Futureweb WWW2010 Conference Day 1 - Opening Session

The opening session for WWW 2010 (which btw is pronounced dub-dub-dub) was given by Vint Cert, the chief Internet Evangelist for Google, and AKA the Father of the Internet. His plenary session was eyeopening - I mean just look at the description:

Bandwidth, Clouds and Things, Oh My! What happens when bandwidth isn’t a bottleneck? What happens when end to end speeds approach or exceed a gigabit per second? What happens when billions of devices populate the Internet, including appliances? What happens when the smart grid meets the Internet of Things and clouds interconnect in a rainbow of photons? How does this transform the World Wide Web? These and other ideas will occupy our attention as we explore a speculative future.

Many of the sessions I would listen to as part of this conference will be focused on not only the Future of The Internet, but what data we have about the current Internet. Some interesting points:

• 1802 Million Internet Users
• Asia has the largest Internet population, but only 20% penetration
• Authenticity of both people and servers is important and has privacy implications
• Digital signatures - in which jurisdictions will a digital signature be honored?
• Bad passwords and lax users are the worst security breech in existence
• We have naive browsers, smart botnets and malware. We have compromised computers through our browsers. (love this analogy - it is akin to someone using your car while you sleep). stopbadware.org
• Compare cloud computing to the separate networks of 1973. We need inter-cloud interactions and liberate data
• The WWW is one large copier, and the answer is not DRM, but Intellectual Property Rights
• We don't need to replicate the physical world in the digital one.
• Bit rot - how do we hold onto information as the systems and software of the future come? Will a webpage made in 1995 be available in 21995?
• You should have MULTIPLE strong identities, just like we have multiple ID badges.
• We need liscence free shared spectrum to increase bandwidth available. We need radio based distributions. For this to happen policy needs to change in the US

I fell I could write an entire blog post on each and every one of these posts. But, the main takeaway from his talk was that the technology will not get into the way of what we are trying to do, but will be held back by what we can imagine possible.

There are some great videos available from FutureWeb if you would like to see it check it out!