Switzerland Built an Alternative to BGP | Hacker News Reader

Switzerland Built an Alternative to BGP

theregister.com

87 pointsjonbaer18 comments

One day some cool new IT tech will come out of Switzerland without it being an ETH Zürich thing. Not saying that that's a bad thing but it's almost comical how one can read such headlines, think "that's probably coming out of ETHZ" and be correct most times. I guess a lot of american IT comes out of MIT, Switzerland is way smaller so it makes sense that there's an even larger bias towards one institute.

Wonder how wide SCION will spread, so far it sounds like it's being used by the Swiss Financial Sector (ugh, even more stereotypical now).

There's some pretty cool stuff (and startups) out of EPFL!

Scala for one.

It's also seeing some adoption in the healthcare sector.

Eh, at least you have the ETH and EPFL. Germany has... TU München and Uni Saarbrücken? I once met a CS postdoc from Uni Saarbrücken who was (and is) doing interesting stuff - he's a professor in Switzerland now.

Stable Diffusion was developed at LMU München. There's also lots of interesting stuff coming out of RWTH Aachen.

Right, I was like... were there one or two in München?, and I took the one I last heard of (Umbra DB / CedarDB, on HN). And I forgot about Aachen.

Wondering what specific field of CS you're referring to, I'm seeing a much wider spread (and Saarbrücken does not even ring a bell). I was attending LMU and I have not kept up with the database stuff the last years from there but I feel like they published a lot of stuff.

I find engineering-type stuff (kernels and hypervisors, programming languages, databases, concurrency, computer graphics, even proof assistants, deep learning now obviously, ...) most important since my impression of many German CS professors is that they would prefer to be mathematicians. There's a ton of interesting theory to be found in sufficiently advanced engineering, but you don't get any of that if you refuse to touch it. IMO, too little engineering is the main disease of German computer science.

Nice to see BGP getting called out. Meanwhile, the fact neither quagga nor frr nor bird SCION patches are available by googling 5 seconds — and they want "company like cisco"?

Well, SCION might not be open. No open standard, no IETF, no open source implementation, and its single commercial exploiter has patents on the technology: https://www.anapaya.net/news/path-selection-system-patent?hs...

Yeah seems likethe business interests have overridden the adpotion needs. Knowing the IETF process is molasses slow , they still have not made moves to close that gap.For open source at least a implementation RFC that interested parties could work with - none avaiable.

They want to sell a technically brillant protocol that is single vendor propriety/patent restricted.

Their bet should have been of open protocol and captalizing on fist mover advantage to drive their business side witha large partner like ericsson/cisco etc.

Of course theres also the soveriegnity angle knowing what went on with another swiss company CryptoAG.

Open Source implementation: https://github.com/scionproto/scion

And that patent looks like it is for an optimization, not a necessary component of SCiON.

Quagga is fully dead. And neither of these is appropriate for SCION since it replaces much more of the Internet.

It sounds great. I wish him the best of luck rolling it out!

sounds good

No they didn't, they built an alternative to the Internet. It can't replace BGP on the existing internet.

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