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Researchers Scheming to Rebuild Internet From Scratch
BobB writes "Stanford University researchers have launched an initiative called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. The project aims to make the network more secure, have higher throughput, and support better applications, all by essentially rebuilding the Internet from scratch. From the article: 'Among McKeown's cohorts on the effort is electrical engineering Professor Bernd Girod, a pioneer of Internet multimedia delivery. Vendors such as Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and NEC are also involved. The researchers already have projects underway to support their effort: Flow-level models for the future Internet; clean slate approach to wireless spectrum usage; fast dynamic optical light paths for the Internet core; and a clean slate approach to enterprise network security (Ethane).'"
What are the odds that, even given a great plan, that this has any hope of making it to daylight. IPv6 has been out for how long, yet how much real adoption have we seen in that space?
Can be found here, is linked to within the first link provided in the summary.
One of the most interesting criteria for a new internet, to me, was criteria #7:
Support anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems true anonymity is becoming more and more important, and less and less available, as governments snoop more on the internet.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Most corporate networks make sense when they were first deployed, but that was back in the 80s and the technology (not to mention corporate layout) has changed enough that it seems crazy today. I know our tech guys here work really hard to keep everything up to date, and for the most part our network is sane, but sometimes there are cases of legacy systems that really look out of place next to everything else.
I want to know how they're going to avoid the second system effect with their new internet. One of the big reasons the Internet works is because a lot of effort was spent in keeping everything reasonably simple. Time has shown that anything that start out highly complicated tends to be only very slowly adopted, if at all. IP may have terrible security but at least it doesn't require someone 10 man-years to build a fully compliant router.
I read the internet for the articles.
I think it was called OS/2. Or maybe 68000. Or was it Itanium?
Unless this is being run by the IETF with EFF looking over their shoulder the whole time, I don't trust this to end up as something I want to use.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Let's get the guys that designed all those "wonderful" networks:
Oh yeah, let's get the "EXPERTS" involved!
What's wrong with porn? The network design shouldn't care about content. That's a place for your personal morals or corporate rules, not network topology.
Translation:
Lets rebuild the internet because it uses too much open source software and we are not making enough money. I know! Lets get all the vendors together and rebuild it using proprietary crud so that it is impossible for any of these "open source" guys to make server platforms that are freely available.
Lets kill open standards too, because well....who needs those IETF guys anyway! They are just a bunch hippies!
Seriously, though. The internet works better than my cell phone does.
It doesn't need "fixing".
It just needs a few upgrades.
IPV6 would be a nice place to start!
GAD.
The thought of CISCO having a hand in anything the future internet could be makes me want to quit my current network manager job and open an Italian Restraunt.
-gc
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Unfortunatly, I'm afraid they will make it more censorable, more business oriented vs. regular people, less anonymous, more regulated, govt/UN controlled, politically correct...and as someone mentioned, full DRM support forever.
Frankly, for all its faults, I like the internet now as it is...kind of the 'wild west' of information. That just has to 'kill' some of those in power around the world.
I think the last thing we want to do, is recreate it, now that those in power know what free flow of information can do...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
As frustrating as it may seem, there are actually fairly sound reasons for this in some situations. I would argue the internet was one.
In theory, ten years of computer science research might have produced a better design for the internet than the one we have today, back when it was first being developed. However, we have learned a lot from the scale-up that on a practical level would be fairly hard to duplicate in a research setting. Sometimes you just don't think of the possible consequences until you see them happen, particularly things due to human beings TRYING to bring down the system. Think about how long telnet lasted, for example.
In all honesty, it's a miracle the world wide web has scaled the way it has - consider the original scope of the military networks and the small amounts of data they were transmitting. The original designs were to Get Something Working and Justify Our Budget - that's how it has to work. I'd say the return on investment for the various stages of the internet has always more than justified even the costs of redoing it. Sometimes you can't wait to figure out how to do it right, because that will take too much time and what you can build NOW is still useful. Think about automobiles - 10 years from now we will undoubtedly be building better ones than we can build today, but the costs of waiting until we know how to do it "right" are much higher than the costs of replacement.
Now, of course, the question of knowing how to do something right is distinct from doing correctly what we already know how to do - one is a research problem, one is an implementation problem. I'm inclined to think that the web is more of a research limitation than a "do it right" issue, although I could be wrong - it depends on how much was known in the beginning states.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The "Wild West" exists (and perhaps always has existed) mostly in fiction.
In history it begins with the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and ends in 1876 at the Little Big Horn. The Last Stand for the Plains Indians as well as for Custer.
It's a brief moment in time - and, in some ways, a pattern of settlement unique to the United States.
It shouldn't surprise anyone if the Internet frontier has it's own ending.
Clones are people two.
"Outrageous! The rich treated the same as the poor!" They want an internet in which a porn movie downloaded by a CEO preempts and disturbs a critical communication from a hospital to an investigation center.
The internet as we have it is an open field. A dumb, simple, protocol so that people can innovate in the sides. This enabled us to be independent from ISP and to design new protocols (Gnutella, Bittorrent, etc.). Of course, they now say that this "dumbness" produced lack of innovation:
It's not clear to me how having a more complex internet in the middle will be able to ease its growth. It seems as the opposite, as more complex middleware will be more complex to upgrade and setup. In fact, the main reason the current internet has "ossificated" *is* dumbness in the middle, but other kind of dumbness. The commercial companies' dumb administrators, dumb managers, who didn't care to provide us multicast, IPv6, mobile ip, IPsec, etc.
The Internet as we have it could never had happened if it were for the private sector. It's too open, private companies don't like standards. See how the classical internet infrastructure got frozen when the commercial companies took over internet in the last century. HTTP, IMAP, POP, HTML, etc. got stuck in their last versions. It's because Internet needs a strong *public* presence. Companies can exist, provide service, but Internet needs a strong presence by the people (in the form of the state..? Universities? I don't know...)
This group is not aiming at a better, utopic, internet. They are trying to recapture what they've lost when their CCITT (X.25, X.400, X.500) network wreck.
You kind of picked a bad example, as vorbis is actually quite popular in some domains (games, for example), is supported by several hardware players, and gives better compression than mp3.
Of course, the idea of rebuilding the internet is a load of bull. The article lists a bunch of things you supposedly can't do with regular protocols, and takes those as reasons for change. They seem to think we can't do multicast, QOS, or security with current protocols. They also seem to think that, since wireless is so different from land lines, we should need new protocols. Their plans also happen to destroy any possibility of network neutrality.
I sincerely hope this project doesn't get any government funding.