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June 23, 1983: DNS Test Sets Stage for Internet Growth
1983: Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel run the first successful test of the automated, distributed Domain Name System. DNS will lay the foundation for the massive expansion, popularization and commercialization of the internet.
The fledgling internet of the time (Arpanet and CSnet) relied on a bulky and exponentially growing "phonebook" of addresses called the "host tables." It was a text file maintained by SRI International in Menlo Park, California. You contacted another computer on the network by looking up its numerical address, and typing it in.
Craig Partridge, another DNS pioneer (.ppt), later called the host tables an "operational nightmare." Everyone on the network had to copy it nightly to get the latest version. There "were many opportunities for error," Partridge wrote, "and we experienced many of them."
"People had figured out that the old scheme wouldn't work forever," Mockapetris told Computerworld a few years ago. He worked at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, and his manager, Jon Postel, assigned him to devise a new way of assigning and recording internet addresses.
Their solution was brilliant. It still used an underlying system of numerical designations, but allowed you to reach a computer by name as well. It was also hierarchical and distributed. Top-level domains would mark out various types of users, like .mil or .edu. Once a name like berkeley.edu got assigned to the University of California at Berkeley, its local network administrator could independently add computers within the domain, numbering and naming them. Or the Berkeley administrator could subdelegate areas of the domain.
After testing the new plan and tweaking it for a few months, Mockapetris, Postel and Partridge published their idea in a Request for Comments (RFC) memorandum in November 1983. The system gained gradual adoption over the next few years (with prodding from the Arpanet overlords at Darpa), first supplementing and then entirely supplanting the host tables.
The first generic, top-level domains weren't officially established until October 1984 (and implemented in January 1985), but they live on: .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org. Though DNS was originally designed to handle 50 million-plus entries, it's been expanded and internationalized. There are now probably more than a billion entries, counting all the DNS names hidden behind firewalls.
Without the Domain Name System, it's doubtful the internet could have grown and flourished as it has. Would a dot-com boom (and bust) have been the same as a dot-22.33 boom (and bust)? If numbers were being used as addresses, would Web 2.0 have emerged as Web B? Would I be writing this? Would you be reading it?
Chrysler Brings 'Infobahn' to Autobahn
Chrysler wants to turn your car into a rolling WiFi hotspot where you check your Facebook profile, upload pictures to Flickr, and eventually be part of a nationwide traffic-control network.
The UConnect Web system Chrysler will unveil Thursday -- and introduce next year -- marks the start of the dot-car era and puts Chrysler in front of BMW in their race to bring wireless internet access to your dashboard. Most of the other automakers, not to mention Microsoft, are right behind them, and there's a push to bring some standards to the hardware.
"It's something everyone's looking at," says Aaron Bragman, an auto-industry analyst at Global Insight. The rush is fueled by the runaway success of Sync, Ford's hands-free iPod and cellphone system. "It's very popular, and it drives a lot of sales," Bragman says.
Sales are something Chrysler desperately needs, and it hopes that filling its cars with gadgets will lure buyers. Among the toys it's showing off next week are rear-seat swivel screens, blind-spot cameras and something it calls "rear cross-path sensing."
But UConnect Web is the star of the show, and Chrysler's betting on it to make its cars appealing to millennials — the twenty-something buyers who've made Sync so successful. The company clearly wants to gain a reputation for high-tech cars.
"In today's market, Chrysler's mission is to bring innovation to market more quickly," Chrysler Vice President Frank Klegon says.
Chrysler says UConnect Web uses cellular and WiFi technology to provide "instant access" to the internet. Anyone in the car will be able to check e-mail, download music, play games and even upload photos from an SD card directly to Flickr. Chrysler says any wireless device and "all major gaming systems" will work with UConnect.
It remains to be seen which models will get UConnect and what it will cost. Chrysler says it will be competitive with laptop wireless cards, and customers won't be tied to long contracts.
It also remains to be seen what regulators might have to say about all those added distractions -- "How long before California bans it?" asks Bragman -- and whether consumers want them. Although car buyers love hands-free systems like Sync, nothing suggests they want to surf the web behind the wheel.
"There could be some opportunity there, but we constantly see that internet access in the car is pretty much at the end of the priorities for consumers," says Thilo Koslowki, an IT analyst with the tech research firm Gartner. "The car is not being seen as an internet-browsing platform."
Koslowski says automakers are "leapfrogging consumer demand" and should focus on making their cars compatible with iPhones, BlackBerrys and other devices. "I don't think the industry is looking at it from that perspective," he says. "Right now most of the emphasis is on replicating what you do at home on your desktop or laptop."
But the drive to bring connectivity to cars is about more than Twittering from the road, and the dot-car era won't get rolling until the Intelligent Transportation Systems is sorted out, says Egil Juliussen at Telematics Research Group. The idea -- which has been promised for years -- is to have cars communicate wirelessly with each other and with the road to increase safety, relieve congestion and manage traffic. Among other things, such a system would allow cars to track everything around them and respond accordingly to avoid collisions. It could also provide real-time traffic information -- so drivers could avoid backups -- and create a national system for paying tolls electronically.
Video: Watch Fire Researchers Torch Homes, Offices and Warehouses
To model how flames turn buildings into ashes, the nation's leading fire researchers don't play with matches over the sink. Instead they burn down entire homes, cubicles and warehouses.
At the National Institutes of Standards and Technologies, researchers set huge fires under a 40-foot-long by 30-foot-wide exhaust hood that is connected to an $8 million control unit.
Using measurements of oxygen consumption, the researchers can precisely determine the temperatures inside the room as well as the heat-release rates of different materials. Then, using software like Fire Dynamics Simulator and Smokeview, the researchers run virtual and real-world side-by-side comparisons of how combustion works.
By modeling the way flames and smoke travel under real conditions, the fire scientists are creating new strategies and technologies for fighting tough blazes.
In this video gallery, you'll see Christmas trees fires, dorm rooms ablaze, and cubicles melting.
Poor Bunny
In this clip, we see how quickly a dried out Scotch-pine Christmas tree can light a room on fire. Within 30 seconds, the room is engulfed in flames. According to the NIST, holiday trees account for more than 400 fires, 10 deaths and $15 million in property damage every year.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:At the end of the nerd-classic Office Space, Milton, the much-abused office loser, sets fire to the cubes of Penetrode, where the main characters work. Here, fire scientists give you an unintentional peek inside the movie's end. The video shows how quickly flames spread from ignition to a point known as flashover, when the room becomes engulfed in flame, in an open office plan.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:When you can't trust your college roommate not to accidentally drop a lit cigarette into a trash can, this video proves that you don't need to -- as long as your college has sprinklers installed.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:Following a six-fatality fire in Chicago in 2003, NIST modeled what happened on the 12th story of the Cook County Administration building. To understand how the fire got out of hand, the researchers measured the heat release rate of different components of the office building. In this video, we see four workstations with chairs in a 23-foot by 24-foot enclosure.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:Here's another video from the series of tests intended to model the Cook County Administration building fire. This time the researchers tested a single workstation that wasn't enclosed. Eventually, these tests helped NIST recommend safety changes that should prevent future fires from turning deadly in similar environments.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:Part of NIST's mission is to educate the public about how fires work. In this video, we watch as a living room goes from spark to flashover in mere minutes.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:When firefighters lit up this Phoenix warehouse, they employed infrared cameras, lasers, sonar, vibration sensors and video to look for clues about how to predict structural collapse. They didn't find any dead giveaways, even with all that tech, but their conclusions and data can be seen here (.pdf).
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:For firefighters, one of the worst things that can happen is the building collapsing on top of them, so figuring out how and when that's going to happen has been a focus of NIST research. In this video, dummy firefighters on top of a burning house fall through the roof before being pulled out by ropes.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
Photographer Documents Secret Satellites -- All 189 of Them
BERKELEY, California -- For most people, photographing something that isn't there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.
His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.
In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.
"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.
Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.
The nearly vertical streak in this image shows a satellite called Keyhole 12-3 crossing the sky near the constellation of Scorpio.
While all of Paglen's projects are the result of meticulous research, he's also the first to admit that his photos aren't necessarily revelatory. That's by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation.
"I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy," Paglen explains. "You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons."
More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw -- an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs.
"It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy," says Paglen, who sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.
Paglen says his most recent project is the culmination of close to two years of trial-and-error experimentation with astrophotography, untold hours of fieldwork and analysis, an ongoing collaboration with amateur astronomers, and many nights in his Berkeley backyard and at California's Mono Lake.
"Lacrosse/Onyx II Passing Through Draco (USA 69)" shows the transit of another surveillance satellite.
To capture his images, the researcher and "experimental geographer" employs a motorized mount with various combinations of telescopes and digital and large-format film cameras. Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan -- a renowned amateur astronomer profiled by Wired magazine in 2006 -- to predict where a given "black satellite" will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image.
"I'll find where a star will be in the compositional plane," he says. "Then I'll use one telescope, which is attached to a webcam, to focus on that star."
With the help of a computer program that controls the mount of the telescope and keeps it focused on the heavenly body, Paglen says he can get the telescope to swivel with the Earth's rotation.
He then uses another telescope attached to a high-end digital camera for his deep-sky shots, similar to the rig he used for his desert shots.
"I'll see the satellite in the sky, kind of know where it's going to be in the frame, then I'll open the shutter and take a long exposure of the satellite passing through."
Paglen's initial interest in the government's so-called "black projects" took shape while combing through U.S. Geological Survey archives of satellite prison photos in 2002. He noticed that many of the photo frames of prison sites were missing or, in some cases, heavily edited.
"I thought: What the hell is this? We still have blank spots on maps? We've mapped the whole structure of the cosmos and the human genome, so what's this all about?" Paglen said.
Eventually, those blank spots led Paglen to other covert subjects and turned a hobby into a full-time job -- one with a decidedly political stance.
"For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge," Paglen notes. "So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it -- something that was very aggressive and dangerous -- and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence."
Ultimately, the satellite photos are an attempt to critique that attitude. While the budget for black military operations has more than doubled in the last 10 years and the government continues to espouse the virtues of secrecy, it can't prevent interested amateur astronomers from calculating the orbital paths of spy satellites.
"The National Reconnaissance Office cannot classify Kepler's laws of planetary motion," Paglen says. "They just work ... and they're unbelievably accurate."