Right now over at ZeroTier we're working on porting Network Containers to different platforms. Here's a summary of what porting something like this (and doing heavy deep network stuff in general) is like on each platform: Linux: It works in most cases, and in cases where it doesn't most of…
I'm thirty seven years old, which is like ninety nine in programmer years. I'm old enough to remember the earliest days of the public Internet and the first boutique Internet service providers. My first online account was via one called Internet Access Cincinnati (IAC). It provided dialup modem access to…
First, a disclaimer: I am neither a venture capitalist nor a financial quant. Therefore this may all be rubbish and should be treated as a hypothesis that might be worthy of further investigation. I'm the founder of a company called ZeroTier. The network architecture of the ZeroTier core network was…
I have to hand it to Docker. It meets my criteria for a genuine innovation, namely that I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about what it is exactly. Great innovations are often not flying cars. Often they are gerschnorvels; incredibly useful things that stay conceptually mysterious for at…
Apparently the browser is dead again because Apple didn't see fit to make Safari available on a watch. Because you know, the screen is too damn small. Nobody is going to browse the web on a watch. VMWare has yet to make a music player available for their virtualization appliances…
... or Why I Think Titan May Be Alive. Of all the worlds in the solar system, I personally believe Titan to be the one most likely to host life -- even complex life. I don't mean in the water of some subsurface ocean, though that's not impossible. I mean in…
I've started reading Peter Thiel and Blake Masters' book Zero to One. I can't give a comprehensive review yet, but I can say that I agree completely on one of the book's most contentious allegations: that technology more or less stalled around 1970. Debate is hot on this one. Here's…
I've created a product called ZeroTier One with two different goals in mind. One is to build a startup. The other is to help "redecentralize" the Internet as a medium. I grew up with this medium, and I've watched it progress toward something that is increasingly controlled, jailed, monopolized, and…
The Cybercultural Singularity Sometimes I feel old for the computer and Internet industry. "Old" is thirty five. I first visited the Internet in 1993, and I remember bulletin board systems. I talk to people on tech startup boards who were born only a few years prior. Ouch. It was a…
My current project is a network virtualization engine called ZeroTier One. It has a new network protocol that I designed from scratch, and in the process of doing so I put a lot of thought and research into the question of just how decentralized I could make it. There are…