Related papers: How We Ruined The Internet
In this paper we reexamine an assumption that underpinned the development of the Internet architecture, namely that a stateless and loosely synchronous point-to-point datagram delivery service would be sufficient to meet the needs of all…
For decades, proponents of the Internet have promised that it would one day provide a seamless way for everyone in the world to communicate with each other, without introducing new boundaries, gatekeepers, or power structures. What…
A century ago, discoveries of a serious kind of logical error made separately by several leading mathematicians led to acceptance of a sharply enhanced standard for rigor within what ultimately became the foundation for Computer Science. By…
Innovation in the Internet requires a global Internet core to enable communication between users in ISPs and services in the cloud. Today, this Internet core is challenged by partial reachability: political pressure threatens fragmentation…
The Internet's TCP/IP architecture was designed for resilient packet delivery between hosts identified by IP addresses. Over time, however, the consolidation of applications and services into large-scale platforms built on that universal…
Motivated by the difficulty of effecting fundamental change in the architecture of the Internet, in this paper, we study from a theoretical perspective the question of how individuals can join forces toward collective ventures. To that end,…
We present a theoretical framework that extends classical information theory to finite and structured systems by redefining redundancy as a fundamental property of information organization rather than inefficiency. In this framework,…
Twenty-five years ago, Dunkelmann and Radons (1994) proposed that neural networks should self-organize to a critical state. In models, criticality offers a number of computational advantages. Thus this hypothesis, and in particular the…
Understanding how different information sources together transmit information is crucial in many domains. For example, understanding the neural code requires characterizing how different neurons contribute unique, redundant, or synergistic…
In this paper, we define a new measure of the redundancy of information from a fault tolerance perspective. The partial information decomposition (PID) emerged last decade as a framework for decomposing the multi-source mutual information…
"A collection of interconnected networks" defines what the Internet is, but not what it is not. Events threaten Internet fragmentation: politics suggest countries or ISPs may secede or be de-peered, disputes between ISPs result in…
Computing has passed through many transformations since the birth of the first computing machines. Developments in technology have resulted in the availability of fast and inexpensive processors, and progresses in communication technology…
The foundational impossibility results of distributed computing -- the Fischer-Lynch-Paterson theorem, the Two Generals Problem, the CAP theorem -- are widely understood as discoveries about the physical limits of coordination. This paper…
In this paper we characterise the propensity of big capital investments to systematically deliver poor outcomes as "fragility," a notion suggested by Nassim Taleb. A thing or system that is easily harmed by randomness is fragile. We argue…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
The Web has enabled the availability of a huge amount of useful information, but has also eased the ability to spread false information and rumors across multiple sources, making it hard to distinguish between what is true and what is not.…
NeurIPS 2020 requested that research paper submissions include impact statements on "potential nefarious uses and the consequences of failure." However, as researchers, practitioners and system designers, a key challenge to anticipating…
Contemporary concerns over the governance of technological systems often run up against narratives about the technical infeasibility of designing mechanisms for accountability. While in recent AI ethics literature these concerns have been…
For the past three decades, the architecture of the internet has rested on two primary pillars - communication on the World Wide Web and Value such as Bitcoin/Distributed ledgers. However, a third critical pillar, Private Coordination has…
Twenty-seven years ago, one of the biggest societal changes in human history began slowly when the technical foundations for the World Wide Web were defined by Tim Berners-Lee. Ever since, the Web has grown exponentially, reaching far…