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Bill Woodcock

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Bill Woodcock
Woodcock in 2001
Born
William Edward Woodcock IV

(1971-08-16) 16 August 1971 (age 53)
San Francisco, California, USA
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of California, Santa Cruz (B.A. in Book Arts), 1993
Berkeley High School, 1989
Occupation(s)Executive Director, Packet Clearing House
President, WoodyNet
Chairman, Quad9
CEO, EcoTruc and EcoRace
Known for
Spouse
Audrey Plonk
​
(m. 2010)​
Parents
  • William Edward Woodcock III
  • Charlene Louise Mayne

Bill Woodcock (born August 16, 1971 in San Francisco, California, United States) is the executive director of Packet Clearing House,[1] the international organization responsible for providing operational support and security to critical Internet infrastructure, including Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system; the chairman of the Foundation Council of Quad9;[2] the president of WoodyNet;[3] and the CEO of EcoTruc and EcoRace,[4] companies developing electric vehicle technology for work and motorsport. Bill founded one of the earliest Internet service providers, and is best known for his 1989 origination of the anycast routing technique that is now ubiquitous in Internet content distribution networks and the domain name system. [5][6]

Activities

Early electronic prepress

BMUG Disk Catalog 1989, the first known example of direct database-to-negative publishing. Collaborating with programmer Greg Dow, Woodcock published the annual catalog of BMUG's software archive using FileMaker output display templates to image direct to the film from which the plates were burned.

Woodcock entered the computer industry via the advent of desktop publishing. He was doing prepress work for the University of California Press when the Macintosh computer was released in 1984, and he switched to the then-nascent field of desktop publishing and electronic prepress. In 1985, he began working with AppleTalk networks, necessary to interconnect Macintosh computers running desktop publishing software with the digital imagesetters which produce the plates from which books are printed, and by 1986 he was speaking on the subject of desktop publishing and electronic prepress at conferences.[6]

Beginning in 1985, Woodcock volunteered with the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group (BMUG), providing technical assistance to its members, working on the production of its biannual newsletters, and assisting Bernard Aboba with the administration of its FidoNet-node BBS and moderating the global MacNetAdmin echo.[7][8] In 1989, he collaborated with BMUG Programming SIG chair Greg Dow to produce what may be the first instance of Database publishing: a catalog of BMUG's shareware archive, printed directly from a FileMaker database to negatives on a LinoTronic 300 PostScript imagesetter.

Woodcock continued his interest in publishing through college and beyond, studying Book Arts at the UC Santa Cruz Cowell Press under George Kane,[9][6] doing the illustrations for his book Networking the Macintosh,[10] and subsequently collaborating with his publisher parents[11][12][13] to provide book designs and cover art for some of their books. Woodcock was one of the founders of Netsurfer Digest, the first online periodical about the world wide web, and served as its production manager from 1994 through 2005.

Early Internet engineering

Between 1987 and 1993, Woodcock began the construction of the dot-com era Internet backbone network Zocalo,[14] which had its origins in the toasternet[15] he began constructing while working at Farallon Computing in the mid-1980s. When the network grew to encompass Santa Cruz as well as Berkeley in 1989, he began using anycast routing to distribute network traffic between the servers in the two locations.[6] Throughout the 1990s, he continued to pioneer IP anycast IGP and EGP-based topological load-balancing techniques.[16] Together with Mark Kosters he proposed at the 1996 Montreal IEPG that the root DNS servers be migrated to IP anycast, and their work has provided the basis upon which root DNS servers have been deployed since the late 1990s.[17][18]

In 2010 and 2011, with Rick Lamb, who had previously built the signing system that places DNSSEC cryptographic signatures on the DNS root zone, Woodcock built the first global-scale FIPS 140-2 Level 4 DNSSEC signing infrastructure, with locations in Singapore, Zurich, and San Jose.[19][20][21][22] In addition to protocol development work,[23][24] Woodcock has developed networking products for Cisco, Agilent,[25] and Farallon.

Bill Woodcock, Hillar Aarelaid and Kurtis Lindqvist on the night of Tuesday, May 8, 2007, in the CERT-EE operations center, as the Russian cyber-attack on Estonia began.

Cybersecurity and critical infrastructure

In 2001, together with Sean Donelan and John Todd, Woodcock constructed the "Inter-Network Operations Center Dial-By-Autonomous-System-Number" (INOC-DBA) infrastructure protection hotline communications system. At its peak, it interconnected more than 2,800 NOCs and CERTs, and was notably the first inter-carrier SIP VoIP network, and the first telephone network of any kind to provide service on all seven continents.[26]

Woodcock was one of the two international liaisons in Estonia during the cyber-attacks unleashed after the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn incident and assisted Hillar Aarelaid and the CERT-EE by coordinating the international effort to intercept and block inbound attack traffic before it reached the Estonian border.[27][28][29]

When Russia conducted a subsequent cyber-attack against Georgia in 2008, in parallel with a conventional military attack, Woodcock was widely quoted in the press as a leading analyst of nation-state cyber warfare, stating that military cyber attacks would likely continue, because "you could fund an entire cyberwarfare campaign for the cost of replacing a tank tread."[30][31]

In 2017, Woodcock was appointed to the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, and served on the commission until its successful conclusion in 2019, participating in the drafting of its eight norms related to non-aggression in cyberspace.

In the wake of the six major Caribbean hurricanes of 2017, which included two Category 5 hurricanes and destroyed critical communications infrastructure in ten Caribbean countries, Woodcock worked with Bernadette Lewis, Bevil Wooding and others to establish the Commission on Caribbean Communications Resilience, served as a commissioner for two years, and assisted in the drafting of its final recommendations.[32][33]

Policy positions

Woodcock has become an outspoken advocate of regulation of the use of artificial intelligence in the public interest, taking positions against the use of AI to exploit human psychological weaknesses,[34][35] against delegating "kill chain" decisions to military AI, and regarding AI and increasing socioeconomic inequities, saying, for example,

"The degree of integration of AI into daily life depends very much on wealth. People whose personal digital devices are day-trading for them, doing the grocery shopping, and sending greeting cards on their behalf, are living a different life than those who are worried about missing a day at one of their three jobs due to being sick, losing the job, and being unable to feed their children. AI are not the problem, but the trend toward greater social divide leaves a larger portion of the world's population in poverty and unable to garner any advantage from self-driving cars or robot vacuum cleaners."[36]

Woodcock advocates in favor of regulation in the public interest, particularly regulation of constrained resources like IPv4 addresses[37] and public rights-of-way.[38] At the same time, he has advocated for permissionless new market entry in cases like those of Internet service providers[39] and Internet exchange points,[40] where no constrained resources are inherently consumed and the value of innovation is high.

Advocacy

In 2019 and 2020, Woodcock organized the successful opposition to the attempted $1.1bn sale of the .ORG top-level domain to private equity firm Ethos Capital, and serves on the board of directors of the Cooperative Corporation of dot-Org Registrants (CCOR).[41][42][43]

In the wake of the ITU's December 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications, which he characterized as an attempted take-over of the institutions of Internet governance, Woodcock published a number of secret ITU budget documents and acted as point-person in an effort to redirect USD 11M in U.S. government funds from ITU contributions to support of the multistakeholder model of Internet governance.[44] This effort centered on a "We the People" petition and an explanatory web site,[45] and received much favorable attention in the press and Internet governance community.[46]

Board memberships

Current

Past

Books and writings

Bill Woodcock lecturing on Internet routing economics, 2018

Woodcock's published work includes many PCH white-papers,[66] the 1993 McGraw-Hill book Networking the Macintosh,[10] the report of the ANF AppleTalk Tunneling Architectures Working Group, which he chaired in 1993 and 1994, many articles in Network World, MacWorld, MacWEEK, Connections, and other networking journals and periodicals.[67] In addition, he was principal author of the Multicast DNS[23] and Operator Requirements of Infrastructure Management Methods[24] IETF drafts, and contributed to the IP anycast RFC.

Selected bibliography

Patents

  • US patent 9112667, "Geolocation", published 2015-08-18 
  • US patent 9609619, "Geolocation", published 2016-01-28 
  • US pending 2019097819, "System and Method for Determining the Relative Timing of Events Occurring in Geographically Disparate Locations", published 2019-03-28 
  • US patent 10440147, "Quality-of-Service Management for Domain Name Service", published 2019-10-08 

References

  1. ^ a b "Packet Clearing House: Nonprofit Profile". guidestar.org. Guidestar. 2003. Retrieved 2021-05-26.
  2. ^ a b "Quad9 Foundation Council". quad9.net. Retrieved 2021-05-26.
  3. ^ "ARIN : AS715 Registration Information".
  4. ^ "Connected vehicles: net governance and autonomous transport".
  5. ^ "Bill Woodcock, Packet Clearing House". blackhat.com. black hat. 2018-03-20. Retrieved 2021-06-01. In 1989, Bill developed the anycast routing technique that now protects the domain name system.
  6. ^ a b c d Perry, Tekla (2005-02-01). "Bill Woodcock: On an Internet Odyssey". ieee.org. IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved 2021-05-26. Woodcock put modem banks and servers in his basement and started a business doing e-mail forwarding for corporations, billing them monthly. "I remember the first month, I made 50 bucks," Woodcock recalls. "I was happy about that." He named his little Internet company Zocalo, a pun in Spanish, meaning both "marketplace" and "wall jack." In the fall of 1989, Woodcock started college at the University of California at Santa Cruz; Zocalo, then a stack of hardware that fit on a desk, moved to his dorm room.
  7. ^ Rowe, Jonathan (25 August 1989). "Business Suits, Briefcases Invade Macintosh Mecca". Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 30 November 2021. Consumer groups are trying to fill the void. The Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, BMUG, has 10,000 members, about half in California. Weekly meetings in the Bay Area attract several hundred people. The BMUG booth had an unvarnished hackers' quality that seemed a throwback to Apple's early days. 'We provide technical support to end users that Apple doesn't provide any more,' said Bill Woodcock, a volunteer, who works at Farallon Computing and volunteers two to three hours a day. Dealing with Apple is hard, he says. 'We don't buy thousands of machines every year, and we don't make millions of dollars.'
  8. ^ Woodcock, Bill (1 March 2021). "My homelab, c. 1993". Archived from the original on 2021-12-01.
  9. ^ "George R. Kane". Santa Cruz Sentinel. 19 December 2009.
  10. ^ a b Woodcock, Bill (1993). Networking the Macintosh: a step-by-step guide to using AppleTalk in business environments. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070716838.
  11. ^ Bradley, Bruce. "William Woodcock III collection". PrimTech. I met Bill Woodcock back in the 1980s when he was Archaeology Editor for Academic Press.
  12. ^ Skibo, James. "Classics Review: Village Ethnoarchaeology". O'Brien et al. (2005) give a great deal of credit to a single individual, Bill Woodcock, the acquisition editor for Academic Press during this period.
  13. ^ Chow, Renee (2002). Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling. University of California Press. p. Acknowledgements. ...Charlene Woodcock, the architecture editor at the University of California Press...
  14. ^ "Full-Service Internet Connectivity for Business". Zocalo. 1996-12-27. Archived from the original on 1996-12-27. MultiPoint Access Internet connections are available throughout the United States and Northern Europe at speeds ranging from 56 kilobits per second to full T1, 1.544 megabits per second.
  15. ^ Engst, Adam (18 January 2013). "Netter's Dinner Declares Success, Shuts Down". TidBits.
  16. ^ Eddy, Wesley; Ishac, Joseph. "Comparison of IPv6 and IPv4 Features". IETF. Retrieved 9 May 2006.
  17. ^ "June 1996 IEPG Meeting". Internet Engineering and Planning Group. 23 June 1996. Archived from the original on 2006-08-23. Retrieved 29 June 2021.
  18. ^ Sengupta, Somini (31 March 2012). "Warned of an Attack on the Internet, and Getting Ready". The New York Times.
  19. ^ Markoff, John (2011-06-24). "A Stronger Net Security System Is Deployed". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  20. ^ "Internet Groups Inaugurate First of Three Cyber Security Facilities". www.circleid.com. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  21. ^ "InsideIT". www.inside-it.ch. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  22. ^ "IT news, careers, business technology, reviews". Computerworld. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  23. ^ a b Manning, Bill; Woodcock, Bill (August 2000), Multicast Domain Name Service, IETF
  24. ^ a b Woodcock, Bill (November 30, 2001), Operator Requirements of Infrastructure Management Methods, IETF
  25. ^ Woodcock, William (7 December 2001). "Method and system for determining autonomous system transit volumes". US Patent and Trademark Office. Border gateway protocol (BGP) tables and data flow statistics sorted by destination address are collected from a plurality of routers. The BGP tables and the data flow statistics are aggregated and correlated by a correlation node. The correlation node produces autonomous system (AS) transit volumes and AS terminating volumes by AS number. The AS transit volumes and the AS terminating volumes can be used to evaluate the suitability of transit providers and potential peers.
  26. ^ Stapleton-Gray, Ross (2009). Inter-Network Operations Center Dial-by-ASN (INOC-DBA), a Resource for the Network Operator Community. Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press. ISBN 978-0-7695-3568-5.
  27. ^ Landler, Mark; Markoff, John (2007-05-29). "Digital Fears Emerge After Data Siege in Estonia". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  28. ^ Davis, Joshua (2007-08-21). "Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe". Wired. Retrieved 2021-05-26. At 10 pm on Tuesday, May 8, Lindqvist, Fältström, and Woodcock arrived at the downtown Tallinn office building that housed CERT headquarters. It was a geek dream team, with the attitude to match. Woodcock, who had spent years traveling through Europe, Africa, and Asia helping to set up Internet infrastructures, sauntered into the operations center wearing bison-skin boots handcrafted for him in Montana. Woodcock hoisted his laptop into the air. He called Aarelaid and Lindqvist over, took a picture with the built-in camera, and sent it out to the network to prove to the Vetted that Aarelaid was for real... As Aarelaid identified a specific address, Woodcock and Lindqvist sent rapid-fire emails to network operators throughout the world asking for the IP to be blocked at the source. One by one, they picked off the bots, and by dawn they had deflected the attackers. "I was very, very lucky that Kurtis, Patrik, and Bill were here," Aarelaid says.
  29. ^ Laasme, Häly (2011-10-15). "Estonia: Cyber Window into the Future of NATO". ndu.edu. National Defense University. Archived from the original on 2012-03-31. Retrieved 2021-05-26. Three world-renowned IT experts were visiting Estonia, and they assisted the Estonian Computer Emergency Response Team with defenses against ping attacks, botnets, and hackers. The experts were Kurtis Lindqvist, Patrik Fältström, and Bill Woodcock, research director of Packet Clearing House and member of the board of directors of the American Registry of Internet Numbers.
  30. ^ Markoff, John (12 August 2008). "Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks". New York Times. Retrieved 29 July 2021. It was the first time a known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war, but it will likely not be the last, said Bill Woodcock. He said cyberattacks are so inexpensive and easy to mount, with few fingerprints, they will almost certainly remain a feature of modern warfare. 'It costs about 4 cents per machine,' Mr. Woodcock said. 'You could fund an entire cyberwarfare campaign for the cost of replacing a tank tread.'
  31. ^ Wortham, Jenna (6 August 2009). "Online Attack Silences Twitter for Much of Day". New York Times. Retrieved 29 July 2021. Woodcock found evidence that the attacks had originated from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia. Mr. Woodcock said the disruptions did not appear to have been caused by a botnet, rather, at about 10:30 a.m. E.S.T., millions of people worldwide received spam e-mail messages containing links to Twitter and other sites. When recipients clicked on the links, those sites were overwhelmed with requests to access their servers. 'It's a vast increase in traffic that creates the denial of service,' he said.
  32. ^ "Terms of Reference". Commission on Caribbean Communications Resilience. Archived from the original on 2021-07-29. Retrieved 29 July 2021. The 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean was particularly destructive as six major hurricanes assailed the region. Ten Caribbean countries were devastated by the most dangerous of these, Irma and Maria, both of which were classified as Category 5. Many communications networks were severely damaged and critical communications services, including broadcast and internet, were badly disrupted. The Commission on Caribbean Communications Resilience is tasked to examine the region's communications vulnerabilities, with specific focus on nature-related hazards, and to recommend actionable strategies for increased resilience to governments, regulators and other stakeholders.
  33. ^ "The Commissioners". Commission on Caribbean Communications Resilience. Archived from the original on 2021-07-29. Retrieved 29 July 2021.
  34. ^ Anderson, Janna; Rainie, Lee (10 December 2018). "Solutions to address AI's anticipated negative impacts". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 29 July 2021. In short-term, pragmatic ways, learning algorithms will save people time by automating much of tasks like navigation and package delivery and shopping for staples. But that tactical win comes at a strategic loss as long as the primary application of AI is to extract more money from people, because that puts them in opposition to our interests as a species, helping to enrich a few people at the expense of everyone else. In AI that exploits human psychological weaknesses to sell us things, we have for the first time created something that effectively predates our own species. That's a fundamentally bad idea and requires regulation just as surely as would self-replicating biological weapons.
  35. ^ Anderson, Janna; Rainie, Lee (16 June 2021). "Worries about developments in AI". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 29 July 2021. AI is already being used principally for purposes that are not beneficial to the public nor to all but a tiny handful of individuals. The exceptions, like navigational and safety systems, are an unfortunately small portion of the total. Figuring out how to get someone to vote for a fascist or buy a piece of junk or just send their money somewhere is not beneficial. These systems are built for the purpose of economic predation, and that's unethical. Until regulators address the root issues – the automated exploitation of human psychological weaknesses – things aren't going to get better.
  36. ^ Smith, Aaron; Anderson, Janna (6 August 2014). "AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs" (PDF). Pew Research Center. Retrieved 29 July 2021.
  37. ^ Ermert, Monika (17 May 2013). "Dispute over future IP address policy – stop managing scarcity?". Intellectual Property Watch. Heise.
  38. ^ Woodcock, Bill; Weller, Dennis (29 January 2013). "Internet Traffic Exchange: Market Developments and Policy Challenges". OECD Digital Economy Papers. doi:10.1787/20716826.
  39. ^ Van der Berg, Rudolf (22 October 2012). "Internet traffic exchange: 2 billion users and it's done on a handshake". Insights. OECD. The current model of Internet traffic exchange can only exist in an environment that stimulates market entry and investment. This requires that regulators allow telecommunication and non-telecommunication operators to enter into the market, to compete and to interconnect. Indeed where development of the Internet has been less than satisfactory this often stems from a lack of sufficient liberalization.
  40. ^ Best, Gerard (29 September 2009). "Trinidad IXP Symposium Brings Prospect of a Faster Internet Nearer". Sightline.
  41. ^ Orenstein, Natalie (2020-01-16). "A private equity firm wants to buy '.org' for $1 billion. A Berkeley-based cooperative says, 'not so fast'". berkeleyside.org. Archived from the original on 2021-05-31. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  42. ^ Menn, Joseph (2020-01-07). "Internet nonprofit leaders fight deal to sell control of .org domain". cnbc.com. Archived from the original on 2020-06-11.
  43. ^ "CCOR: A Better Way for .ORG". Retrieved 17 July 2021. By and For Non-Profits: The Cooperative Corporation of dot-org Registrants, or CCOR, is the cooperative organization that seeks to embody and collectively represent the community of dot-org domain name registrants. The CCOR is an organization created by nonprofits for nonprofits to maximize the security and stability of the open and non-commercial Internet.
  44. ^ Ackerman, Elise. "The U.N. Fought The Internet -- And The Internet Won; WCIT Summit In Dubai Ends". Forbes. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  45. ^ "De-fund the ITU!". defundtheitu.org. Archived from the original on 2013-01-17. Retrieved 2021-05-25.
  46. ^ Blue, Violet. "UN plans Internet governance amid outcry to defund ITU". ZDNet. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  47. ^ "Articles of Incorporation of the Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants". sos.ca.gov. California Secretary of State. 2020-01-09. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  48. ^ Sammallahti, Leo (2020-05-25). "The co-op that blocked the sale of the .org domain to private equity has a plan to democratise large parts of the internet". coop.exchange. COOP Exchange. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  49. ^ Lohr, Steve (2020-01-07). "Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle Over .Org". The New York Times. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  50. ^ L’Italien, KiKi (2020-01-23). "The .ORG Divide: Associations and the Future of How We Use the Internet". associationchat.com. Association Chat. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  51. ^ "CleanerDNS, d.b.a. Quad9: Nonprofit Profile". guidestar.org. Guidestar. 2016. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  52. ^ "CleanerDNS Articles of Incorporation". sos.ca.gov. California Secretary of State. 2016-12-24. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  53. ^ "Internal Revenue Service : M3AA Foundation 990 filing" (PDF).
  54. ^ "American Registry for Internet Numbers: Board of Trustees". arin.net. American Registry for Internet Numbers. 2016-11-11. Archived from the original on 2016-11-11. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  55. ^ "American Registry for Internet Numbers: Former Trustees". arin.net. American Registry for Internet Numbers. 2021-05-31. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  56. ^ "Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace : Our Commissioners". Retrieved 21 May 2020.
  57. ^ Best, Gerard (2017-12-10). "New commission formed to improve Caribbean communications resilience". dominicanewsonline.com. Dominica News Online. Retrieved 2021-05-31. "Packet Clearing House is honoured to be participating in this effort," said Bill Woodcock, who is the executive director of PCH, and one of the ten commissioners. "The scale of the devastation wrought by this season's hurricanes is unmatched in recent communications history. Having two entire countries go offline through the critical period of evacuation and humanitarian relief is a failure that cannot be allowed to happen again, and the challenge that climate change presents in the Caribbean will continue to increase in future years."
  58. ^ "Number Resource Organization : Response to the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group Request for Proposals on the IANA from the Internet Number Community". 16 January 2015. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
  59. ^ "ITU Plenipotentiary Conference PP-14, Busan Korea, Final list of participants" (PDF). itu.int. International Telecommunication Union. 2014-11-25. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  60. ^ http://www.sanog.org/resources/sanog6/woodcock-icapdev.pdf
  61. ^ "State of California Nonprofit Statement of Information". California Secretary of State. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
  62. ^ "Public Interest Registry Advisory Council". Archived from the original on 2005-12-10.
  63. ^ "Berkeley Telecommunications Task Force meeting minutes". Archived from the original on 2002-11-13. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
  64. ^ Whitney, Susan (21 April 1998). "NetProfessional Selects Editorial Board". mactech.com. Xplain Corporation.
  65. ^ "Bill Woodcock Biography". ieee.org. IEEE. 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-06-22. Retrieved 2021-05-26.
  66. ^ Woodcock, Bill. "Packet Clearing House: Papers". pch.net. Retrieved 2021-05-25.
  67. ^ "Munal".
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