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New Stuff
5-11-2001 :
Historical Post-Gazette : Pearl Harbor
5-10-2001 :
Release of Privacy P3P - APPEL
Source Code
5-9-2001 : Privacy
and Your Digital Rights : The Struggling Symbiosis of Technology and Law
Introduction to
the Laboratory
The Internet represents
a unique opportunity for science and engineering to investigate new concepts
for a large scale system that:
- accesses hundreds of millions
of people of all ages and all kinds,
- accesses hundreds of millions
of computers,
- accesses millions of terabytes
of information and computer programs,
- operates with effective latencies in
seconds
- operates with effective speeds from thousands to millions of bytes
per second,
- moves many billions of dollars
and services electronically every year.
In 1990, no such large-scale system
existed. Surely the Internet, in the aggregate, has the capability of providing
new knowledge and services on an unprecedented scale.
The Internet Systems Laboratory is a scientific engineering laboratory
focused on the Internet as the principal subject. As scientists we have the opportunity
to automate large-scale observations of man, machine, and nature. As engineers
we have the opportunity to construct new kinds of devices from those that enable
the Internet to those that emerge unexpectedly from the infrastructure already
provided. As scientists and engineers we make new observations of
men, machines, and nature in order to engineer new infrastructure detail, and
to discover emergent new processes. The engineering goal is to improve the functioning
of the Internet. This includes improvements to all aspects of our collective
global system:
- increase its service across people
of all kinds and all ages,
- scale to billions of computers,
- facilitate access to all the terabytes of information and computer programs,
- decrease effective latencies to milliseconds,
- operate at effective speeds to billions of bytes
per second,
- move trillions of dollars and services electronically every year.
The Internet Systems Laboratory believes "The Internet is in the Details". Often, a very small decision,
a very simple device, in exactly the right place, can have enormous engineering
impact. Making the right engineering decisions involves deep technical knowledge
of how things currently work, careful observation, experimentation, and an
understanding of the vision or goal driving the progress.
Given this broad
view, there are many tens of thousands of "Internet Systems Laboratories"
already underway around the world. For example we can observe that a MEMS Optical Switch laboratory is an Internet Systems
Laboratory, since perfecting microelectronic
optical switches will most certainly speed up the Internet and lower
communications latencies. However, our lab is not driven by one technology, or one field of study, or another. We
are interested in looking across all technologies, psychologies, and socio-political
processes to discover places where small Internet changes may, unexpectedly, have large-scale
impacts. Our field is purely the field of study of Internet Systems. We are driven
by the notion that the Internet as a grand system with mutable properties should evolve into the role of a robot servant
to individual people and thereby to all people.
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