‘Mother of the Internet’ Radia Perlman favors central resources • The register

Internet pioneer Radia Perlman has argued for centralized infrastructure while speaking at the International Symposium on Blockchain Advancements in Singapore on Friday.

Perlman said conventional wisdom posits centralized systems as “bad” and decentralized as “good,” but decentralized entities are inherently problematic in several ways.

“Blockchain as a buzzword started as the technology behind Bitcoin. People were making money off of Bitcoin, and the more hyped it was, the more startups capitalized on the hype to claim that their product has something to do with Blockchain,” explained Perlman. “If you hear so much hype, in the end you guess well, it must be incredibly important.”

“I think pianos are wonderful, but I wouldn’t use them for mass transit. Everything has a purpose,” added the inventor of spanning-tree protocol (STP).

Perlman said the purpose of Bitcoin’s blockchain was to avoid governing organizations like countries or banks, and while these systems can be corrupt at times, they also have their uses.

“Centralized means that one organization is in charge. It usually means that there are multiple servers, so it doesn’t mean a single point of failure. And it usually means that the data is stored in many places, so your data is not going to be lost. And especially if your data is stored in a public cloud,” Perlman said.

The author and academic added that other added benefits are that it is clear who to blame when things go wrong, and most applications require “adult supervision”, or someone to answer for the system’s problems.

“Now if you use Bitcoin, I’m not sure what you would buy with Bitcoin, probably something like an assassin. And if he doesn’t kill, who can you complain to? How do you get your money back? So most of the time it’s centralized right what you want, she reasons further.

In conversation with The register after her presentation, Perlman said that blockchain is more of a marketing term than an actual technology, a fad in its existing form that may have elements that play out in the future, but is essentially not much different from a database and is often more difficult to use.

“I’m surprised I’m involved in this at all because most of my thoughts are really anti-blockchain,” Perlman told Reg “I kind of don’t think it’s a fundamental technology you should focus on.”

Perlman’s spanning tree algorithm was published in 1985 and is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, eventually paving the way for modern Ethernet to be transformed into a protocol that can handle large clouds.

She is often referred to as the “Mother of the Internet”, a title she tends to laugh at.

Perlman told Reg if she hadn’t written the algorithm, someone else would have, although she feels pretty sure it wouldn’t have been done as simply or elegantly because she believes her superpower lies in simplicity and pragmatism.

So how does the “mother of the internet” feel about the network of networks she helped make possible?

“If you had asked me that question 10 years ago, I would have waxed rhapsodic about how miraculously it changed society,” she said The register. “But these days I think it’s the end of civilization.”

Perlman described AI algorithms that lead to polarizing rabbit holes of content as among the best dystopian features of the internet. Worse, it allows disaffected extremists to connect with each other.

“If there are only 50 terrorists in the country, it’s no big deal, unless they can all find each other easily,” Perlman said.

“I don’t look out of this anyway,” she said The register.then added that fixing the internet is now up to the next generation.

“Sometimes when I give a lecture at a university and I talk about all this doom and gloom, I smile and I say, but you’re all students. If I were to say that we solved all the problems in the world, what would you have to do? Then are you not grateful to us for giving you such a broken thing?” ®