A node by any other name

A node by any other name
: Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s polygamist parents (and a very nice guy) gives an interview to the BBC on the future of the net:

The Enum initiative attempts to turn phone numbers into net addresses and give people a universal way of contacting anyone, provided they know at least one e-mail, address, phone or pager number for them.

Allied to this is the work on Naming Authority Pointer Records (NATPR) that broadens the net’s reach considerably.

Mr Cerf has proposed extending the net to other planets

“It allows you to take a domain name and map it into whatever ID space you want to,” he said, “I think that’s a sleeping giant because it allows you to escape the bonds of the DNS and move into new naming spaces that have very different characteristics.”

NATPR allows almost anything, such as book or magazine ISDN codes, to become an address space that the net can work with.

[via Om Malik]