[NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

[David Bray, PhD]

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 at 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 at 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 at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:21 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
>> Nnagain <nnagain at 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 at iconia.com
>> > living as The Truth is True
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > Nnagain at 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
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>
>
>
> --
> Nathan Simington
> cell: 305-793-6899
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