The smart conference suite at Stanford University in California was packed with the cream of the computing community. They were there, earlier this year, to hear David Cheriton explain his vision of the future of the internet. If Cheriton is to be believed, the wired world we now know and rely on is on the brink of collapse. The internet, he insists, is broken. How can this be? Emails still get through. The web seems to work well enough. Prophesies of doom might seem alarmist, even laughable. But Cheriton, a professor of computing at Stanford, has played a leading role in computer networking for the best part of 20 years, and the networking community takes him seriously. Cheriton reckons that the internet is dangerously insecure, and it's a verdict that few internet experts would disagree with. What held the audience's rapt attention, however, was Cheriton's radical solution to the problem.
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