Re: [hybi] [Uri-review] ws: and wss: schemes

[Lloyd Wood <[e-mail]>]

(this thread seems to have wandered somewhat from the subject line,
but hey, right in my area.)

Vinge's "Zones of Thought" spanned the entire galaxy as the ultimate
physical firewall with trusted zones and a DMZ. His "A Fire upon the
Deep" riffed on usenet conversations, with civilizations communicating,
and discussed aspects of network communication of group minds
(the "Tines").

"A Deepness in the Sky" comments on the invention of Unix, latency
as a significant factor in the communication of civilizations,
and the difficulties of consistent timekeeping in the space
environment. There's nothing on drugs for programming
(Focus is biological, leads to code only maintainable by the authors,
and sets up a set of jokes on life in cubes), but programming is  
respected
as an archaeological discipline.

HTTP has been considered for interplanetary networking - or rather,
the 'delay-tolerant networking' that the 'Interplanetary Internet'
(which was originally just a catchy phrase to get NASA to move its
space probes to some form of networking, and nothing to do with the
Internet at all) morphed into via scope creep. See
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wood-dtnrg-http-dtn-delivery
This is just using HTTP for transfers - it's not a server/browser client
model, and doesn't require a lot of the framework we take for
granted terrestrially. HTTP ueber alles (multiple transports) is  
discussed in
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/75/slides/tsvarea-1.pdf

But URIs in space? URIs are predicated on an authoritative DNS.
In deep space, DNS as it stands is likely not to be useful - lookups
take too long, contacts are scheduled and planned, late binding,
rather than early binding, is needed. And TCP's assumptions
and timers aren't a good fit with the environment. But that doesn't
rule out IP or other protocols in the suite.




On 11 Sep 2009, at 20:51, Infinity Linden wrote:

> hold on.. are we talking about using IPN ( http://www.ipnsig.org/ ) or
> replacing it?
>
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:12 PM, Lisa Dusseault
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Didn't Vernor Vinge sketch something like this out as part of the
>> multi-solar-system-spanning network in the Zones of Thought Sci Fi
>> series?  His future programmers needed mind-altering substances (well
>> beyond caffeine, of course) to change any small part of the system  
>> and
>> they still caused chaos with every change.
>>
>> Your addressing example provides additional concreteness and realism
>> to the scenario :)
>>
>> Lisa
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 6:01 AM, Daniel R. Tobias<[e-mail]>  
>> wrote:
>>> I wonder if the "HTTP Uber Alles" crowd, if they were active 20  
>>> years
>>> ago, would be insisting that everything, including that newfangled
>>> HTTP protocol, be expressed in the form of a Gopher address, or
>>> perhaps FTP or Telnet, or maybe an e-mail address with the standard,
>>> adopted by the owner of the address, that the subject line contain
>>> the actual protocol intended to be used?
>>>
>>> I also wonder if, should their side win all its battles, 1000 years
>>> from now all URIs in use will be at least 1000 characters long, of
>>> which at least 800 of these characters will be fossilized deadwood  
>>> of
>>> obsolete protocols that are preserved as magic incantations to begin
>>> a URI.  So they'll be something like:
>>>
>>> http://ipp.solarsystem.net/earth/galacticgateway.net/andromeda/tachyon
>>> .protocol.net/ ...[snip]... /actualsite.actualgalaxy/path-in-site
>>>
>>> where "ipp.solarsystem.net", under "http", is the magic indicator of
>>> the InterPlanetaryProtocol that became dominant in 2067, and was
>>> followed by the actual address being reached by that protocol,
>>> starting with its home planet, but then "galacticgateway.net" within
>>> "earth" became the magic string to indicate that you are actually
>>> using the InterGalacticProtocol which became dominant in 2152, and
>>> similarly the "tachyon.protocol.net" signifies the Tachyon Protocol
>>> that caught on around 2272.
>>>
>>> User agent identifiers for the browsers people use with their 31st
>>> century protocols are similarly long and convoluted, beginning with
>>> "Mozilla/5.0" and containing references to MSIE, Gecko, and various
>>> other browser names and codenames that were trendy at some point or
>>> other over the millennium.
>>>
>>> --
>>> == Dan ==
>>> Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
>>> Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
>>> Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

DTN work: http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/saratoga/

<http://info.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><[e-mail]>