October 2003

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.
   — Douglas Adams, HHGTTG

One way to get an idea of what’s in store for the internet is to peek over the technical horizon by reading the Internet Drafts put out by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).

One interesting current research area is that for Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs); networks where the conventional TCP/IP assumptions of continuous connectivity and “low” delay are broken. One of the things this translates into is standards for an Interplanetary Internet, but it also has relevance for sensor networks, communications with submarines and web access for reindeer herders.

[2018-03-05: Updated with new URLs, some via the Wayback Machine. The reference to the main Internet-Draft has become a reference to the superseding RFC.]

New medium, same old sleaze it seems. Today, someone wishing to advertise Those Blue Pills placed a comment on each of the fifteen posts I’d made here so far. Just to make sure the message got through, some posts got up to three copies of the advertisement.

This was annoying, but I should have been expecting it.