Sometimes, "experts" are a lot less intelligent than you think. Take this story in ComputerWorld, for instance - it's yet another "the tubes are failing" thing from the so called experts:

Nick McKeown, a computer scientist at Stanford University, heads up one such program. He says the Internet is “broken” in at least two places -- security and mobility.

...

“But if the user is moving around, you end up with a whole lot of hooks and kludges to keep track of the user,” he says. “There have been various proposals for a mobile IP, and they are all awful. They barely hold together now, but all the routing mechanisms will just break when there are many more mobile devices.”

That's just utter gibberish. The servers generally aren't mobile - they pretty much stay where they are, at "well known" IP addresses. Clients move around a lot - on Tuesday, for instance, this notebook was on a wired network at my hotel in Dayton, then on WiFi at the airport, then on Wired (and WiFi) here at my house. And believe it or not, the tubes didn't clog, the sky didn't fall, and life as I know it didn't end. I have a clue for McKeown: the rest of the network doesn't care where my mobile devices are, or whether they happen to be online or offline. I care, and some apps on my devices might care. The rest of the world? Not so much.

The stupidity gets much, much worse though: Here's McKeown's "solution":

McKeown and his colleagues have developed a prototype network called Ethane, which centralizes security rather than putting it all around the network in firewalls, virus scanners and the like. With Ethane, all communications are turned off by default. A host joining the network must get explicit permission from a centralized server before it can connect to anything except that server. And the server won’t grant permission unless it is able to determine the location and identity of the requestor.

You know, I like single points of failure as well as the next guy, but McKeown can have it, thanks. I'll stay with the less secure - but vastly more robust - system we have now. To get on the net at an arbitrary airport or coffee shop now, all I need is WiFi and a DHCP server that can route me. Under his system? Well, let's just say that I expect various interoperability issues with that security setup. Fortunately, the net is too big to be re-bootstrapped, so McKeown's ideas will stay where they belong - in the lab.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, security