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 sharewarearchive, printed directly from a FileMaker database to negatives on a LinoTronic 300PostScript imagesetter.
Woodcock continued his interest in publishing through college and beyond, studying Book Arts at the UC Santa Cruz Cowell Press under George Kane,[6][9] 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.[14]
Early Internet engineering
In 1987, Woodcock began building the dot-com eraInternet backbone network Zocalo,[15] which had its origins in the toasternet[16] 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.[17] Together with Mark Kosters he proposed at the 1996 Montreal IEPG that the root DNS servers be migrated to IP anycast, and this work has provided the basis upon which root DNS servers have been deployed since the late 1990s.[18][19]
In the early 2000s, Woodcock was an early proponent of reputation-based routing security and encapsulated much of that work in the "Prefix-List Sanity Checker" toolset which was used by most of the largest Internet networks to validate proposed BGP routing announcements in the interregnum between the RPSL and RPKI eras.[20][21]
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 140-2Level 4DNSSECsigning infrastructure, with locations in Singapore, Zurich, and San Jose.[22][23][24][25] Woodcock has also done networking protocol development work,[26][27] and has developed networking products for Cisco, Agilent,[28] and Farallon.
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.[29] 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.[30]
Woodcock was one of the two international liaisons in Estonia assisting Hillar Aarelaid and the CERT-EE during Russia's 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by coordinating the international effort to intercept and block inbound attack traffic before it reached the Estonian border.[31][32][33]
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 an 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,"[34][35] and that "any modern warfare will include a cyber-warfare component,"[36] but cautioning that precise attribution is difficult: "You'll never be able to establish who was sitting in front of a computer from which an attack originates."[37]
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.[38][39]
"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 their 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."[42]
...and regarding the use of AI to intermediate human communication through "filter bubbles":
"The single most important factor in improving the quality of digital life and the trajectory of digital interaction is the disintermediation of human communication: The removal of the agents with separate and competing agendas, like Facebook and Twitter, that have positioned themselves between people who could otherwise be engaging directly in civil discourse. This requires decentralization, federation and the empowerment of the users of digital technology to act on their own behalf."[43]
Woodcock advocates in favor of regulation in the public interest, particularly regulation of constrained resources like IPv4 addresses[44] and public rights-of-way.[45] At the same time, he has advocated for permissionless new market entry in cases like those of Internet service providers[46] and Internet exchange points,[47] where no constrained resources are inherently consumed and the value of innovation is high. He has advocated for a nuanced view of "Internet Balkanization" or fragmentation since at least 2013, as in this reference to Brazil's rapid construction of Internet infrastructure:
""Despite the clear benefits of these developments for Brazilians, their government's statements have been shrilly and incorrectly branded as extreme and decried as Soviet socialism by some U.S. media. This is largely due to a misimpression that what Brazil is doing is cutting itself off from the Internet or balkanizing the Internet -- when in reality, it's building more Internet faster. Critics fail to understand that the path Brazil is taking was blazed in the United States. While Brazil may engage in aggressive rhetoric, its actions are sound."[48]
...and has argued in favor of less heated rhetoric regarding national Internet infrastructure initiatives and controls in China, Russia, Egypt,[49] Iran,[50] Georgia, and Estonia[51] as well.
Woodcock is a noted advocate for competitive telecommunication marketplaces, frequently speaking and publishing on the topics of new market entry and the benefits which increased competition in Internet access markets bring to users, in the form of improved performance and lower costs. These positions have informed and generally been adopted as best-practices by the OECD in its recommendations to member countries on telecommunications regulation and legislation.[52][53] Supporting that work, in 2011 he produced the first-ever survey of the peering connections between Internet networks, characterizing more than 142,000 such agreements,[54] and followed up with a second survey of 1.9 million peering connections in 2016.[55][56]
Advocacy
In 1997 and 1998, Woodcock and J.D. Falk worked with the California legislature
[57][58] to enact the world's first anti-spam legislation, Assembly Bill 1629, which was enacted as California Business and Professions Code 17538.45, and was subsequently used as the basis for the United States federal anti-spam law.[59][60]
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.[61] This effort centered on a "We the People" petition and an explanatory web site,[62] and, although ultimately unsuccessful, received much favorable attention in the press and Internet governance community.[63]
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).[64][65][66]
In March, 2022, Woodcock was one of the lead authors, along with Bart Groothuis, Eva Kaili, Marina Kaljurand, Steve Crocker, Jeff Moss, Runa Sandvik, John Levine, Moez Chakchouk and some eighty other members of the Internet governance and cybersecurity community, of an open letter entitled Multistakeholder Imposition of Internet Sanctions.[67] The letter outlines a set of principles governing the imposition of Internet-related sanctions and describes the mechanism being built to operationalize the sanction mechanism. The letter was occasioned by a request from the UkrainianMinistry of Digital Transformation to ICANN and RIPE, requesting that Russia's top-level domains and IP addresses be revoked.[68] The letter advocates more effective sanctions, more narrowly-focused on military and propaganda targets, and avoiding collateral effects upon civilians[69][70][71] and features a four-page annex evaluating different technical mechanisms by which Internet-related sanctions could be imposed.
Woodcock's published work includes many PCH white-papers,[95] 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.[96] In addition, he was principal author of the Multicast DNS[26] and Operator Requirements of Infrastructure Management Methods[27][97] IETF drafts, and contributed to the IP anycast RFC.
^"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.
^ abcdPerry, Tekla (2005-02-01). "Bill Woodcock: On an Internet Odyssey". IEEE. 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.
^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.'
^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...
^"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.
^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.
^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. ISBN978-0-7695-3568-5.
^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.
^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.
^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.'
^Wortham, Jenna (6 August 2009). "Online Attack Silences Twitter for Much of Day". New York Times. 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.
^Gitlin, Martin; Goldstein, Margaret J. (April 2015). Cyber Attack. Twenty-First Century Books. ISBN9781467725125.
^Shachtman, Noah (January 2009). "Cyber Attack Flares Up in Eastern Europe". Discover. 30 (1): 48. Bill Woodcock, research director with the Internet infrastructure group Packet Clearing House, is cautious about assigning blame. 'You'll never be able to establish who was sitting in front of a computer from which an attack originates,' he says.
^"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.
^"The Commissioners". Commission on Caribbean Communications Resilience. Archived from the original on 2021-07-29. Retrieved 29 July 2021.
^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.
^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.
^Van der Berg, Rudolf (22 October 2012). "Internet traffic exchange: 2 billion users and it's done on a handshake". Insights. OECD. Archived from the original on 14 November 2021. Retrieved 14 November 2021. 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.
^Singel, Ryan (18 February 2011). "Report: Egypt Shut Down Net With Big Switch, Not Phone Calls". Wired. According to a February presentation made by Bill Woodcock, research director of Packet Clearing House to the Department of Homeland Security's Infosec Technology Transition Council, obtained by Wired.com, the Egyptian Communications Ministry acted quite responsibly in the procedure it used to cut ties from the net, after the shutdown was ordered by Egypt's much-feared intelligence service.
^Timberg, Craig (6 April 2015). "Tech investments show an Iran eager to end isolation". Washington Post. Iran also has engaged in on-again, off-again talks about building an Internet exchange point, which would allow much faster data connections, said Bill Woodcock, research director of the Packet Clearing House. The San Francisco-based nonprofit has built Internet exchange points throughout much of the world. 'All they're trying to do is be like us,' Woodcock said. 'They're trying to build as much Internet as they can, as quickly as they can.'
^Healey, Jason (22 October 2013). "WS242 Lessons from Cyber Conflict History". Internet Governance Forum. These are two slides from a briefing I gave NATO at the end of 2008 on what happened in Estonia and Georgia. At the time the Russians attacked Estonia it came with a little warning. The Russians took the Chinese playbook very literally. They went to Estonia and said, 'who are the Russians in Estonia that can help us conduct this attack inside Estonia?' But that's an attack against law and order; that's an insurgency. Which means the Estonians were conducting a counter insurgency; an appeal to law and order. The Estonians said: 'Hey, your cousins in Moscow have trouble finding groceries in the grocery store. Their plumbing doesn't work all the time. The electricity is not reliable. Law enforcement isn't that good. You have it really good here in Estonia, right? Why would you attack that?' And at the same time they found the Russian agent who was running around recruiting, threw him in jail. This is effective counter insurgency. You say: 'Here are the benefits of what we are offering.' That's the carrot. The stick is: 'If you violate the societal compact, you get thrown in jail.' So when the attack came there was no domestic participation. There were not ethnic Russian Estonian hackers running botnets inside Estonia. That made the attack much simpler to deal with.
^Foster, Ed (14 December 1998). "Individual States offer a glimmer of hope in the fight against junk e-mail". InfoWorld. Retrieved 1 February 2022. Another attempt to deal with the junk e-mail problem, which seems even stronger than the Washington law, goes into effect in California on Jan. 1, 1999. AB 1629 takes a broader aim in trying to eliminate unsolicited commercial e-mail in general by allowing California ISPs to publish a notice forbidding the use of their equipment to send or deliver spam. Violators can be sued. 'We think it's a much better bill than anything that's been considered at the federal level,' said Bill Woodcock, the president of Zocalo, a Berkeley, Calif., ISP, and representative of the Consortium of Interneet Service Providers, in testimony before the California legislature. 'It's the first one that's good enough to get support from the Internet industry.'
^Woodcock, Bill (4 May 2002). "Re: anybody else been spammed by "no-ip.com" yet?". NANOG mailing list archive. North American Network Operators Group. J.D. Falk and I put a lot of work into getting tough anti-spam legislation passed, and we were successful. Here in California we now have jail time for second-offense spammers.
^Rodriguez, Karen (14 May 2000). "Federal lawmakers propose bill to end spam". San Jose Business Journal. Retrieved 1 February 2022. The basis for the new bill sitting before Congress is anti-spam legislation adopted in California last year (AB 1629). Under the federal "Can Spam Act" (HR 3113), co-authored by Rep. Gary Miller, R-Calif., Internet service providers would be allowed to take civil action against spammers -- those who send unsolicited commercial e-mail -- for $50 per message, up to $25,000 per day. Observers say the bill has a strong chance of being approved by Congress.
^"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.
^Woodcock, Bill; Groothuis, Bart; Kaljurand, Marina; Crocker, Steve; et al. (10 March 2022). "Multistakeholder Imposition of Internet Sanctions"(PDF). Archived from the original on 12 March 2022. Retrieved 12 March 2022. We believe it is the responsibility of the global Internet governance community to weigh the costs and risks of sanctions against the moral imperatives that call us to action in defense of society, and we must address this governance problem now and in the future. We believe the time is right for the formation of a new, minimal, multistakeholder mechanism, similar in scale to NSP-Sec or Outages, which after due process and consensus would publish sanctioned IP addresses and domain names in the form of public data feeds in standard forms (BGP and RPZ), to be consumed by any organization that chooses to subscribe to the principles and their outcome.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^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."
