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Datagram Forwarding Considered HarmfulUnstructured conditional branching is an operationally sufficient mechanism to write any program, and places no constraints on the flow of control. Similarly, datagram routing is an operationally sufficient mechanism to implement wide are networking, and places few constraints on the flow of information.Computer Science long ago moved past reliance on unstructured programming. Is it time to reevaluate our reliance on unstructured networking? Datagram Forwarding Considered Harmful |
Was the Internet A Mistake?In 2021 a group of 18 emminent network researchers put their names on a white paper, the topic of which was how to add new services to the public Internet. The approach they championed made this fundamental assumption:
Prisoners Of Our Own Device |
Does ChatGPT Have Something Up It's Sleave?Let's apply information theory to generative AI. My hypothesis is that LLMs like ChatGPT contain within their data structures the information equivalent of a (possibly compressed) version of portions of their training sets. I'm not saying that there is a bitwise copy of any particular portion of the training set. Just that the information content of the parts of the the training set on which there is statistical agreement is present in some form.more... The recent paper described here addresses the issue of memorization in LLMs, but only through the mechanism of provoking the chat interface to regurgitate portions of the training data. This does not give insight into whether there may be much more of the information content of the training data encoded within the LLM data structure. To understand this would require actually analyzing the data structure rather than just trying to provoke regurgitation. Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT |
How We Ruined The InternetIn this paper we examine an assumption that underpinned the development of the Internet architecture, namely that a loosely synchronous point-to-point datagram delivery service could adequately meet the needs of all network applications, including those which deliver content and services to a mass audience at global scale. We examine how the inability of the Networking community to provide a public and affordable mechanism to support such asynchronous point-to-multipoint applications led to the development of private overlay infrastructure, namely CDNs and Cloud networks, whose architecture stands at odds with the Open Data Networking goals of the early Internet advocates. We argue that the contradiction between those initial goals and the monopolistic commercial imperatives of hypergiant overlay infrastructure operators is an important reason for the apparent contradiction posed by the negative impact of their most profitable applications (e.g., social media) and strategies (e.g., targeted advertisement).How We Ruined The Internet Micah Beck, Terry Moore arXiv:2209.03482306.01101, June 2023 Submitted to Communications of the ACM |
Breaking Up A Digital MonopolyThe dominating power of today's global data monopolies - most prominently Google, Facebook, and Amazon - has alarmed people around the world. Governments have been moved to seek ways to rein in such monopolies and establish reasonable conditions for competition in the services they offer. Their business models (e.g., targeted advertising) also raise major issues of personal security and privacy, so measures that control their tendencies toward monopoly may also help to address the threats they pose to civil and political liberties. We propose a regulatory strategy that addresses the naturally monopolistic nature of these services by isolating the core acquired data collection and management functions. Acquired data is derived from the discourse of society at large and so the public retains a legitimate ownership interest in it. Our proposal requires companies to compete by innovation rather than through monopolistic control over data.
Breaking Up A Digital Monopoly |
The Hedge Podcast Episode 150: Universal Broadband
A discussion of whether a less synchronous form of broadband connectivity be more cheaply and easily deployed to the entire world.
Deployment Scalability in Exposed Buffer Processing Micah Beck 17th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS 2020) Delhi NCR, India, December 10-13, 2020 (Virtual conference) |
IEEE MASS 2020 presentation, December 2020 |
"On The Hourglass Model" Micah Beck Communications of the ACM, July 2019, Vol. 62 No. 7, Pages 48-57. |
Communications of the ACM, July 2019 |
Exposed Buffer Architecture for Continuum Convergence Micah Beck & Terry Moore arXiv:2008.00989, Aug 2020 |
https://rule11.tech/the-hedge-podcast-episode-27-new-directions-in-network-and-computing-systems