUs driving advances and slashing prices in GPU tech
> Vast advances in back-end cloud (to pick one company, Sawzall/Lingo/GFS/Colossus plus associated datacenters is almost invisible to the public, and I have no idea what's powering Chinese AI back-ends)
> Nuts-and-bolts development in ML/data science that are eroding the fuzzy boundary between ML done as a planned, discrete query by an expert over a small, curated dataset and ML as a quasi-autonomous system not requiring expert queries, given authority over physical devices, doing its own ingestion, etc -- "a sufficiently large difference in quantity is itself a difference in quality"
>
> This stuff is particularly worth asking about because we are now at least 30 years into what I think of as "pervasive networked personal computing," now in wireless and appified form, and I think the public experiences this as just advances that "happen by themselves" in the ordinary course without seeing the jags in the step functions underwriting the apparent smooth curve of progress.
>
> 2. Security in real-world systems
> Getting hacked used to mean losing data, having devices bricked, maybe getting co-opted into a botnet, etc. Now it's a lot scarier, because we are increasingly surrounded by always-on, always-connected devices whose security infrastructure is a black box and which may be trusted with controlling physical equipment. It's bad enough if your household appliances are phoning home (where?) with your credit card number. It's a whole new level of scary if there are possible APTs in the power grid and whoever manufactured the IOT modem in a transformer is about 8 degrees of separation from the grid operators. Even if there's no malice intended, modern grid balancing is a new level of challenging because you may have multiple sources of generation with immense moment-by-moment fluctuations in inbound generation, etc., and that's just one category, leaving groceries, ports, financial markets, building security, whatever replaces positive train control (PTC) down the road, vehicular autonomy, industrial operations, etc. to one side...
>
> Panic reactions are one thing, but it would be more productive for the public to think about what their expectations are for how to react to these new capabilities and challenges and then demand that the policy sector cashes this out into new standards by consulting with technologists. I would therefore love advice on what you think the public needs to know. Maybe some kind of public forum that could get press or a white paper that could get written up in an op-ed?
>
> On that note, in addition to (or instead of) commenting on this posting, please consider commenting on the US Cyber Trust Mark proceeding now open at the FCC (comments close November 10th, commenting link here: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/23-239). If you'd like to talk about this off-list, please drop me a line at NS@fcc.gov. I'll let you know in advance if anything you want to say requires you to file an "ex parte" statement so that you don't have to worry about going on the record unintentionally. This is a fantastic opportunity for the network engineering and computer security communities to air their concerns in a federal forum in a way that may bind the federal government going forward.
>
> 3. The future isn't evenly distributed
> Talking to a friend who does industrial devops reminded me of this fantastic postmortem on healthcare.gov's rollout: https://lobste.rs/s/igt4ez/10_year_anniversary_healthcare_gov. Obviously I don't need to tell the career professionals this, but tech advances don't necessarily propagate, and if they do, it may be at radically different rates between different countries, companies, sectors... (If I needed a reminder of this, I recently had to upload DICOM files to a hospital using a terrible Java applet that was obviously written so long ago that it only wanted to upload from CDs, i.e., at a time when you wouldn't have spent hard disk space on DICOMs. I eventually managed to "persuade" it that a flash drive was a CD.)
>
> This ties into points 1 and especially 2, because if we want the full social benefits of all the advances modern engineering has accomplished, we need to get people in "nontraditional" sectors thinking about the benefits of the communications and controls capabilities that are now on the table. Everyone should be asking why we aren't doing ML to reduce the cost and energy consumption for making breakfast cereal, totally pedestrian stuff like that; if the answer is juice isn't worth the squeeze, that fine, but that's going to run on a delay because, as the healthcare.gov example shows, high-value new practices may be invisible to a sector that would definitely benefit from them.
>
> Sorry for the very lengthy post, and as they say on the artist formerly known as Twitter, "my DMs are open." And thanks for everything you all do!
>
> All the best--
> Nathan
>
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
>> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
>>
>> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims on
>> this part of his post:
>>
>> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
>>
>> to be true. Any one question this?
>>
>> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load, and,
>> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
>> success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their own
>> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs those
>> that didn´t.
>>
>> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
>> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
>> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied on
>> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
>> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies, and
>> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed towers,
>> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late fighting
>> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how to
>> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
>>
>> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do not
>> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
>> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
>> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you Paul
>> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and Simon
>> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
>> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice" -
>> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
>> working *right now* the way they expect.
>>
>> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
>> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are keeping
>> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very irked
>> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
>> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least, sometimes
>> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my wifi.
>>
>> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other aspects
>> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
>> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping the
>> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love to
>> hear it.
>>
>> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
>> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only achieve
>> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
>>
>> > --
>> > Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
>> > living as The Truth is True
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Nnagain mailing list
>> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
>
>
> --
> Nathan Simington
> cell: 305-793-6899



-- 
Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Re: [NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

[Frantisek Borsik]

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It's a small detour on my part, but here is a list of some great
engineering (not only network) feats, achieved also fast:
https://patrickcollison.com/fast

RE: Nathan's "*3. The future isn't evenly distributed"*, this goes
especially deep for anything bufferbloat related. All the tools to get rid
of it are basically out there and free to use. open-sourced, but there's so
many people in the industry either willingly ignoring it because they want
to sell big buffers, or they just don't know about it even (as I was
sharing my experience from this week's WLPC conference here on the list).
Van Jacobson was talking about it at Netdevconf 2018 really extensively:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAni0_lN7zE. Bufferbloat is, as we know,
one of the biggest culprits that led to the NN.

Have a great weekend you all.

All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik



https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik@gmail.com


On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:32 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> 2 items: 1 - nathan's email ended up in my spam folder, and if david
> had not replied I would not have seen even part of it. I had to search
> on a key phrase "Branching from Dave's thread" to find it (A search
> for "nnagain nathan" did not), and Google's filter described it as
> "this email looks dangerous click here if you recognise the sender"...
> where me I was delighted and *amazed* to see what he wrote. I imagine
> he hit 90% of everyone's spam folders? Can some people check?
>
> I was also on a 24hr  amtrak train to seattle with no connectivity,
> meeting people, & playing music, and loving it. More on that later.
> Stopping here overnight 'cause this californian did NOT pack clothes
> suitable for my talk in canada!
>
> A quick note as to who is worth talking to about the present and
> future of the internet might be this list:
> https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/ - most of 'em still
> answer their email, when they get it.
>
> More later. Thx for dropping in Nathan! There's lots to talk about!
>
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 6:27 AM Nathan Simington <nsimington@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Branching from Dave's thread because I don't want to get into the
> politics, but I would like to very strongly endorse Dave's remarks about
> how the incredible accomplishments of network engineers are totally
> unacknowledged and misunderstood (e.g., note the public policy emphasis on
> line speed over all else.) As such, I'd like to solicit the members of this
> list to suggest some of the greatest accomplishments in network engineering
> that you've never seen properly acknowledged or appreciated. I'd like to
> promote and discuss them in speeches and papers to help get more sunlight
> on them.
> >
> > 0. Let's get network engineering some applause, please!
> > Both recent and historical accomplishments are welcome. I just want to
> help get more people thinking about what a difference network engineering
> has made to everyone's lives! All technologies, personalities and
> accomplishments welcome!
> >
> > Beyond this specific thing, in terms of public discourse, I'd love to
> get more opinions about how to communicate to the public about the tech
> underpinnings of the world we live in now, and I'd love comments on how to
> discuss and promote any of these topics:
> >
> > 1. Infrastructure advances
> > It would generally do a lot of good if the public were to think of
> "tech" less as purely the consumer-facing side and more in terms of
> fundamental architecture and infrastructure. For example, there's really no
> point talking about "AI" in the public-facing aspect of end-user LLM
> experiences without first looking at how the cost of compute and transit
> has gone through the floor compared to 15 years ago or so. I can't even
> disentangle all the drivers, but they must include at least:
> >
> > New uses for GPUs driving advances and slashing prices in GPU tech
> > Vast advances in back-end cloud (to pick one company,
> Sawzall/Lingo/GFS/Colossus plus associated datacenters is almost invisible
> to the public, and I have no idea what's powering Chinese AI back-ends)
> > Nuts-and-bolts development in ML/data science that are eroding the fuzzy
> boundary between ML done as a planned, discrete query by an expert over a
> small, curated dataset and ML as a quasi-autonomous system not requiring
> expert queries, given authority over physical devices, doing its own
> ingestion, etc -- "a sufficiently large difference in quantity is itself a
> difference in quality"
> >
> > This stuff is particularly worth asking about because we are now at
> least 30 years into what I think of as "pervasive networked personal
> computing," now in wireless and appified form, and I think the public
> experiences this as just advances that "happen by themselves" in the
> ordinary course without seeing the jags in the step functions underwriting
> the apparent smooth curve of progress.
> >
> > 2. Security in real-world systems
> > Getting hacked used to mean losing data, having devices bricked, maybe
> getting co-opted into a botnet, etc. Now it's a lot scarier, because we are
> increasingly surrounded by always-on, always-connected devices whose
> security infrastructure is a black box and which may be trusted with
> controlling physical equipment. It's bad enough if your household
> appliances are phoning home (where?) with your credit card number. It's a
> whole new level of scary if there are possible APTs in the power grid and
> whoever manufactured the IOT modem in a transformer is about 8 degrees of
> separation from the grid operators. Even if there's no malice intended,
> modern grid balancing is a new level of challenging because you may have
> multiple sources of generation with immense moment-by-moment fluctuations
> in inbound generation, etc., and that's just one category, leaving
> groceries, ports, financial markets, building security, whatever replaces
> positive train control (PTC) down the road, vehicular autonomy, industrial
> operations, etc. to one side...
> >
> > Panic reactions are one thing, but it would be more productive for the
> public to think about what their expectations are for how to react to these
> new capabilities and challenges and then demand that the policy sector
> cashes this out into new standards by consulting with technologists. I
> would therefore love advice on what you think the public needs to know.
> Maybe some kind of public forum that could get press or a white paper that
> could get written up in an op-ed?
> >
> > On that note, in addition to (or instead of) commenting on this posting,
> please consider commenting on the US Cyber Trust Mark proceeding now open
> at the FCC (comments close November 10th, commenting link here:
> https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/docket-detail/23-239). If you'd like to
> talk about this off-list, please drop me a line at NS@fcc.gov. I'll let
> you know in advance if anything you want to say requires you to file an "ex
> parte" statement so that you don't have to worry about going on the record
> unintentionally. This is a fantastic opportunity for the network
> engineering and computer security communities to air their concerns in a
> federal forum in a way that may bind the federal government going forward.
> >
> > 3. The future isn't evenly distributed
> > Talking to a friend who does industrial devops reminded me of this
> fantastic postmortem on healthcare.gov's rollout:
> https://lobste.rs/s/igt4ez/10_year_anniversary_healthcare_gov. Obviously
> I don't need to tell the career professionals this, but tech advances don't
> necessarily propagate, and if they do, it may be at radically different
> rates between different countries, companies, sectors... (If I needed a
> reminder of this, I recently had to upload DICOM files to a hospital using
> a terrible Java applet that was obviously written so long ago that it only
> wanted to upload from CDs, i.e., at a time when you wouldn't have spent
> hard disk space on DICOMs. I eventually managed to "persuade" it that a
> flash drive was a CD.)
> >
> > This ties into points 1 and especially 2, because if we want the full
> social benefits of all the advances modern engineering has accomplished, we
> need to get people in "nontraditional" sectors thinking about the benefits
> of the communications and controls capabilities that are now on the table.
> Everyone should be asking why we aren't doing ML to reduce the cost and
> energy consumption for making breakfast cereal, totally pedestrian stuff
> like that; if the answer is juice isn't worth the squeeze, that fine, but
> that's going to run on a delay because, as the healthcare.gov example
> shows, high-value new practices may be invisible to a sector that would
> definitely benefit from them.
> >
> > Sorry for the very lengthy post, and as they say on the artist formerly
> known as Twitter, "my DMs are open." And thanks for everything you all do!
> >
> > All the best--
> > Nathan
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 3:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> >> Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > ➔➔https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716558844384379163
> >>
> >> Leaving aside the rhetoric, I believe the majority of these claims on
> >> this part of his post:
> >>
> >> https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1716884139226329512
> >>
> >> to be true. Any one question this?
> >>
> >> I do wish that he showed upload speeds, and latency under load, and,
> >> acknowledged some mistakes, at least, and did not claim perfect
> >> success. Also individual states had stepped up to institute their own
> >> rules, and I would love to see a comparison of those stats vs those
> >> that didn´t.
> >>
> >> The COVID thing I am most fiercely proud of, as an engineer, is we
> >> took an internet only capable of postage stamp 5 frame per sec[1]
> >> videoconferencing to something that the world, as a whole, relied on
> >> to keep civilization running only 7 years later, in the face of
> >> terrible odds, lights out environments, scarce equipment supplies, and
> >> illness. ISPs big and small helped too - Their people climbed towers,
> >> produced better code, rerouted networks, and stayed up late fighting
> >> off DDOSes. People at home shared their wifi and knowledge of how to
> >> make fiddly things on the net work well, over the internet  -
> >>
> >> Nobody handed out medals for keeping the internet running, I do not
> >> remember a single statement of praise for what we did over that
> >> terrible time. No one ever looks up after a productive day after a
> >> zillion productive clicks and says (for one example) "Thank you Paul
> >> Vixie and Mokapetris for inventing DNS and Evan Hunt(bind)  and Simon
> >> Kelly(dnsmasq) for shipping dns servers for free that only get it
> >> wrong once in a while, and then recover so fast you don´t notice" -
> >> there are just endless complaints from those for whom it is not
> >> working *right now* the way they expect.
> >>
> >> There are no nobel prizes for networking.  But the scientists,
> >> engineers, sysadmins and SREs kept improving things, and are keeping
> >> civilization running. It is kind of a cause for me - I get very irked
> >> at both sides whining when if only they could walk a mile in a
> >> neteng´s shoes. I get respect from my neighbors at least, sometimes
> >> asked to fix a laptop or set up a router... and I still share my wifi.
> >>
> >> If there was just some way to separate out the ire about other aspects
> >> of how the internet is going south (which I certainly share), and
> >> somehow put respect for those in the trenches that work on keeping the
> >> Net running, back in the public conversation, I would really love to
> >> hear it.
> >>
> >> [1] Really great talk on networking by Van Jacobson in 2012, both
> >> useful for its content, and the kind of quality we could only achieve
> >> then: https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
> >>
> >> > --
> >> > Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
> >> > living as The Truth is True
> >> >
> >> > _______________________________________________
> >> > Nnagain mailing list
> >> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> >> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Oct 30:
> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> >> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Nnagain mailing list
> >> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> >> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Nathan Simington
> > cell: 305-793-6899
>
>
>
> --
> Oct 30:
> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>

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