[NNagain] RFC: Public Communications on Tech Infrastructure

Sat Oct 28 04:58:35 EDT 2023

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 at gmail.com

On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:32 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
nnagain at 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 at 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 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
> >> >
> >> > _______________________________________________
> >> > 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
>
>
>
> --
> 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
>
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