Al Gore's Internet? Wait -- What?

Here's the lead-off quote

"Check out how insecure Al Gore's internet is ...."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080225-insecure-routing-redirects-youtube-to-pakistan.html

While losing YouTube isn't really an issue, shows how fragile the networking infrastructure is worldwide.

Sigh. The Pakistan story is only “insecurity” in the broadest, vaguest sense of “secure”. It’s really “usability” in that the usability of the routing (like too many things) depends on an arcane, easily-overlooked rule. It's only security if there's exposure or misuse of information.

Politics

Why does everyone keep lauding Al Gore for voting to fund the invention of the internet? I think he was only one of 60-odd senators who agreed with the appropriations over the years. Why are the others ignored? Even Vinton Cerf forgot to give them credit in this little essay , and he was the direct beneficiary of their voting.

After I finished my "Al Gore was Only One Of Many" rants, I got this response

"Believe the grad student who developed eventually developed the
first real search engine for the Internet and the two Michigan
State guys who developed the browser were the major contributors
of the modern Internet. The founders of Arpanet (unknown to me)
share in this along with tons of router and wiring guys.

Politicians who say they voted and supported Internet stuff are nice but not "founders".

I quote Al Gore since it gets a laugh (just like nuclear with Bush).

Sigh. Browser? You mean Mosaic? That’s not The Internet. That’s the World Wide Web. Sorry, but cart must come before horse. ... Internet dates from early 70’s. Funding was critical. World Wide Web dates from the 90’s.

The Internet and Arpanet predate the browser by decades. (2 at the minimum, perhaps 2.5.)

See

Innovation

You can deprecate the funding, but without visionaries in the Senate — in the early days of Arpanet — we’d be using Token Ring and agreeing to love it because it was supplied by AT&T. Personally, I wish that folks would actually thank the other senators who agreed with Gore to fund the Arpanet research that gave us an open source internet. Without that vision, we’d be using AOL on character-mode terminals that provided advertisement-only content. Without the whole pack of Senators who funded this mess called the "Internet" (Not the World Wide Web; that came much later) we’d have junk instead.

I think the folks who chuckle at the Al Gore line should be forced to use only proprietary products: AOL over Token Ring, managed by AT&T at dial-up speeds.