THE MAGAZINE OF USENIX & SAGE August 2002 volume 27 • number 5 inside: CONFERENCE REPORTS USENIX 2002 & The Advanced Computing Systems Association & The System Administrators Guild conference reports 2002 USENIX Annual KEYNOTE ADDRESS Technical Conference THE INTERNET’S COMING SILENT SPRING Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA, USA OUR THANKS TO THE SUMMARIZERS: Summarized by David E. Ott JUNE 10-15, 2002 For the USENIX Annual Technical Conference: In a talk that received a standing ova- Josh Simon, who organized the collecting of ANNOUNCEMENTS tion, Lawrence Lessig pointed out the the summaries in his usual flawless fashion Summarized by Josh Simon recent legal crisis that is stifling innova- Steve Bauer tion by extending notions of private Florian Buchholz The 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Matt Butner Conference was very exciting. The gen- ownership of technology beyond rea- Pradipta De eral track had 105 papers submitted (up sonable limits. Xiaobo Fan 28% from 82 in 2001) and accepted 25 Hai Huang Several lessons from history are instruc- Scott Kilroy (19 from students); the FREENIX track tive: (1) Edwin Armstrong, the creator Teri Lampoudi had 53 submitted (up from 52 in 2001) of FM radio technology, became an Josh Lothian and accepted 26 (7 from students). enemy to RCA, which launched a legal Bosko Milekic campaign to suppress the technology; Juan Navarro The two annual USENIX-given awards David E. Ott were presented by outgoing USENIX (2) packet switching networks, proposed Amit Purohit Board President Dan Geer. The USENIX by Paul Baron, were seen by AT&T as a Brennan Reynolds Lifetime Achievement Award (also new, competing technology that had to Matt Selsky known as the be suppressed; (3) Disney took Grimm J.D. Welch tales, by then in the public domain, and Li Xiao “Flame” because Praveen Yalagandula of the shape of retold them in magically innovative Haijin Yan the award) went ways. Should building upon the past in Gary Zacheiss to James this way be considered an offense? Gosling for his “The truth is, architectures can allow”; contributions, that is, freedom for innovation can be including the built into architectures. Consider the Pascal compiler Internet: a simple core allows for an James Gosling for Multics, unlimited number of smart end-to-end Emacs, an early applications. SMP UNIX, work on X11 and Sun’s windowing system, the first enscript, Compare an AT&T proprietary core net- and Java. The Software Tools Users work to the Internet’s end-to-end Group (STUG) Award was presented to model. The number of innovators for the Apache Foundation and accepted by the former is one company, while for the Rasmus Lerdorf. In addition to the well- latter it’s potentially the number of peo- known Web server, Apache produces ple connected to it. Innovations for Jakarta, AT&T are designed to benefit the owner, mod_perl, while the Internet is a wide-open board mod_tcl, and that allows all kinds of benefits to all XML parser, kinds of groups. The diversity of con- with over 80 tributors in the Internet arena is stagger- members in ing. at least 15 The auction of spectrum by the FCC is countries. another case in point. The spectrum is usually seen as a fixed resource charac- terized by scarcity. The courts have seen Rasmus Lerdorf spectrum as something to be owned as property. Technologists, however, have shown that capacity can be a function of 62 Vol. 27, No. 5 ;login: architecture. As David Reed argues, annual in-person meetings or on the though there are three in-person high- capacity can scale with the number of email lists for the various groups – can bandwidth meetings per year. However, EPORTS users – assuming an effective technology join and be a member. The IETF is con- decisions reached in person must be rat- R and an open architecture. cerned with Internet protocols and open ified by the mailing list, since not every- standards, not LAN-specific (such as body can get to three meetings per year. Developments over the last three years Appletalk) or layer-1 or -2 (like copper They produce RFCs which go through ONFERENCE are disturbing and can be summarized C versus fiber). the Standard track; these need to go as two layers of corruption: intellectual- through the entire working group before property rights constraining technical The organizational structure is loose. being submitted for comment to the innovation, and proprietary hardware There are many working groups, each entire IETF and then to the IESG. Most platforms constraining software innova- with a specific focus, within several RFCs wind up going back to the work- tion. areas. Each area has an area director, ing group at least once from the area who collectively form the Internet Engi- Issues have been framed by the courts director or IESG level. neering Steering Group (IESG). The six largely in two mistaken ways: (1) it’s permanent areas are Internet (with The format of an RFC is well-defined their property – a new technology working groups for IPv6, DNS, and and requires it be published in plain 7- shouldn’t interfere with the rights of ICMP), Transport (TCP, QoS, VoIP, and bit ASCII. They’re freely redistributable, current technology owners; (2) it’s just SCTP), Applications (mail, some Web, and the IETF reserves the right of theft – copyright laws should be upheld LDAP), Routing (OSPF, BGP), Opera- change control on all Standard-track by suppressing certain new technologies. tions and Management (SNMP), and RFCs. In fact, we must reframe the debate from Security (IPSec, TLS, S/MIME). There The big problems the IETF is currently “it’s their property” to a “highways” are also two other areas: SubIP is a tem- facing are security, internationalization, metaphor that acts as a neutral platform porary area for things underneath the IP and congestion control. Security has to for innovation without discrimination. protocol stack (such as MPLS, IP over be designed into protocols from the “Theft” should be reframed as “Walt wireless, and traffic engineering), and start. Internationalization has shown us Disney,”who built upon works from the there’s a General area for miscellaneous that 7-bit-only ASCII is bad and doesn’t past in richly creative ways that demon- and process-based working groups. work, especially for those character sets strate the utility of allowing work to Internet Requests for Comments (RFCs) that require more than 7 bits (like reach the public domain. fall into three tracks: Standard, Informa- Kanji); UTF-8 is a reasonable compro- In the end, creativity depends upon the tional, and Experimental. Note that this mise. But what about domain names? balance between property and access, means that not all RFCs are standards. While not specified as requiring 7-bit public and private, controlled and com- The RFCs in the Informational track are ASCII in the specifications, most DNS mon access. Free code builds a free cul- generally for proprietary protocols or applications assume a 7-bit character set ture, and open architectures are what April first jokes; those in the Experimen- in the namespace. This is a hard prob- give rise to the freedom to innovate. All tal track are results, ideas, or theories. lem. Finally, congestion control is of us need to become involved in another hard problem, since the Internet The RFCs in the Standard track come reframing the debate on this issue; as is not the same as a really big LAN. from working groups in the various Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring points out, areas through a time-consuming, com- an entire ecology can be undermined by INTRODUCTION TO AIR TRAFFIC plex process. Working groups are created small changes from within. MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS with an agenda, a problem statement, an Ron Reisman, NASA Ames Research email list, some draft RFCs, and a chair. INVITED TALKS Center; Rob Savoye, Seneca Software They typically start out as a BoF session. Summarized by Josh Simon THE IETF, OR, WHERE DO ALL THOSE RFCS The working group and the IESG make Air traffic control is organized into four COME FROM, ANYWAY? a charter to define the scope, milestones, domains: surface, which runs out of the Steve Bellovin, AT&T Labs – Research and deadlines; the Internet Advisory airport control tower and controls the Summarized by Josh Simon Board (IAB) ensures that the working aircraft on the ground (e.g., taxi and The Internet Engineering Task Force group proposals are architecturally takeoff); terminal area, which covers air- (IETF) is a standards body, but not a sound. Working groups are narrowly craft at 11,000 feet and below, handled legal entity, consisting of individuals focused and are supposed to die off once by the Terminal Radar Approach Con- (not organizations) and driven by a con- the problem is solved and all milestones trol (TRACON) facilities; en route, sensus-based decision model. Anyone achieved. Working groups meet and which covers between 11,000 and 40,000 who “shows up” – be it at the thrice- work mainly through the email list, feet, including climb, descent, and at- October 2002 ;login: USENIX 2002 G 63 altitude flight, runs from the 20 Air Questions centered around advanced long and complex to be easily remem- Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC, avionics (e.g., getting rid of ground con- bered. This means that DNS will play a pronounced “artsy”); and traffic flow trol), cooperation between the US and vital role in getting IPv6 deployed. Sev- management, which is the strategic arm. Europe for software development (we’re eral new resource records (RR) have Each area has sectors for low, high, and working together on software develop- been proposed to handle the translation, very-high flight.