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HedgeMage | 9 years ago

That's simply not what I said; I was misquoted. Please watch the original video.

https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-internet-is-going-to-fall-...

It's amazing* how many people here are willing to roast me over a third-hand account of my opinions, when I've already offered to answer questions directly.

* Not actually amazing, fairly typical of internet commentary, really.

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areyousure|9 years ago

To save effort on finding the relevant segment of a 17+ minute interview, I have attempted to transcribe a portion. See also https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/susan-sons-on-maintaining-and-... with some portions transcribed (inexactly); add ~20s to the times below to match the podcast timing.

(5:26) [O'Reilly interviewer] Mac Slocum: Related question on this: how can the Internet's infrastructure remain up to date and secure, particularly when it's distributed like this?

(5:33) Susan Sons: So the really terrifying thing about infrastructure software in particular is when you pay your ISP bill, that pays for all the cabling that runs to your home or business. That pays for the people that work at the ISP. That pays for their routing equipment and their power and their billing systems and their marketing and all of these wonderful things. It doesn't pay for the software that makes the Internet work. (5:54) That is maintained almost entirely by volunteers. And those volunteers are aging. [Um.] Most of them are older than my father. And [um,] we're not seeing a new cadre of people stepping up and taking over their projects, (6:10) so what we're seeing is ones and twos of volunteers who are hanging on and either burning out while trying to do this in addition to a full-time job, or are doing it instead of a full-time job, or should be retired, or are retired. [Um.] And it's just not giving the care it needs. (6:27) And in addition to this, these people aren't always up to date on the latest [um] techniques and security concerns of the day. And the next generation isn't coming up. I recently started a mentoring group called the #newguard that takes early and mid-career technologists and we cross-mentor and then we match them up with the old guard who are maintaining and who built this software to try to help solve that problem. But in the meantime there's still not enough funding going in this direction. And there's not enough churning happening. [Um.] And it's a really tough thing because there's a certain amount of what I call "functional arrogance" involved. [Um.] I don't have a certificate of "Susan is good enough to save the Internet" anywhere. I don't know who hands those out.

(7:08) Slocum: Sure.

xenophonf|9 years ago

I found your remarks about succession planning at around the 5:50 mark of the linked video:

[The software that makes the Internet work] is maintained almost entirely by volunteers, and those volunteers are aging. Most of them are older than my father, and we're not seeing a new cadre of people stepping up and taking over their projects, so what we're seeing is ones and twos of volunteers who are hanging on and either burning out while trying to do this in addition to a full-time job, or are doing it instead of a full-time job, or should be retired, or are retired, and it's just not getting the care it needs. And in addition to this, these people aren't always up to date on the latest techniques and security concerns of the day, and the next generation isn't coming up.

In context "should be retired" sounds awfully prescriptive, but I can see how that could mean something like "these volunteers want to retire but feel obligated to continue their maintenance duties".

Then at the 7:00 mark, you say:

It's a really tough thing because there's a certain amount of what I call functional arrogance involved... There's a certain point where you just have to say, "I'm going to decide that I'm in charge of this"...

I dunno. I can see where that's going to rub people the wrong way while at the same time seeing the value in having some moxie. I get the impression, though, that Stenn wasn't too happy with this approach.

mcguire|9 years ago

2:15 The entire build system depended on one build server located in Harlan Stenn's home. "But Harlan no longer had the root password to this system, couldn't update it, didn't know what scripts were running on it, and no one in in the world could build NTP without this server continuing to function."

3:25 It was death by a thousand cuts. "And I was seeing things that were not yet C99 compliant in 2015. The status of the code was over 16 years out of date in terms of C coding standards which means that you can't use modern tools for static analysis..."

4:30 "And in the mean time, security patches were being circulated secretly and then being leaked, and the leaked patches were being turned into exploits which we were seeing in the wild very quickly, when the security patches weren't being seen in the wild for a long time."

6:00 "...but it doesn't pay for the software that makes the Internet run. That maintained almost entirely by volunteers, and the volunteers are ageing, most of them are older than my father. And we're not seeing new [?] people stepping up..."