Slashdot Mirror
The Case for Rebuilding The Internet From Scratch
dotnothing writes "I just caught a column on a security site advocating for a total start from scratch as far as certain internet protocols like SMTP. It's an interesting idea and there are some ideas on how to conduct the transition... if everyone would agree on something like this it would definitely reduce the spam (among other things)."
We can't even roll out IPV6. Even Internet2 has some basis in existing standards.
IPv6, replacement for SMTP, Slashdot style moderation on USENET, default encryption on all data transfers, DHCP configures EVERYTHING (like mail server, news server, etc), and more naked women. That would be perfect.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Will they make use of the new 'Evil' IP bit?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
You could have a new version of SMTP, maybe called SMTP2 that would refuse connections from an SMTP1 server. That would cause most people to change rather quickly, and might even be workable.
Something like IP, otoh, would be best if the new version could coexist with the old version.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
... sorry, not happening. Hell, we can't even push out v6, let alone start from scratch. Sure, these organic growths (i'm talking bout the internet) may seem inefficient and disorderly, but anyone in theorectical math knows that such systems have an awkard effecientcy. Similar to the buses in Mexico (they don't have a single entity controling them, like the US does), the internet grows from several competing interests, and often seems chaotic and ineffective. Yet, studies show that the buses in mexico are several fold more effecient than the regulated from the start ones here in the states. Just some food for thought.
(someday, i will make FP)
YOU SUCK BALLS!
not to tell AOL? Lets just not mention anything to them, and suddently we have two seperate networks...
The old network only consisting of AOlers.
The new network consisting of everyone else.
If this isn't acceptable, could we try just not telling Microsoft?
You can't get 3 people to agree on where to eat. How does anyone expect to reach a worldwide agreement on how to redesign something that's become such a huge part of our lives.
The only way we ended up with something as good as we have was due to the fact that it was created by a small group of very intelligent men with much foresight.
With that in mind I suggest we form a task force to look into this matter. That way we can sleep soundly at night knowing nothing will ever actually happen.
"If you limited normal users to 100 messages per second and major companies to 10,000 messages a second it would be hard for legitimate users to complain, but spamming would be much harder."
Hm... At a limit of 100 per second that only means I can send out 100x60x60x24 = 8,640,000 e-mails per day. How am I going to be able to talk to all of my friends now?
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
A subjective summary of the column:
- Scrapping the Internet is a good idea because spammers have used email to annoy everyone.
- Under this new, hypothetical email system, Verisign would require everyone to buy a secure ID to ensure they are who their messages say they are.
- The columnist is willing to spend more money and lose his privacy in exchange for these conveniences, so we should be, too.
Please. The problem with spammers isn't because SMTP is so weak. The primary cause of the modern deluge of spam is unsecured email servers around the world, allowing senders to spoof their identity and auto-email anyone they happen to have an address for. And no new system, no matter how rigidly secured, will make up for admins who don't do their job; if it did, it would be prohibitively expensive or complicated and thus be impossible to implement as widely as email is now.
The writer, Larry Seltzer, complains about spammers abusing his account, and yet his online publisher sticks a link to his email address right at the bottom of everything he writes. I would suggest that if he wants to reduce the flow of junk to his inbox, he start with his own managers.
Seems like every implementation I've seen first hand of "let's rebuild this super humoungous system from scratch" never goes as planned. Inevitably, there are many unforseen problems with the new system. Some of these problems are due to poor planning. Some are not. Some of these problems will be a tremendous pain to fix. Some will be discovered immediately while others will be discovered months or years down the road. In the end, you may wind up with more problems than the old system and you wonder if it was really worth it. Just my $0.02.
Agree. Ain't gonna happen. The major isp's do a tremendous job keeping most of the spam out of our mailbox. For the few that slip through, there are various filtering programs like SpamAssassin that can help.
e 921.zip
For those interested in higher accuracy and more speed, you can write your own filtering program that analyzes the headers and responds to your unique name and email address.
I just uploaded my version written in Borland Pascal running in DOS.
My spam program filters valid messages at up to 3,000 msg/sec, detects spam messages and decodes base64 at 200 to 300 msg/sec, and has no false positives or false negatives.
The nice thing is it is easy to update when spammers change their tactics. If you are interested in seeing how I do it, download the source file at
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automation/misc/spa2
Best Regards,
Mike Monett
(Who tried to re-register but cannot get SlashDot to remember my name and password:)
I don't think the problem is with your system. :-)
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Why take business.com when you can grab slashdot.org and link it to msn.com for a few days? Watch the hilarity ensue as geeks around the world suicidely jump out of office buildings thinking that the Devil won't stop messing with their heads.
I agree. There were a couple slim areas in this article - the presumption that SPAMmers would not adapt was distressing.
Reading this article, I recalled that the ones that probably would gain the most financially from an increase in spam would be spam filtering companies.
Also, the idea of individuals having certificates was pretty funny. Good way to increase certificate sales without addressing the underlying SPAM problem at all.
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
I'm the author of the column under discussion. I hope I got my point across that whatever merit I see in this I doubt it could succeed in less than a long time.
But I don't see the spam filtering and security companies as the main obstruction. I see millions of users and companies who would have to change applications as the real problem. Whatever the benefits, this would be highly disruptive. As others have pointed out, look at how long it's taken to get almost nowhere with IPv6.
SMTP being replace, that's a possibility. But with "trusted authorities" such as Verisign? Never. Those of us already having to deal with Verisign (or Microsoft or whoever) do NOT want something as important as email to be completely in someone else's hands.
SMTP should be replaced by a protocol that requires authentication. That's the biggest probley (open relays) really. Going any further than that will be more of a pain than its worth.
As for everything else (including IPv4), there are too many old clients out there (old meaning unsupported by the vendor). There are enough Windows 95 clients out there, not to mention other systems where upgrades are simply unnecessary otherwise, to where changing the underlying protocol simply won't happen.
Incremental upgrates, sure. We'll probably end up replacing SMTP -- or updating it -- to support, or even require, authentication. In a few years. We may even supplant FTP with SFTP or some other more secure variant.
But to try and simply replace a major, established protocol -- with no backward compatibility -- simply will not happen. There will be enough resistance and reluctance to make it infeasible; then the upgraders will have to begin supporting both "legacy" and new protocols, and we'll be in a bigger mess than before.
So, my opinion is this: we'll slowly, with full backward compatibility, supplant older protocols with updated ones -- perhaps via adding extensions to them (like SMTP Authentication), allowing slow upgraders to catch up as needed. No revolutionary changes will happen, no forced upgrades...
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