"Cowie founded a company called Renesys that between 2000 and 2014 gathered and sold intelligence about internet infrastructure - think of it as a precursor to Cloudflare's Radar service. A company called Dyn acquired Renesys in 2014, before itself being acquired by Oracle. During the back-office crunch that followed the two acquisitions, much of the data Renesys had collected over the years was lost. "As time passes, information likes to disappear. If you do not invest, its default is to die," Cowie told The Register."
"Losing data irks Cowie, who, this week, told the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) he thinks "the operational exhaust of the internet" can help humanity to understand what networked systems have done to society. "If we wanted to understand if human progress and technical progress are aligned, how would we do that?" he asked during his keynote address. "These are perilous times. Everything is changing and we don't know how.""
PingER ran nearly 30 years of ping-based measurements recording round-trip times between internet nodes by sending thousands of pings daily. SLAC shut PingER down in 2024 when the last operator retired, leaving decades of measurements unpreserved. Renesys collected internet-infrastructure intelligence from 2000 to 2014, but much of its data was lost after acquisitions by Dyn and Oracle and subsequent back-office disruption. Jim Cowie, who founded Renesys and witnessed such losses, launched the Internet History Initiative to identify and preserve operational internet records. The initiative aims to protect data that enables understanding of networked systems and their societal effects.
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