The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the oldest and most important protocols used in today's Internet. TCP was designed as the same time as IPv4 and the basics of TCP are still the same as when RFC793 was published. Since 1981, TCP has been modified slowly in a backward compatible manner. These modifications include :

• some clarifications in RFC1122
• the timestamp and large windows extensions in RFC1323
  

In his last editorial forSIGCOMM's Computer Communication Review, S. Keshav explains his frustation in finding that among the 30 papers he reviewed for SIGCOMM, most contained flaws in their statistical methodology. The networking community often uses experimements and simulations, but I agree with Keshav that many papers often neglect to include confidence intervals and other statistical information in measurements and simulation results.

The last issue of IEEE Spectrum contains a cover story written by Larry Roberts, one of the creators of the ARPANET. The cover's title claims that the Internet is broken.. This is not the first time that someone claims that the Internet is broken. Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet had similar claims a few years ago.

Napster was probably one of the first popular peer-to-peer application. Since then, many other peer-to-peer techniques and been developed and measurement studies show that in some parts of the Internet peer-to-peer applications generate more packets than classical client server applications. During the last ten years, many papers have been written on peer-to-peer technologies. The new book written by Buford, Yu and Lua has collected more than 550 references and provides a detailed and up-to-date survey on the peer-to-peer world.

This new edition of Douglas Comer's book clearly indicate that networking courses are more and more taught at undergraduate level. The fifth edition of this book is an introductory book on computer networking and TCP/IP in particular. Douglas Comer choose to cover a large number of topics at an introductory level. The book uses a mixed approach. It first starts by describing internet trends and internet applications. Then, it spends 130 pages on the physical layer. This part does not require any specific electrical knowledge.

A few years ago, Juniper Networks used cartoons and humour to attack its rival cisco in a marketing campaign with companion postcards and lots of cartoons. Recently, Juniper decided to come back to traditional marketing and removed the cartoons from its website. Cisco took the opposite direction with a new marketing campaign based on flash videos : http://www.cisco.com/cdc_content_elements/flash/security/therealm/index....

Fifteen years ago, Richard Stevens wrote the first volume of TCP/IP Illustrated. In his book, he took a different approach than the existing books. Instead of describing TCP/IP from a theoretical viewpoint, he took an "exploratory" approach. He set up a small network and looked at the packets exchanged to explain in details the core IPv4 and TCP protocols. Today, the TCP/IP protocol suite has changed significantly with the introduction of IPv6, new applications and changes to many of the Internet protocols.