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That made me remember part of an interview done to Dennis Ritchie back in 2000:

  When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, 
  I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed 
  under the advice of a worldwide crowd. C is peculiar in a lot 
  of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a 
  certain unity of approach that stems from development in a 
  small group.

StephenFalkenon So You Want to Write Your Own Language (2014)

  LinuxWorld.com: What is your advice to designers of new programming languages?
  
  Dennis Ritchie: At least for the people who send me mail about a new language 
  that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to 
  write a compiler. Don't have any expectations that anyone will use it, unless 
  you hook up with some sort of organization in a position to push it hard. 
  It's a lottery, and some can buy a lot of the tickets. There are plenty of 
  beautiful languages (more beautiful than C) that didn't catch on. But someone 
  does win the lottery, and doing a language at least teaches you something.
  
  Oh, by the way, if your new language does begin to grow in usage, it can 
  become really hard to fix early mistakes.[0]

[0] http://www.itworld.com/article/2826125/development/the-futur...

StephenFalkenon Thepiratebay.com domain has been suspended

That truly is a pressing challenge due to all these DNS related issues.

It makes me remember a short paper from 1977 by Carl A. Sunshine [0] where he proposed a network architecture with no global unique addressing, no global routing, and no global naming. These three major axis of modern Internet censorship would fall apart.

David P. Reed, the designer of UDP, tried to push for larger role of source routing in the then nascent Internet architecture. But, somehow, it didn't reach what he had envisioned.

The 70's were a very interesting era on the research of networking fundamentals and I find it sad that such important topics like source routing weren't investigated much further in the following decades.

Shouldn't we somehow return to the fundamentals of networking to try to find ways of dealing with the censorship by the status quo against the natural need of sharing our digital culture in a free and anonymous way?

[0] http://cartap.us/p29-sunshine.pdf

StephenFalkenon Jeff Kell, ListServ and IRC pioneer, has died

An example of a BITNET Relay session [0]:

  /SIGNUP robert harper
  * Thank you for signing up, robert harper.
  * Now use the /SIGNON <nickname> command to
  * establish a nickname and to logon Relay.
  /SIGN ON rob
  Welcome to the Inter Chat Relay Network, Rob.
  Your host is RELAY@FINHUTC (Finland).
  Your last logon was at 08:39:23 on 03/17/89.
  There are 67 users on 27 relays.
  /HELP
  **************** Relay Commands ***************
  /Bye . . . . . . . . . . . . Signoff from Relay
  /Channel <num> . . . . .Change to channel <num>
  /Contact <host-nick> . .Show Relay contact info
  /Getop . . . . . Try to summon a Relay operator
  /Help. . . . . . . . . . . . . Prints this list
  /Info. . . . . . . . . . . Send RELAY INFO file
  /Invite <nick> . . .Invite user to your channel
  /Links . . . . . . . . . . .Shows active relays
  /List. . . . . . . . . . . List active channels
  /Msg <nick> <text> . . . .Sends private message
  /Nick <newnick>. . . . . . Change your nickname
  /Names <channel> . . . . .Show users with names
  /Rates . . . . . . . . . .Display message rates
  /Servers <node>. . . . Show relays serving node
  /Signon <nick> <channel> . . . .Signon to Relay
  /Signon <nick>,SHIFT . . Forces uppercase shift
  /Signon <nick>,UNSHIFT . Forces lowercase shift
  /Signoff . . . . . . . . . . Signoff from Relay
  /Signup <full name>. Signup or change full name
  /Stats . . . . . . . . Display Relay statistics
  /Summon <userid>@<node>. . Invite user to Relay
  /Topic <subject> . . . . Topic for your channel
  /Who <channel> . . . . Show users and nicknames
  /WhoIs <nick>. . . . . . . .Identify a nickname 
  /LINKS    
  RELAY Version 01.24x0 Host RELAY@FINHUTC (Finland)
  Relay  RELAY  @ CEARN   (  Geneva  ) ->  Finland
  Relay  RELAY  @ DEARN   ( Germany  ) ->  Switzerland
  Relay  RELAY  @ AEARN   ( Austria  ) ->  Germany
  Relay  RELAY  @CZHRZU1A (  Zurich  ) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @ HEARN   ( Holland  ) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @TAUNIVM  ( TAUrelay ) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @EB0UB011 (Barcelona ) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @ ORION   (New_Jersey) ->  Geneva
  Relay  RELAY  @ BITNIC  ( NewYork  ) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RELAY  @JPNSUT10 (  Tokyo   ) ->  NewYork
  Relay  RELAY  @ VILLVM  (Philadelph) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RELAY  @NDSUVM1  (No_Dakota ) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RLY   @CORNELLC (Ithaca_NY ) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RELAY  @ UTCVM   (Tennessee ) ->  Pittsburgh
  Relay  RELAY  @UIUCVMD  (Urbana_IL ) ->  Pittsburgh
  Relay  RELAY  @CANADA01 ( Canada01 ) ->  Ithaca_NY
  Relay  RELAY  @  AUVM   ( Wash_DC  ) ->  Va_Tech
  Relay  RELAY  @ VTVM2   ( Va_Tech  ) ->  Ithaca_NY
  Relay  RELAY  @UALTAVM  ( Edmonton ) ->  Canada01
  Relay  RELAY  @NYUCCVM  (   Nyu    ) ->  New_Jersey
  Relay  RELAY  @  UWF    (Pensacola ) ->  Va_Tech
  Relay MASRELAY@  UBVM   ( Buffalo  ) ->  Ithaca_NY
  Relay  RELAY  @CMUCCVMA (Pittsburgh) ->  Ithaca_NY
  Relay  RELAY  @PURCCVM  (  Purdue  ) ->  Pittsburgh
  Relay  RELAY  @UREGINA1 (Regina_Sk ) ->  Canada01
  Relay  RELAY  @ GITVM1  ( Atlanta  ) ->  Tennessee

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET_Relay#Usage

StephenFalkenon State of emergency in France

What I see is that no amount of monitoring of the more radicalized elements of society will alter the deep and profound civilizational changes that are taking place in Europe.

This seems to be about the end of an era and the beginning of a whole new one. And nothing seems able to alter that course of History.

StephenFalkenon Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR

  One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of (state) violence will
  ever solve a (hard) math problem.

  -- Jacob Appelbaum

StephenFalkenon Can we colonize the moon?

I always ask this to myself:

  If we haven't been able to make our human civilizations sustainable here on 
  planet Earth (where we have the perfect conditions to do so), how will we 
  ever create sustainable environments in much harsher conditions such as on 
  the Moon or Mars ?

StephenFalkenon Code Specialists Oppose U.S. and British Access to Encrypted Communication

I wonder if they will ever be able to ban steganography on ham radio. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

StephenFalkenon Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

Another good example is Lynn Conway [1][2], that together with Carver Mead wrote "Introduction to VLSI System Design" bestseller that would catalyze the Mead & Conway revolution [3] in VLSI design in late 70's, early 80's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

[2] http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead_%26_Conway_revolution

StephenFalkenon Many Bitcoin wallets vulnerable to double-spending of confirmed transactions

There is an interesting graph on how the block chain size has progressed over the years since Jan 2009 [1].

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&show...

StephenFalkenon The Harmful Consequences of Postel's Maxim

Great point.

The original Usenet comp.mail.pine newsgroup post [1] by Mark Crispin (father of the IMAP protocol):

  This statement is based upon a terrible misunderstand of Postel's
  robustness principle. I knew Jon Postel. He was quite unhappy with
  how his robustness principle was abused to cover up non-compliant
  behavior, and to criticize compliant software.

  Jon's principle could perhaps be more accurately stated as "in general,
  only a subset of a protocol is actually used in real life. So, you should
  be conservative and only generate that subset. However, you should also
  be liberal and accept everything that the protocol permits, even if it
  appears that nobody will ever use it."

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.mail.pine/E5ojND1L4u8/i...

StephenFalkenon What Happened with Lego (2013)

It's pretty impressive how LEGO has changed its destiny in the last 10 years, given this: [1]

  In 2003, The LEGO Group faced a budget deficit of 1.4 billion DKK (220 million
  USD at then current exchange rates; equal to EUR 175 million),[40] causing
  Poul Plougmann to be replaced by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen as president. In the
  following year, almost one thousand employees were laid off, due to budget
  cuts. However, in October, 2004, on reporting an even larger deficit, 
  Kristiansen also stepped down as president, while placing 800 million DKK of 
  his private funds into the company.

Right now, LEGO is the largest toy company in the world, surpassing Mattel since late 2014. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lego_Group#Financial_resul...

[2] http://time.com/money/3268065/lego-largest-toy-company-matte...

StephenFalkenon C for high level programmers (slides)

  C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely
  helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language
  efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and
  fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments.

  -- Dennis M. Ritchie (in "The Development of the C Language" [1])

[1] http://heim.ifi.uio.no/inf2270/programmer/historien-om-C.pdf

StephenFalkenon GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

Great point !

StephenFalkenon UDP and me

You raise a really interesting point about the relevance of Source Routing.

Recently I read a small but significant paper by Carl A. Sunshine [1] (from the beginning of 1977) about Source Routing and some of its implications. This was written at a time when there was still a very active community researching the fundamentals of Computer Networking.

He shows how one could build an even simpler and dumber (while still functional) core computer network with no routing infrastructure (pretty amazing concept when you think of it), no global addresses and no global node naming. All that complexity would be transferred to the endpoints, making the whole network even more configurable and adaptable to topology changes. Endpoints would have a more powerful and free participation in that network. The End-to-End Principle taken to its limits.

Is there still some deep fundamental research on the feasibility of such a large scale network based on Source Routing ?

[1] Source Routing in Computer Networks http://cartap.us/p29-sunshine.pdf

StephenFalkenon Programmers of ITMO University win the ACM ICPC for the sixth time

For those wishing to try and submit the problems, there is an online judge containing the ACM-ICPC World Finals since 2012 till 2015 [1].

[1] https://icpc.kattis.com/problems

StephenFalkenon NoTCP

A bit of UDP history by its creator [1]:

  Actually, UDP was "un-designed" by me and others.By this I mean that 
  UDP was the final expression of a process that today we would call 
  "factoring" an overcomplex design. Originally, the ARPANET end-to-end 
  protocol NCP was a "kitchen sink" oriented toward providing remote 
  teletype-centric access using the "telnet" protocol and the "FTP" 
  protocol to remote machines over a packet network.

  A group of us, interested in a mix of real-time telephony, local area 
  networks, distributed operating systems, and communications security, 
  argued for several years for a datagram based network, rather than a 
  virtual circuit based network. The group involved me, John Schoch and 
  Yogen Dalal of Xerox PARC, Danny Cohen of ISI (now at Caltech, I think), 
  and Steve Crocker, with Jon Postel as a supporter, and Vint Cerf and Bob 
  Kahn as neutral referees.

  UDP was actually "designed" in 30 minutes on a blackboard when we decided 
  pull the original TCP protocol apart into TCP and IP, and created UDP on 
  top of IP as an alternative for multiplexing and demultiplexing IP 
  datagrams inside a host among the various host processes or tasks. But it 
  was a placeholder that enabled all the non-virtual-circuit protocols since 
  then to be invented, including encapsulation, RTP, DNS, ..., without having 
  to negotiate for permission either to define a new protocol or to extend 
  TCP by adding "features".

[1] "udp and me" http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=6

StephenFalkenon Dennis Ritchie official webpage deleted by Alcatel-Lucent(/Nokia)

Thanks for that snapshot. Unfortunately it's missing a lot of the content that was available there. It's only around 1/3 of the full content.

StephenFalkenon Reddit: can anyone clean up the mess behind 'the front page of the internet'?

That makes me remember the now famous quote:

  The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural 
  resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. 
  When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-
  -free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

    -- Alan Kay

StephenFalkenon Konrad Zuse: Nearly the German Turing

Some years before his death, Konrad Zuse wrote a book about his long and interesting life called "Der Computer - Mein Lebenswerk", which was later translated to an English version titled as "The Computer - My Life".

StephenFalkenon Konrad Zuse: Nearly the German Turing

Some trivia from Wikipedia [0]:

  The movie Tron: Legacy, which revolves around a world inside a computer system, 
  features a character named Zuse [1], presumably in honour of Konrad Zuse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#Zuse_Year_2010

[1] http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0209988/?ref_=tt_cl_t7

StephenFalkenon I have moved to naming global singletons with a The* prefix

Giving expressive, meaningful, coherent and readable names to the entities used all the time in programming languages (variables, functions, procedures, classes, methods, etc) is an incredibly challenging task that in general doesn't seem to be acknowledged as such.

StephenFalkenon Operating system research – 16 years perspective (2008)

You can also read the original USENET post on comp.os.research here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.research/fw2frykLjOI...

StephenFalkenon Asm.js Speedups Everywhere

"You want it (the browser) to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101." -- Alan Kay

StephenFalkenon Capsela, the game that changed my life

Back in 1994, this LEGO Technic set [1] impressed me beyond anything else related to toys until and after that time.

[1] http://www.leg-technic.hu/images/sets/6/lego-8880-super-car....

StephenFalkenon OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t (2013)

There is a quite interesting book where the author (John Day) shares an inside view about the OSI committees back in the 70's and 80's, and its endless discussions: "Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals" [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Network-Architecture-Fundamen...

StephenFalkenon Zusie – My Relay Computer

"The movie Tron: Legacy [1], which revolves around a world inside a computer system, features a character named Zuse [2], presumably in honour of Konrad Zuse."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#Zuse_Year_2010

[2] http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0209988/

StephenFalkenon Future of Programming Languages

Your point makes all sense and I totally agree with it. And it made me remember an old joke about programming languages of the future, through a fictional book cover: [1]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/dPjtGVj.jpg

StephenFalkenon The “Clockwise/Spiral Rule”

C was created for solving a very practical and specific problem: making the newly born UNIX operating system easily portable across different architectures. It was an impressive success on that challenge.

That means most of the decisions Dennis Ritchie (with the help of others) took when designing the language were the right ones for solving the problem at hand [1], otherwise the language wouldn't have survived as strongly as it did. [2]

[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.pdf

[2] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

StephenFalkenon Half of stars lurk outside galaxies

One day we will eventually realize that we are indeed traveling through space on "Spaceship Earth".