SunCEC2007 Day 1: 3rd breakout - Myths in networking by Radia Perlman
There is a special track at the CEC that is called “Luminaries”. It´s reserved for colleagues that are really capacities on their field. One of these luminaries is person known in the whole industry: Radia Perlman. Most of you will know her as the inventor of the most annoying but equally most butt-saving feature of Ethernet … the spanning tree protocol. Her talk was a really enlightening about the past, present and the future in networking. But the best were the endless amount of good examples and stories (i´m only able to paraphrase them):
- Ethernet is not a network … it´s a shared access link layer.
- It´s was a good idea that ISO didn´t substituted TCP/IP … because one them is a standard body, the other a protocol.
- She hates HTTP. She thought ASN.1 is too complicated until she saw XML. In her opinion, it´s even more complicated than ASN.1 from a computing perspective. Thus any protocol transporting XML over HTTP combines the two most insulting protocols.
- The trend to tunnel much communication about port 80 to be more firewall friendly is indeed firewall hostile, as it prevents the firewalls from properly do it´s task
- You should know the problem before you try to solve it. Her best example: When her son was three he cried about a problem with his hand. She kissed it several times and asked him about the problem. He peed on his hand. It was a really exciting presentation. Many insights from a woman which really knows her stuff. PS: One of the last point was really insightful, too … End2End encryption in the Internet would be the end of the world … well at least the end of the Internet as we know it. The reason is obvious. With encryption you wouldn´t be able to look into the communication between a spammer and it´s target mail account, thus antispam techniques other than filtering on the client would have no vector to work as they can´t look into the mail or mailheaders There wouldn´t enough bandwidth to transport the SPAM otherwise filterered out before reaching to many hops in the internet.