[NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

Wed Oct 25 16:44:12 EDT 2023

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 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 [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 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
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>>> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> Nathan Simington
>> 
>> cell: 305-793-6899 _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://healthcare.gov
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain