Crocker’s biggest contribution to the project was the creation of the Request for Comments, or RFC. Shared among the various research institutions building the ARPAnet, these were documents that sought to describe how this massive network would work, and they were essential to its evolution – so essential, they’re still used today.

Like the RFCs, Crocker is still a vital part of the modern internet. He’s the chairman of the board of ICANN, the organization which operates the internet’s domain naming system, following in the footsteps of his old high school and UCLA buddy Vint Cerf. And like Cerf, Crocker is part of the inaugural class inducted into the Internet Society‘s (ISOC) Hall of Fame.

This week, he spoke with Wired about the first internet transmission, the creation of the RFCs, and their place in history. ‘RFC’ is now included in the Oxford English Dictionary. And so is Steve Crocker.

Wired: Some say the internet was born on Oct. 29, 1969, when the first message was sent between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). But others say it actually arrived a few weeks earlier, when UCLA set up its ARPAnet machines. You were there. Which is it?

Steve Crocker: October. The very first attempt to get some communication between our machine, a Sigma 7, and [Douglas] Engelbart‘s machine, an SDS-940, at SRI.

Famously, it crashed.

We tried to log in [to the SRI machine]. We had a very simple terminal protocol so that you could act like you were a terminal at our end and log in to their machine. But the software had a small bug in it. We sent the ‘l’ and the ‘o,’ but the ‘g’ caused a crash.

Their system had the sophistication that if you started typing a command and you got to the point where there was no other possibility, it would finish the command for you. So when you typed ‘l-o-g,’ it would respond with the full word: ‘l-o-g-i-n.’ But the software that we had ginned up wasn’t expecting more than one character to ever come back. The ‘l’ was typed, and we got an ‘l’ back. The ‘o’ was typed, and we got an ‘o’ back. But the ‘g’ was typed, and it wasn’t expecting the ‘g-i-n.’ A simple problem. Easily fixed.

Wired: And the internet was born?

Crocker: Some say that this was a single network and therefore not ‘the internet.’ The ARPAnet was all one kind of router, and it didn’t interconnect with other networks. Some people say that the internet was created when multiple networks were connected to each other – that the IP [internet protocol] and TCP [transmission control protocol] work on top of that were instrumental in creating the internet.

The people who worked at that layer, particularly Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn [the inventors of IP and TCP], tend to make a careful distinction between the APRAnet and the later expansion into multiple networks, and they mark the birth of the internet from that later point.

But, conversely, the basic design of protocol layers and documentation and much of the upper structure was done as part of the ARPAnet and continued without much modification as the internet came into being. So, from the user point of view, Telnet, FTP, and e-mail and so forth were all born early on, on the ARPAnet, and from that point of view, the expansion to the internet was close to seamless. You can mark the birth of internet back to the ARPAnet.

Wired: It was before that first ARPAnet transmission that you started the Requests for Comments. They helped make that transmission possible?

Crocker: The people at ARPA [the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, later called DARPA] had a formal contract with Bolt, Beranek, and Newman [or BBN, a Boston-based government contractor] for the creation of the routers, and they had a formal contract with ATT for the leased liens that would carry the bits between the routers, across the country. But they had no formal plan, or formal paper work, for the nodes that would be connected to the network.

What they had instead was a captive set of research operations that they were already funding. The first four [nodes on the ARPAnet: UCLA, SRI, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah] and all of the other places that would play a part in those early days were places that were already doing research with ARPA money.

These were pre-existing projects of one sort of another. Graphics. Artificial intelligence. Machine architectures. Big database machines. All the key topics of the day. Douglas Engelbart’s work at SRI was focused on human-machine interaction. He had an early version of a mouse and hypertext working in his laboratory, for example….

So, the heads of each of these projects were busy with their own agendas, and here comes this network – which was kind of foisted on them, in a way. Not unwillingly, but not with any kind of formality either. So, basically, they delegated the attention to this project down to the next level. In the case of the university projects, that meant graduate students, and in the case of SRI, that meant staff members below the principal investigator level.

Somebody called a meeting in August of ’68, and a few of us came from each of these places … on the order of a dozen or fewer people. Vint and I drove up from L.A. to Santa Barbara, where the meeting was held and met our counterparts. And the main thing that happened was that we realized we were asking the same questions and that we had some commonality in our technical backgrounds and our sense of what should be done – but there wasn’t a lot of definition to it.

So we made one of the more important decisions, which was to go visit each other’s laboratories and to keep talking to each other. And we understood the irony that this network was supposed to reduce travel and the first thing we did was increase travel.

Over the next several months, from August ’68 to spring ’69, we had a series of meetings where we visited each other’s labs, and we also had kind of freeform discussions on what we might do with this network – how it might develop. We didn’t have a detailed specification of how the IMPs [interface message processors] were going to be connected to the hosts.

When we started, BBN hadn’t actually been selected. I think they were selected and got started on the first of January 1969. Some us went out to meet them in Boston in the middle of February 1969, in the middle of a large snow storm. But they didn’t publish a detailed specification of how you connect a host to an IMP until later that spring. So [the researchers] had this time from when we first met each other to the time we had a detailed spec in which we could speculate and focus on the larger issues without having to narrow down into ‘this bit has to go here’ and ‘this wire has to go there,’ and we started to sketch out some key ideas.

There was no senior leadership. There were no professors. There was no adult in the room, as it were. We were all more or less in our mid-20s and self-organized. Out of that emerged … a strong sense that we couldn’t nail down everything. We had to be very ginger about what we specified and leave others to build on top of it. So we tried to focus on an architecture that had very thin layers that you could build on top of – or go around.

After a few months, we had a meeting in Salt Lake City, and we said: ‘It’s time to start writing some of these ideas we’ve been kicking around.’ We made assignments to each person, and then I took on the minor job of organizing all these notes.

I found myself very nervous about that over the next couple of weeks. At first, it seemed simple, but then I realized that the mere act of writing down what were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us – presumably some adult out of the east, either Boston or Washington.

So I got increasingly nervous. I was staying with some friends in the Pacific Palisades area, and late one night, I couldn’t sleep and the only place I could work without waking people up was in the bathroom. It was 3 a.m., and I scribbled down some rules for these notes. I said that they were completely informal, that they didn’t count as publications. You could ask questions without answers. You just had to put your name and the date and a title on these things, and I’d assign them a number as fast as you wrote them.

There wasn’t any editorial control. And then to emphasize the informal nature, I hit upon this silly little idea of calling every one of them a ‘Request for Comments’ – no matter whether it really was a request or how formal or how informal.

I genuinely thought that by the time the network got built in the fall, there would be some formal documentation and that these notes would just become obsolete and be thrown away. But they stuck. And this became the primary mode of documentation. And it persists today, although it has gone through some transformation.

Wired: How close are today’s RFCs to the original version?

Crocker: In the early days, we didn’t have the network. We were anticipating it. So some of the early RFCs were lists of people to send the RFCs to. There were a whole series of RFCs that have nothing more than the mailing list and changes to that mailing list. Obviously, that’s not interesting today, when you have e-mail.

E-mail also changed things in that you don’t have to write a full document to discuss something. You can just send an e-mail to a list.

In the early days, we had a forerunner to the Internet Engineering Task Force, what we called the network working group. After the first several meetings, it grew and grew. It got to be 20 people and then to 50 people, and it got to be so unwieldy that we had to divide it up into two parallel sessions to have different discussions. Today, there are on the order of 100 working groups operating in parallel.

People come from all over the world for the physical meetings, which are three times a year, and they range from 1,200 to 1,500 people. But of course, most of the work is done over the net with e-mail.

Now, there’s also an intermediate form that evolved called internet drafts. After several iterations of internet drafts, the working group working on something will say, ‘We’re done with this’ and then they’ll get it approved and published as an RFC.

We passed through 1984 some time ago. So RFC doesn’t mean anything like a Request for Comments anymore. It means a formal publication. Perfectly Orwellian.

Wired: You left UCLA and the ARPAnet in the middle of 1971. But in June of 2011, you came full circle, taking over as the chair of ICANN’s board of directors, like Vint Cerf before you.

Crocker: I spent a long time working on other things – principally formal proof techniques for software, program verification – but gradually, over time, I got more involved with computer security and network security and got back more deeply into the whole internet culture….

In the ’90s, at the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force], they created a security area, and I got invited to be the first area director and that put me on the steering group for the IETF. I did that for several years and was later on the Internet Architecture Board….

Later, Vint became the chairman of ICANN, and when 9/11 came along, ICANN, like every other organization in the country, said to itself: ‘Security is really important. What else should we be doing?’ And it formed a security and stability advisory committee, and Vint asked me to chair that, so I took that one. He said six months, but I knew it would be a couple of years minimum, and it dragged on, and I got more deeply enmeshed in ICANN. The committee I was on eventually got a non-voting seat on the board, and I took that role as well. Eventually, I shifted over to a voting position, and longevity just wins out here.

Wired: Is this in any way like the work you first did on ARPAnet more than 40 years ago?

Crocker: John Postel was another member of the group at UCLA, and when I left, I sort of turned to him and said: ‘Hey would you take the RFCs on?’… Over a period of time, that little insignificant role of assigning numbers to RFCs morphed into a lot more bookkeeping, all of which fell to John. Then the domain name system was created under his watch, and there was yet more bookkeeping. He would assign top-level domains to various countries.

He was also an active researcher, well respected and accepted in the inner circles. So he had this dual role, being inside the network research community and carrying on this clerical function on the side, and that persisted for an amazingly long time without much modification. He changed jobs a few times and kept those duties with him.

Eventually, it became a little dicey. Different parties and countries said: ‘How come it’s being controlled this way?’ And the University of Southern California, where he was working, got nervous about this, the White House got involved, and ICANN was formed.

He was slated to become the chief technology officer, but he died almost at the moment that ICANN was formed. It was an unfortunate. But there’s an legacy that lives on, that’s rooted through him, all the way back to the earliest days of the ARPAnet. And in a certain sense, a provide a bit of continuity, reaching all the way back to that time.

Image by Joi under Creative Commons license

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/KOAtLLaHjfk/meet-the-man-who-invented-the-instructions-for-the-internet

Obviously, given my job, I checked out Klout when it first launched. I can’t remember my score, to be honest. It was almost certainly pitifully low as my Twitter stream is full on inane babble about science that nobody really cares about.

But I’m not going to check it now, because Klout makes me feel dirty. As of today, I am Klout-free. Join me! [XKCD]

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/bbdQ40NvUzw/kill-me-if-i-klout

The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that they have reached the 7,000-comment threshold on a Facebook privacy proposal, first raised last week, which would force the company to take the revisions to a worldwide vote. Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy and how it is approached by Facebook.

Specifically, if you go to Facebook’s English-language Data Use Policy page where it has detailed the new proposals, there are now over 9,000 comments on the post. The proposal, you can see, has some XXX’s at the top: that’s because it is due to close this evening, at 5pm Pacific time (yes, more business as usual at Facebook, despite the fact that it also happens to be going through the biggest IPO ever in tech history).

The signatures are potentially a milestone moment in a campaign that began about a year ago, when the activist group filed 22 complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (Facebook’s international HQ is in Ireland). Those complaints in part led to the DPC issuing a report in December with some suggested changes to its privacy policy — largely aimed at making it more transparent and for users to be able to more clearly access all their data and delete it if they choose — but the activists believe that the changes in fact “worsened many issues and did not comply with the Irish conditions.” The Irish DPC and its German counterpart, the German Data Protection Agency, have put in more suggestions for changes since then.

Europe-v-facebook.org has been trying to drum up support for its campaign and says that after an appearance on a German TV show “Stern TV,” it resulted in a wave of responses — 30,000 on the German version of the privacy proposal page, and over 7,000 on the English page (although if you look at that page you can see  that there are a lot of German comments there, too).

What happens next? It’s an unprecedented situation but Facebook says in its own “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” that it will take any proposed changes to its wider user base, currently at 901 million active users, for a vote, and if 30 percent of them vote in favor or against, their decision will be binding:

If more than 7,000 users comment on the proposed change, we will also give you the opportunity to participate in a vote in which you will be provided alternatives. The vote shall be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote.

It’s been a hot topic, but it’s anyone’s guess whether 300 billion people will actually make the effort to weigh in on privacy. And according to europe-v-facebook.org, Facebook is still looking at the comments to decide whether they are applicable to this rule. Indeed, there’s scope for duplicates and fake comments, so that is one vetting that will likely be done first.

We have also reached out to Facebook ourselves for a comment and will update this as we learn more.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/UMt4_ekA8DM/

Facebook knows what’s best for you, sometimes before you do. That’s the meaning of a new “Likers Gonna Like” inspirational mini-poster printed by the Facebook Toronto Office. If you don’t approve of something Facebook’s doing, fine, there’s millions of other people who do. And just as with the launch of the news feed, if you hate some change to the Facebook interface, wait a few months, and you’ll probably end up Liking it too.

It’s a cavalier statement, one based on several old hip-hop songs including “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, where he raps “If [they] hate then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up”. It’s a mentality that has gotten the company into privacy trouble. But the idea that Facebook and its visionary CEO Mark Zuckerberg should push forward with bold ideas because “Likers Gonna Like” is what’s let Facebook move faster than its older rivals, and kept it from being disrupted these last eight years.

The poster wasn’t officially produced by Facebook Analog Research Laboratory, which made the company’s famous “Stay Focused Keep Shipping” and “Move Fast Break Things” posters. It’s a 8.5 x 11 inch printout, according to Sachin Monga of Facebook’s Toronto platform strategy team who snapped the photo above. But it’s still being widely Liked and shared by employees, showing the words resonate with them as they watch Facebook IPO later this morning.

Facebook’s mission is “making the world more open and connected”. Sometimes that means making people uncomfortable at first. You don’t have to agree with how Mark Zuckerberg does things, and you can hate if you want to. But remember, Facebook’s just the messenger. The message is the future.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ft3dAES2AmQ/

In some ways that’s a little surprising because, back in 2010, Jobs famously criticized large phones. He didn’t think anybody would ever want to carry a big phone, going as far as saying that “no one’s going to buy” one. The market has since proved him wrong and, if we’re to believe Bloomberg’s reporting, clearly Jobs had changed his mind before his death in October last year.

With so many reports floating around about Apple’s shift to a four-inch screen, it’s beginning to seem inevitable. If you’re a small-screen fan, now might be a good time to brace yourself. [Bloomberg via The Verge]

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/5Yk2ns65d7k/bloomberg-steve-jobs-was-closely-involved-with-development-of-larger-iphone-5

With both Sorkin and Woz on board, the film certainly promises to be definitive—though we’ll have to wait and see if it delivers on that. Elsewhere in the Reuters report are snippets from Sorkin about the direction the movie will take:

“I know so little about what I am going to write… I know what I am not going to write. It can’t be a straight ahead biography because it’s very difficult to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biography…

“Drama is tension versus obstacle. Someone wants something, something is standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia – doesn’t matter … And I need to find that event and I will. I just don’t know what it is.”

Do you have any ideas? [Reuters via The Next Web]

Image by OnInnovation under Creative Commons license

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/JDc7UW7mmuw/sony-hires-woz-as-advisor-for-steve-jobs-biopic

The new nano-SIM design, put together by RIM and Motorola, takes Apple’s previous suggestion and adds tweaks that the other three manufacturers want to see. In the words of The Verge, “it’s 80 percent Apple and 20 percent RIM/Motorola.”

Despite its diminutive size—it measures just 8 millimeters by 12 millimeters—it’s designed to be backward compatible with older SIM cards, and the notch is there so it can be pushed in and out of a spring-loaded slot.

The only final hurdle is getting agreement from Apple but, given that the design is largely theirs, that seems at least plausible. Either way, there’s not long to wait: the next meeting to settle things once and for all—in conjunction with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, the body that governs international SIM standards—happens at the end of this month. [The Verge]

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/h7xOMhunRr8/this-is-probably-your-next-sim-card

With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 Securities, is seizing the moment to boost its own profile by offering customers US$200 of Facebook shares if they sign up to trade on 8 Securities’ trading platform in the next month.

The offer indirectly serves a couple of other purposes, too: it gives non-U.S. citizens a relatively easy crack at a bit of stock in the most valuable tech IPO ever, and it raises Facebook’s Asia profile even further as people continue to wonder how Facebook might finally address one of the biggest markets in the world, China.

Mikaal Abdulla, the CEO of 8 Securities (a TC Disrupt Beijing Finalist in October 2011), says it will work like this: An individual opens an investing account for 8 Securities’ trading platform, for a minimum of HK$10,000 ($1,290). His company will then purchase Facebook stock on the open market and deposit directly into that customer’s account. “Once a customer’s account is opened, we will purchase the stock on a rolling and daily basis. The customer need not worry as we will always purchase at least $200 USD of stock and round up for them.”

Making U.S. stocks more accessible to non-U.S. investors, specifically in Asia, is what 8 Securities is about: ”Until now, access to the US stock market has not been widely accessible to individual investors across Asia,” Abdulla said in the release announcing the offer. “Old technology, high pricing and poor local customer service has made US trading difficult for investors.” The company offers 15,000 U.S.- and Hong Kong-listed stocks from a single account and charges a US$8.88 flat fee per U.S. trade with no other fees.

Abdulla tells me that the most active stocks so far on its platform have been Apple, Google and Sina. “I am certain Facebook will take the top spot today,” he says. The company will be running the Facebook promotion for the next month, starting today.

8 Securities, founded by ex-E*TRADE employees, has only been live for the last three weeks, so this will be a profile-raising exercise for the company, which otherwise says it promotes itself exclusively via social and online in Asia. Before launch, 8 Securities had raised $8 million from VCs Velocity Capital in the Netherlands and Full Global in Hong Kong. On the back of “very strong” early results — Abdulla notes that Alexa data puts 8 Securities already as the most-visited brokerage in Hong Kong (there are over 150 there) — the pair of VCs have just invested an additional round of $1.5 million in the company, Abdulla tells me. He says the top geographies for account opening is Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Singapore.

The funding will be used to expand the company’s operations further in Asia, specifically Mainland China and Japan, he says. Not a precursor, necessarily, to Facebook itself expanding in these markets, but definitely one way its profile will rise.

In its latest S-1, Facebook noted that it had 230 million monthly active users in Asia. It notes that in countries like Japan and South Korea it has less than 15 percent of the market.

Perhaps more significantly, it has no official market share in the biggest market of all, China, where it is banned from official use — although there have been workarounds created using private networks. Some speculate that when Facebook finally does something in China it might be via an acquisition rather than an organic operation. Among the local social networks, RenRen currently has a market valuation of $2.4 billion and Tencent has one of $54.3 billion, and some believe that could make RenRen a target.

• FACEBOOK
• 8 SECURITIES LIMITED

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term…

Learn more

8 Securities was born from a mission to empower individual investors and reinvent the way people trade. Through a personalized Trading Portal, we give our customers global trading, market data research and a private social network on a single dashboard. Our customers can track the community’s most active buy sells, follow trending traders, stocks topics, view community sentiment and communicate with the network as a whole or in private circles. A totally transparent and real-time peer…

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/yQi6YeJ6eB0/

Making the very stereotyped assumption that only men play video games, Absoloo is urging women—video-game widows, they call them—to snap a photo of themselves holding the Diablo III box, then post that photo to the sex-toy seller’s Facebook page to receive a coupon code for a free vibrator.

There are so many strange components here, it’s difficult to know who is coming out on top. Is it Absoloo, who is surely getting some big publicity thanks to this stunt? Is it the women, who are getting free sex toys? Is it Blizzard Entertainment, who is clearly doing well, if this is the kind of raunchy remediation needed in the wake of its big release?

To recap: Electronic entertainment robs women of male attention — vibrator-hawking website solicits Diablo-promoting Facebook photos — photos are uploaded — code is sent — vibrators arrive, free of charge.

Is this how the human race expires? A clue of what’s to come? Is this great, or is it crazy?

*Sorry to say, this offer is currently open only to game “widows” in France. Alas. [DailyMail]

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/ZL84fnl6eTw/diablo-iii-gets-women-off-while-men-play-with-themselves

Two years ago, WhiteyBoard founders Saachi Cywinski, Sherwin Kim and Jason Wilk set out to re-think those clunky, inflexible whiteboards found in classrooms and offices around the country. They developed a portable, flexible alternative: An inexpensive, “instant” plastic board that weighs less than two pounds and adheres to any surface without screws.

The idea, and the fact that co-founder Jason Wilk was (at the time) hard at work on a Y Combinator backed startup, quickly attracted $500K in seed funding from serial entrepreneur and founder of popular European professional network Xing.com, Bill Liao. The startup used the funding not only to to continue developing their whiteboards, but to develop a new product, called WhiteyPaint, which they launched late last year.

Wilk tells us that WhiteyPaint has since found an eager audience, leading to the fortunate problem of demand quickly outpacing supply. Struggling to finance demand on a bootstrapped budget, the founders reached out to Dallas Mavericks owner, Shark Tank investor, and HDNet Co-founder Mark Cuban. Seeing a billion-dollar market dominated by a few bloated players, Wilk said, Cuban believed WhiteyBoard was onto something.

So, today, the startup is officially announcing that it has raised an undisclosed round of seed financing from the billionaire entrepreneur. Wilk tells us that WhiteyBoard has already sold to over 10K businesses, and smaller versions of the product are currently in stores at retailers like Urban Outfitters and ThinkGeek as well as at fulfillment centers around the world. (What’s more, its products are now made exclusively in the U.S. of A.)

Since last November, he says, sales for both its whiteboard and paint have quadrupled, and with the new funding from Cuban, the team is this week launching version 2 of its WhiteyBoard paint, which the founders say not only has better performance and more durability, but is “the best dry-erase product the world has ever seen.

That remains to be seen, but it certainly helps in the validation department to have Cuban on your side. For now, WhitePaint is for sale on the startup’s website here.

• WHITEYBOARD
• MARK CUBAN

Whiteyboard has come up with an ultra inexpensive white board that sticks on to any wall, weighs less than 2 pounds and gets you working in seconds.

Learn more

Mark Cuban is a tech entrepreneur who owns the Dallas Mavericks. He is the founder of Broadcast.com (acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.04 billion), HDNet, and several other companies.

He has also been an angel investor for several startups including SlideShare, Goowy, RedSwoosh, Box.net, Weblogs, Inc., and Mahalo.

Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/GjGmtLezIK4/