CS 462 – “Plan B” TED Talk

Watch this video, This was a TED talk by Danny Hills. The topic was “The internet could crash. We need a Plan B.” According to him, “From each according to their ability to each according to their need” was the concept about IP in the olden days. Discuss how it has changed in the present, preferably giving examples like he has talked about (Router bug causing flight to ground). Also feel free to comment on the favorite parts from the video.

Internet Protocol (IP) and the Internet as a whole have gone through many changes in the past few decades. An example was In Danny Hillis’ TED Talk when he showed a book that had the information of the 20 people who were on the Internet in 1982. It was a means of small communication for sending and receiving messages. Over the years, it continued to grow in scale, hosting many applications and websites, having protocols that were developed for more messaging capabilities, and having security protocols developed for holding the structure together. However, as the Internet has grown, it’s still fragile in overall protection. This is proven in the video with events like Stuxnet and the Mississippi planes where despite the assumption being that nuclear facilities and planes don’t rely on the Internet, they were still large events that occurred due to a small connection to the Internet. This is why I like Hillis’ point of a Plan B for the Internet in the case of a cybercriminal or mistake taking out the entire system, affecting most forms of infrastructure.

Also, my favorite part of the video was when he brought up how things like planes and pumping gas seem to not be using the Internet but are starting to. As the Internet of Things (IoT) industry continues to grow in what can be connected to the Internet, there needs to be more focus on how to protect not only the individual systems of these devices themselves but also the Internet itself which IoT devices are connected to.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *