PATTERN RECOGNITION
TOBY SHAPSHAK: Parable of finding the right pebble to divert fake news and malware
The Internet doesn’t know it’s being used. The fact that it is neutral means you can abuse it
I’m the chief Internet evangelist at Google, so I speak in parables," Vint Cerf joked at last week’s South by South West conference in Texas. He is often called one of "the fathers of the Internet": in the 1970s he co-invented the TCP/IP protocol that underpins how computers connect and transmit data on the Internet. "Imagine you live in a little town at the bottom of a giant hill. One day you realise a boulder is about to roll down the hill," Cerf related, in reference to the malaise of fake news and malware, and the threat it poses. "You know you’re not big enough to stop the boulder yourself. As you’re racing up the hill, you’re looking for a pebble of the right weight and size and [hoping to] find the right pebble and put it in the right place to divert the consequence of what you see."He worked on the original version of what would be called the information superhighway when it was a research project of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Asked about how to solve ...
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