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National Projects Aim to Reboot the Internet
iron-kurton wrote with a link to an AP story about a national initiative to scrap the internet and start over. You may remember our discussion last month about Stanford's Clean Slate Design project; this article details similar projects across the country, all with the federal government's blessing and all with the end goal of revamping our current networking system. From the article: "No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes. Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was 'generally healthy' because the current technology 'does not satisfy all needs.'"
Is this one of those 'forced upgrade' things so hardware and software manufacturers can make a heap of money selling more stuff?
And get ready for a whole heap more IP claims and big corps attempting to own the internet.
Even the Slashdot editors were less misleading.
So they're replacing the tubes with pipes. I suppose that is an upgrade. :)
"Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was 'generally healthy' because the current technology 'does not satisfy all needs.'""
Whom and what needs?
Just like IPv6 is going to be implemented... someday. It will never happen. I guess someone needs to bring it up that, boy, it sure would be a great idea, but frankly it will never happen. The Internet is so much more than just the US, there's no way you can have it scrapped. As is with most things in this world, it will continue along on this current path, and maybe something will be built along side it (eg Internet2 or whatever that University network is called) and eventually switched over, but you can't just scrap it.
You are attempting to reboot the internet. Cancel or allow?
this fucking REEKS of big money and government wanting to control people on the internet even more, it bug the hell out of them that we have the freedom we do on there.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Good luck with that... IPv6 has been ignored for how long now and they think an even bigger change could be implemented?
You don't always get a second chance to change things. I hunch that the internet is too well advanced to rip it up and start over.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Now maybe we can finally get some regulation, control and respect for authority around here. And install some methods for ferreting out terrorists and music pirates. Ein Welt, Ein Furher, Ein Internet.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
The Internet is basically fair, because when it was designed no one knew how insanely profitable and important it would be. At the time, no one cared about the net except the people who designed it, so they could do it honestly.
Any new design will inevitably be corrupted by the interests of large companies, and of governments who would feel the need to have their ability to spy on and control traffic protected.
"And get ready for a whole heap more IP claims and big corps attempting to own the internet."
Who owns it now?
Yeah. Let's replace the entire infrastructure, hardware, application software and protocols overnight in a risky revolutionary leap. Because measured evolutionary change based on informed concensus has never really worked has it?
Tell you what here's a better idea in the same vein...
"No longer constrained by tedious democracy and accountability researchers say the time has come to rethink the governments underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing congress and rewriting laws on freedoms to better channel future money from the existing consumers. Even Andrew Jackson, one of Democracy's founding fathers said the exercise was 'generally healthy' because the current system 'does not satisfy all needs."
Is there some forum or wiki, that will will allow for a collaboration of ideas for revamping of the internet? Or will the changes be dictated soley by corporations?
Stanford University states their research program can be characterized by two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?" and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?"
A new internet architecture such as proposed will open vast new markets and endless business opportunities - in short - a potential gold mine for the seven industrial sponsors. The fear is that the Stanford research program will trade off attention to social and political issues for expediency in the impetus to get the new infrastructure up and running quickly.
How do we ensure that those questions don't get switched around to, "...if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a better conduit to more efficiently funnel revenues to our sponsors?" and "How should their profit margins look in 15 years?"
See my blog "The Internet is Broken" for an answer.
I suggest you do the same.
I don't think any one group can say that we're going to scrap the internet and start over. Hell, the US government couldn't convert its citizens to the metric system and they're the ones that control the measurements. No entity controls the internet and that's what makes it so great. If someone thinks they have a better idea of how it should work let them create their own networks of computers and run their own protocols and standards and we'll see which one the consumers prefer. Probably the one they already have thousands of dollars invested in, are familiar with, and have *freedom* to navigate.
Can anyone reference a national system that was successfully replaced? I heard rumor that a very small country changed which side of the road they drove on in the past ten years. The Internet is a global system - fat chance of any cold turkey changes.
Besides which, lets assume that there is a massive change to the internet. There are plenty of geeks in the world with the knowledge and capabilities to set up their own networks and build an internet of their own. How many of us have wired and wireless internetworks between apartments, dorms, and neighboring houses already? It would just become even more prevalent.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
They messed up the first time and built something that by design is difficult to take out of the hands of the people. The new one will fix that problem. Pesky plebes.
"What needs to happen is a profound change in protocols and in implementation," ISA Chairman Bill Hancock said in that 2004 interview. "Getting people to talk about it isn't hard. I've talked to the geeks, I've talked to the executives, I've talked to everyone. It's a total issue of money. The realistic approach is to look at the economic impetus. ... We need some strong, highly-secure protocols, and they've got to be able to last a long time. The problem is that we have 655 million or so users of the Internet right now. Deploying security enhancements to that many users at once is a non-trivial matter. The problem is complex, big and will take a while to solve"
The Internet won't be replaced this way, but it's still a useful exercise. You spend some money researching the "what if" scenario, get some results you didn't expect, and then you adapt the technology to the existing infrastructure.
http://outcampaign.org/
we can't even get IPv6 adopted, and you wanna do what to the internet?? get real :P
What a huge waste of money. Sure they could build DRM and WGA and SonOfClipper in at the lowest level, but really, what's in it for the rest of us?
You never know. The guys raising money for this will beat the pr0nography and DRM drum enough that some politicians will be impressed and throw some of (your) money at it. But are they going to convince business and the public for massive retooling costs, when in the end, we'll have something very similar to what we have at the moment.
There are better uses for money. Try Cancer research or something else instead please.
"the internet is dead" mantra has been around for a long time. The goal is control.
I'll bet it has. Make sure all that surveillance and control architecture is in place before people get to use it, right?
Liberty in your lifetime
We're at a point where total reboot/scrapping of the Internet is as likely as waking up tommorow and finding all of IPv4 scrapped in favor of new shiny IPv6.
There's more loss in scrapping everything and starting over than it is to improve existing solutions in a compatible manner.
Another example: everybody knows the x86 instruction set and interface sucks. It so sucks, that for quite some time AMD and Intel don't produce x86 chips anymore. Have you felt any revolution or "scrapping" going on"? No because all modern chips will take the x86 instructions and translate them internally, so on the outside the chip works with x86 software.
This is how progress works: if something is used massively world-wide, and something sucks about it, expect slow gradual transition, where the offending problems will be tucked away in a compatibility, emulation, translation layer and earth keeps spinning.
I wonder if they will be using Darik's Boot and Nuke when they wipe it out? Got to make sure they can't recover all those spam emails...Nothing like a good set of tubes down the tube. Oh crap! I just realized I store all of my personal information on the net!
http://wstewart.php0h.com - the sugarbuzz project blog
Vint Cerf said the exercise was 'generally healthy'
We've known that for a while, just didn't care. You say something obvious like that one more time I'm gonna waddle my fat ass over to you and after trying to regain my composure and normal resting BPM of 145, attempt to gather enough strength to punch you in whatever of yours I can reach.
And there would be unforeseen side-effects. I don't mean the easily foreseeable abuse-of-power kinds of side-effects, I mean the exploitation of such fascist features by the criminal element who today does things like spam and run bot-nets.
We would end up with a marginal improvement in performance, a huge loss of individual freedoms and equal or worse levels of personal risk and annoyance.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I can see a lot of good coming out of something like this. It's like asking "what would I build assuming I had all the money in the world? Then you get as close as you can with the money you have, and that's the best you can do. We can do the same thing with this: "If I knew then what I know now, how would build it?" Then we can go out and shoot for the best can get out of what we have. It's basically goal-setting.
On the other hand IPv6 is kinda the result of this already. Read it very literally: Internet Protocol version 6. We've already revised the Internet in some big ways, and no one even cared. Most people are saying "what we have is good enough. I've even seen Slashdot comments that say "we don't need more IPs, NAT is fine, your computer doesn't need a public IP!" These comments actually get modded up.
At this point, I think a better question would be: "How do we convince people that IPv6 is worth it?" IPv6 may not be a silver bullet, but it's a start. And I like some of the "shortcomings" of the current internet. It's tough to be completely anonymous, but you can do it. That'll never happen again if we start redesigning it, and it's more valuable than many people realize.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
Is this even news? I thought this was already in progress with IPV6 and internet2...
Excuse me, the Internet is a series of tubes, not pipes.
Who's going to pay to replace the whole internet?
it it ain't broke - don't fix it...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
On the contrary, it would be an awesome use of money for the folks like MS, **IA, and Bells who stand to benefit hundredfold if they assert complete control over some aspect of the Internet.
Stanford's term "ossification" seems fitting, but I think applying it to only the internet is a bit narrow in scope. Let's face it: The stranglehold of big players like Microsoft has brought revolutionary thinking to a standstill. Everybody operates on their opinion of how the computer and network should operate. I commend Stanford for thinking with integrity, but ultimately they have to answer to Microsoft when it comes to revolutionary thinking.
That's easy! Just replace all the servers with Windows NT based ones. The internet WILL reboot itself, naturally.
What would be the incentive to me, the user, to adopt this? Without enough incentive, the project is doomed to fail. Hold that thought, it probably isn't worth it. I'm happy with what I have now.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
AT&T's gotta go. Ed is either too stupid to understand how the Internet is actually structured and truly believes that everyone is getting a "free ride" or he's just plain greedy and then isn't the kind of person we should have running one of the largest ISPs anyway.
harry@internet:~$ uptime
4:14am up 30 years or so, 1071284312 users, load average: 31337,41, 31337,32, 31337,28
I wondered how long it would take before the topic of re-designing the Internet started making general rounds.
No one really owns it, and governments can't really control it. How long did we think that would last? I'm sure there are plenty of true benefits that would emerge, but we all know what we will really end up with is a DRM infested wiretap paradise that only serves the financial interests of corporations and the control aims of governments. Mind you, whether its an incremental upgrade or a complete replacement I think these aspects of the Internet will become inevitable - it's just a question of how long it will take.
Hope it doesn't take as long as it takes my Ubuntu to boot.
this sounds like something the MPAA/RIAA would push for.
since the current internet allows p2p applications to "adapt" around any attempts to control their traffic, this new net would, of course, have numerous, onerous, overlapping lockdown and lockout schemes to keep joe user from violating the precious copyrights.
of course, the big telcos dont object either, because they can then implement all the dirty tricks most people are currently fighting tooth and nail to prevent.
this said.. if they try to push this "new and 'reformed'" internet off on the public they'll be told where to stick it (both by the public and by most companies with net presence).
not necessarily because of lockdown, but the pre-existing network-externailty issue as well. no average user is going to migrate to where nobody is, and no company is going to pay to retool for a network where there are few to no users.
open notice from we the people to the us government and certain moneyed interests, the internet genie is out of the bottle, and youre not going to put it back!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Ok, so *this time*, can we make it a dump truck instead of a series of tubes?
There can't be a sudden "oh, here's something new" because of how strictly society is coupled with the current internet. It could, however, be part of a gradual evolution with the internet... something which I think we can all agree *has* been happening (think of the internet you were introduced to compared to the internet you know now).
And all of that "it needs to be more secure" sentiment really needs to be seen as "the current hackers are getting bored, let's make it interesting." It's the digital age and necessity is the mother of invention (or so they say, these days it's more like boredom is). You make a more secure internet, there is a plethora of people who are willing to adapt current money making schemes to adapt to said new internet. It's not like those guys are stupid... just morally deficient.
All one can hope to do is create measures to make it more secure with the knowledge that you have a year at best before someone comes along and breaks your security. We live in an age where people are breaking security protocols not because they have an ulterior motive, but because it's there... and it's what they do. Programmers find technology, read about the limits, and immediately find reasons and ways to push those limits in ways that nobody ever thought of before. The most successful programmers are the ones who learned to work with the current system and make it profitable, but the best programmers are the ones who need nothing more than a microwave, pop-tarts, an energy drink, and a fast connection.
Ctrl + Alt + Del always worked for me.
I think they should consider replacing the current series of tubes with something that more closely models a big truck. That way I wouldn't have to wait until next Thursday to get an internet from my office.
The biggest shortcoming of the current internet (to me) is that anonymity wasn't designed in from the ground up.
Hopefully, this "next big thing" will be designed so there is no information (like IP address) that can be used to trace an internet persona to an actual person or geographic area.
Will a reboot of The Internet make my Beowulf-cluster run faster? And are they sure that they haven't already done this in Soviet Russia?
You know, we'd all like to see the plan.
sure - everyone trusts the US these days.....
...inertia...
Without pr0n, the "new" internet will go nowhere. Pr0n drives innovation!
Didn't William Gibson write about this all ready? Huge corporate/governmental structures taking over CyberSpace(Internet) and making it a fascist structure meant to satisfy ONLY THEIR NEEDS? Kinda sounds familiar to me...
The current internet is working well, and with proper management it will continue to do so.
That't the problem. The powers that be don't want the internet to work as well as it does. Instead they want to control it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I hope this proposal fails. They probably know it will fail but this is a "make work" project -- just a method of researchers to spend grants so that they will get further grants like governments do at end of fiscal.
t hreadID=190&messageID=26576&start=-1
When they talk about "The internet" they mean layers 4 and 5: IP and TCP (or TCP/IP).
[Points about the internet]
- The author of that article knows nothing about the internet; not once did he mention any of the layers.
[[Important]]
Just because the internet is old does not mean that it is by any means bad; in fact, for most users, this "older version" is better.
- IP was formalized back in the 1980s; it was designed back when memory was expensive; it was designed when every bit and byte counted. A new "version" of the internet would in fact be much slower than the current IPV4. IPV6 for example has more over head than IPV4.
Read about the formalized protocol here
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc791.html
The paper may seem a little complex; however, realize that the purpose of IP is for simply routing messages so that one machine on the internet can reach another
-- Final comments --
The only service which the "old" internet does not offer is functionality for quality of service (technically it does, but those bits are not used).
And this is a good thing. No quality of service prevents ISPs from gouging their users. How would you like it if your ISP implemented IPV6 and then said "Oh, and if you want your latency below 200ms that will be an extra $20/month).
That is the type of functionality they are looking to add into the "new internet". Anything else can just be built ontop of TCP.
---
Also, to clarify the IP running out of addresses issue: TCP/IP supports 4 billion address. Only 1 or 2 are in use. Why is there a shortage problem you ask? Because of the method in which IP addresses are assigned. IP addresses are assigned in classes of A, B, and C (do further research for understanding this).
For example, Stanford university has more IP addresses than all of china.
http://news.com.com/5208-1028_3-0.html?forumID=1&
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
if you think it's as insightful as I do. If not, don't, fine with me.
How we know is more important than what we know.
old news.
... I saw a HD TV. I forget who the exhibitor was but, IIRC it was analog composite video, 1024 interlaced, 4x5 aspect ratio. Both the TV and camera were enormously expensive, but I remember thinking I would have one in just a few years and I couldn't wait for the standards to be revised so it could be brought to market. It took 30 years for me to have something comparable.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Well, clearly RFC 3514 will play an important role in the New Internet.
If you get this, we're 10 of a kind.
I ain't pullin' no more cable! Read my lips! No new hardware!
What?
Not gonna happen.
Truly. For years we've had governments and other special interests clamoring for change because they fear the digital age. In part due to this, we've lost more and more freedoms while the sheeple of the world are led by the ring in the nose ( which they are not even aware of ) into believing that everything is ok; Nothing going wrong here.
So let them redo the internet into a new corporate-friendly version. Let them rape us six ways from sunday. After working in the industry as I have, I could just as easily walk away and leave it to other more patient and gullible folks to handle.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
What is really needed is widespread adoption of encryption; this would prevent the hoards of greedy and evil entities from pushing "solutions" to problems which don't actually exist. The purpose of the network should be to move data, not to enforce policy, or spy on people. Things such as VOIP are recent enough that they should never have even existed in an unencrypted form. At this time, any fundamental redesign of the Internet will likely only make the situation worse.
Thankfully, this is a problem that can be solved at the edges of the network. If you are a developer of a networked application, you should embrace encryption, no matter what you are sending. Only after a significant part of the traffic is encrypted will the Internet truly be an end to end network as it was originally intended. This is a good thing, and is the primary reason why the Internet has flourished to date.
Until then, more and more intelligence will be stuffed into the network, and it will offer no benefit at all to the users of that network. It only serves to further the special interests of large corporations and government, and will continue to be severely abused. It only serves to make the network more expensive, and one thing is for certain; it won't move the data any faster.
Only after this becomes a reality can we really concentrate on making the network faster and better, rather than inventing new ways to squeeze more money out of people for the same crappy infrastructure.
for Internet 3 or whatever?
Could we really get a consensus on that with all the diverse and conflicting interests out there now?
Perhaps the original internet only got a sensible design because very few people or companies or governments
had much of a stake in it and most of those who actively used it and developed it had PhDs or were uber-geeks
who could be fairly rational and objective about it.
I would say there's a pretty massive bipolar view on it right now.
On the one side you have the following cluster of beliefs/philosophies:
The decentrist anarchist emergent-systemists:
-Information wants to be free and freely available
-Open standards and lots of F/OSS software are great things
-The United States government should not run the online world
-The future is decentralized, P2P, edge-network-oriented,
and strongly encrypted to allow massive locationless anonymous
sharing of private and public "inner-nets".
- Bandwidth should be symmetrical up and downstream.
- We might need 3 packet priorities, but money should not attach to them.
- the internet should be globally seamless, not nation-state oriented.
On the other hand you have the content-owning or pipe-owning
capitalists, and the NSA:
-I bought all the valuable information, so pay me rent
-You're using my pipes to look at stuff, so pay me rent
=You're my competitor and you're using my pipes to compete with me, so pay me more rent
-You're using my pipes, so I should decide what goo to feed you through them
-It's not YourTube its MyTube, like it always has been.
-You're breathing too much data. If you don't pay me more rent, I'll cut off your windpipe.
-Repeat after me. "I am a consumer. I am a consumer." "I want you to choose for me."
-Fast downstream IPTV for a fee. No upstream bandwidth. No P2P.
-P2P is a security risk, and a haven of illegality.
-Strong encryption in the hands of the masses is helping the terrorists win.
-The US government needs to snoop on everyone everywhere at all times.
-Net anonymity is wrong.
How could we design a single new net architecture that would satisfy both of these
viewpoints? It seems impossible to me. Maybe we need two nets?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If big brother and big business are so worried about it, why don't they just build their own "private" internet? get all their crap off of the public domain and we would have a lot less problems. but i guess the answer to my own question is that it does them no good. without the general public to watch or be seen by, they wouldn't need nearly as much bandwidth, etc. if they want to start over, then let them start over somewhere else and get the hell off of the "public's" internet. then they can do whatever they want and we will not have to pay for upgrades or new equipment. and if you speed junkies want access to the new system, YOU can pay for it. i mean just imagine the current internet without any government, corporate, or industrial traffic!
Just put AOL on a separate subnet. Then the rest of the net can reassume the civility of the old Compuserve days. Another big plus would allow people to be their own servers, instead of everybody depending on the big commercial ones. You know, distributed load, P2P, there's a novel concept. And of course those who wish to remain anonymous need community support, seeing as that you'll probably never get that from the commercial, much less the government sector. Maybe now is the time to really develope the wireless "cloud", again to relieve us of telecom/cable dependence. But like the article says, there will probably be too much meddling from special interests for any really good system to result. Just more TV is what the big money will bring us.
What?
Am I the only one who remembers seeing this same bit 'o news last month:
Researchers Scheming to Rebuild Internet From ScratchHenry Ford did build a car that not only used hemp in the construction but also ran on ethanol alcohol made from hemp. Before this Rudolph Deisel designed his deisel engine to run on hemp oil as well as other vegetable oils. In 1898 when he demonstrated his engine at the Paris Expo he had it running on peanut oil. A History of Biodiesel/Biofuels. In the 1930s a study by MIT found an acre of hemp would produce more paper than an acre of forest. Yet despite, actually as it treatened many wealthy and power people because of, the industrial advantages of hemp hemp was made illegal via the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act. Then as president Nixon had a study group to study whether hemp should be made legal again. However he said no matter what they concluded he would never agree to make it legal, which is what the study concluded.
FalconShould there be a Law?
NT
Nothing is everything to everyone.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
According to Bram Cohen beta-tested the system by loading masses of pr0nography and inviting people to download it. The system was of course Bittorrent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
Disclaimer: Of course, Wikipedia has been known to make mistakes. From time to time.
If you are a developer of a networked application, you should embrace encryption, no matter what you are sending.
Yes, this is unfortunately one of those situations that is not, "user error," but rather, "developer error." Encryption is one of those things where all parties need to jump on board at once. It's a chicken and egg problem. How can I start sending encrypted instant messages or emails if none of my friends or colleagues can decrypt them?
Networked application developers, our liberty is at your mercy...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Maybe we need to take commercialization out of connectivity infrastructure. Internet connectivity could become a utility like water, natural gas or electricity. I think we can agree that it's getting pretty close to be being that essential. The biggest problem with this, of course, would be finding administrators with the right capabilities, principles, concepts and vision (think people not named Ted...)
No more AT&T morons whining about "usin' ma papes fer free!", Shaws packet shaping to inhibit BitTorrent usage or Telco-ISP combo-corps "accidentally" dropping VoIP packets to benefit their own vested interests would all be nice things to see vanish.
Some interest wants a to see a bit of public opinion on this matter. The main article and those linked to it have many obvious and glaring technical errors. Who would believe the Net isn't logged so completely that every move can be traced if there is the will to do it? That just stood out in red to me. (and a couple others noticed it)
Granted, there are protocols that are obsolete or even some that should never have happened. There is an almost endless list of 'future use' protocols too. The Internet works fine today and has rapidly _evolved_ since the average person found out about it. All anyone with any brains might want to see is some better mechanisms to protect it from the ravages of "criminals" and even poorly written software -- A little "spew protection".
All improvements imaginable are at hand with what we have today. The system is completely flexible and today allows everyone a fair amount of access. Certain absolutely needed improvements, such as symmetrical end-user connections, full freedom to set up a server at home or a small office, decentralized data centres to avoid repeated 'long distance calls' to save costs, and better proxy systems overall, all in the works on existing networks.
The present system gives users at all levels "all they can handle", so "where's the beef"? Besides, the Net will fully replace itself over time. Look at its closest cousin, the phone system. There might be some "crank phones" still in existence but a dynamic and flexible infrastructure can interface to those relics too, if need be.
Get a life: This is simply not going to happen. People tell me: "If you don't like the Internet, make your own". Good try, but the concept of an Internet implies anything can be interfaced. Only the most extreme situations require complete isolation. 'Building your own' tends to imply you will become part of the whole. Its been researched quite thoroughly
and nothing is more efficient. Compare that with 'licensed radio' across all frequencies -- What a waste of empty space!
This has been an April Fools joke with all the horror of "Friday the 13th". Some suits better loosen their ties.....
My 0,02 worth. -- BillSF
It would cost too much money to replace all the tubes.
Being the first to post something doesn't make it pertinent.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
the poisonable protocol
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There was a time when the internet was first implemented, that it was necessary to use available means to communicate. One of those methods was a copper wire used for the telephone, which hs been used in excess of 100 years.
These days, copper wire is no longer practical or viable, much like the incandescent light-bulb. Now we have fibre optics, and satellite signals etc.
It's about damn time this move has started to gain wind.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
re sig: let me guess, you're one of those that dont? 11 binary = 3 in decimal not 2
Much of what's in there is the classic telco dream - virtual circuits, charged by usage. What's being proposed is not the next Internet. It's the next ISDN.
Remember what went wrong with ISDN in the United States. The US telcos tried to use it as a way to get away from flat-rate pricing for local voice calls. That made it a non-starter for voice. The data pricing was so high it wasn't even feasible for data in the era of dial-up.
The Stanford "clean slate" document is basically "ISDN 2.0". Or, at the bulk level, "ATM 2.0".
From their own words, the agenda is clear - create a billable Internet where the price of each service can be cranked up by the service provider to the point that maximizes the provider's revenue.
There are times when I'm embarrassed that I graduated from Stanford computer science. This is one of them.
I've always said that big corporations' chief regret is letting the Internet happen. If they had it to do again, we'd be paying a million dollars for the privilege of reading and writing on this board. And you can forget getting those tubes to transmit anything useful, like real software, free information, or voluntarily shared files.
That's the chief reason the Internet is free (as in freedom): it was made before Microsoft.
You joke about it, but this already happened (without the security warning) on my CentOS box.
My wife was browsing the net with several tabs open. She turned to me and told me that she had attempted to close one of the tabs, but suddenly the internet crashed! I clicked on the firefox icon to start it again. It was only a short time, but I knew I'd have to apologize.
About the internet rebooting: sorry guys, my bad.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
If you're a whitehat, you get internet A.
If you're a blackhat, you get internet A.
If you're an asshat, you get internet B.
100% of the security problems on the Internet come from a computer running Microsoft software. ISPs can just refuse connection to MS boxes. Problems solved. That's what they'd do if they really gave a damn about the problems they're claiming to care about.
Doesn't enough academic spam get submitted to the IETF on a daily basis as it is?
:)
I read the Stanford doc and fundementally disagree with it. Specifically the push for more intelligence than necessary for routing in the network rather than the edges where it belongs.
Along similiar lines Internet scale QoS is a ridiculous idea. The cross domain arrangements required to even begin to accomplish such a feat necessarily turns the network into a police state. Trust requirement for intermediate nodes = I'll pass
Heres a much simpler equation. It does not require any knowledge of graph theory.
Disruptive change with no benefits = being ignored, noone caring and going out of business.
... and I would like to think that it should be easy to spot from these comments that Contaminated Money, Monopolies, and Government, and such like are antagonistic towards presently perceived Internet flaws. Surprisingly the tools, that would be used to design and run a new internet, e.g., Global Grid Computing and Support Vector Machines, etc., are precisely the ones that should be used in Computational Finance to not only model existing economic systems but design a new "one size fits all" form of transactional representation to remove the aforementioned antagonists from the world. Should I live to see a new form of Internet overtake the Laws of Capitalist states? Not on your life!
Argumentum ad Probabilitum
Would you pleeease think of the pr0n!!1
or better power it off ; that will teach it for not allowing YOUR operation!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
What I really hate about these "clean slate redesign", "rebuid the Internet from scratch" or "re-engineer the Internet from the bottom up" projects is that there still exist engineeris out there thinking that they can change the Internet as a whole, as if it was only be a matter of the right "engineering" solution. How many failed attempts (does anyone here still remember ATM??) do they need to understand that they can not just drop out the entire installed base of IP machinery and start to use some shiny new technology and make this enormous shift from one day to another? What we need is small, incremental changes (even IPv6 seems top big of a leap nowadays) and not fundamental redesign. They have not yet realized that the whole goddam thing has its own momentum, it lives its own life and has its hardly effectively changeable trajectory? What the hell do they think about themselves? Do they believe that it is still pure _technology_ what matters in the Internet??
Isn't redesigning the Internet equivalent to reengineering an elephant? Isn't the proposition "let's change the IP protocol suite" equals an attempt to stop a glacier?
The idea of "updating" the internet makes me feel very much the same as when people talk about rewriting the US Constitution: we have a brilliantly conceived but outdated thing which could use an update to meet current circumstances impossible for the originators to have envisioned.
However, in the same vein, I'd be totally against it: I simply cannot see in the current world the ability to pull together an equally brilliant group of people who could do the task with an equal political objectivity. Indeed, as the internet is an acting infrastructure and not simply a set of rules on paper, it would be even more necessary to pull together resources from various who all have very different and conflicting biases. The BEST one could hope for would be something "designed by committee" ala the shuttle or the EU constitution. At worst, you're going to have interests conceding power in various facets to each other to suit their various needs. How would you like the internet *designed* by the RIAA? By the Republicans? By the Illuminati?
Thanks but no. I'll keep the creaky, leaky thing we've got. At least at it's CORE it's a fundamentally good thing. We just have to keep patching it.
-Styopa
At the risk of being modded down, I'd have to disagree. We've got to at least keep the current compromise between interests in law and order and interests in privacy (trying to be neutral here), otherwise we'll lose it. As it stands, if you get caught in a bittorent swarm of a pirated file, the **AA at least has a lead to you. We have no reliable automatic snooping system, and we have safety in numbers. I feel anonymous enough.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The program ALLYOURBASE.EXE is attempting to reboot the internet using port 80.
[ ALLOW ] [ DENY ]
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
OK, here are a few of my "ideal world" wishes. Deciding their technical feasibility in real life is left as an exercise to the reader.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The most important thing for this "new", "improved" intarweb would be to scrap it's peer-to-peer nature, and strictly establish a client-server architecture that will prevent the lowly peons from running their own servers or being anonymous, leaving this to well-established croporations, so they can control the content flowing on it.
to do, would be to find a way to provide high-speed wired access to the existing Internet, without having to deal with either the monopoly phonecompany or the monopoly cablecompany.
Either that or a major breakthrough in wireless tech that eliminates the line-of-sight requirement, increases the range and bandwidth, and doesnt increase the cost.
And no, I'm not holding my breath on either of those.
this :
"If it aint broke, DONT fix it"
Internet is working, it is working well. There are stuff that conservatist shit around the world cant stomach, such as freedom, and the necessity that they will have to get up from their couches and do their parental duties, hence ripping them of their freedom of letting children loose at home.
most importantly, governments and ruling rich elite circles are ANNOYED with the level of freedom on the internet and how far it goes on exposing their shit.
that is the reason beyond "initiatives" like those. They want something suits their tastes, not peoples'.
Read radical news here
I'm skeptical and all, because I suspect content providers of wanting to sneak in some sort of DRM into the whole mix.
However past that: cool! Just don't expect people to do it at once. You'll need a way to merge this shit in. People suck at taking leaps to new technology. You need a well planned, staged migration that better be transparent to most users. If you don't plan on doing this, you've already failed and earned a spot the Internet's next "10 worst ideas that never made it" list.
Who sets the specs? The US? Think the rest of the world will follow? Will China? Will Russia? Will Europe? Will the middle east?
How is it going to be implemented? Will it be free? Will it be corporate controlled? Will we get protocol based content filtering based on what's "allowed" and what content is not supposed to be seen?
What about net neutrality and QoS? Who sets the rules?
What about DRM? Will we get mandatory content restriction already in the protocols?
Would I really want something "new" instead of something that works? From a few recent developments in the IT sector, both technologically and legally, I can at least answer this question: NO WAY
No, I don't trust our governments to have our best interest as their main focus. So anything that they don't change can only be for the better.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sure the government will take over the internet. It was bound to happen, since the internet is a danger to the society that is building. It will take a while, because as many have said, the internet is moving slowly, but there's a hell of a lot of force behind it. Eventually it will be turned into something similar to tv. Here's the part where the no worries are involved. I believe that once it happens, the internet will just change forms and we'll have a new internet similar to this one. Whether it's rogue underground internets, or if it's a whole new system with new devices, it'll happen. As long as the need is there, we'll find a way to feed it. The fascists are always a step behind.
1) you ain't gonna ever, ever satisfy everybody...
2) anyone who talks about "pipes" and the internet is not to be trusted
3) it is a scam to make more perfectly good equipment/software obsolete (no repeat sales if it works OK as is)
"Hell, the US government couldn't convert its citizens to the metric system and they're the ones that control the measurements"
c t.html
In the US, the inch is defined as 2.54 centimeters.
In that sense, the US has been on the metric system since about 1865 +/-. At that time, the US scrapped the traditional, inaccurate, British definitions of distance, mass, etc. and redefined them in terms of meters, kilograms, etc.
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/metric-a
And, by the way, the citizens are supposed to control, not "the government".
I'm sick and tired of waiting thirty seconds or more for somebody's slow ass Web server or puny pipe to feed me my porn!
This is nearly as bad as twenty or thirty years ago sitting at a green screen dumb terminal waiting for the mainframe to respond. At least then the wait times were shorter!
Not to mention the times the sites are totally down, or "you do not have permission to access this page" because some moron misconfigured his Apache Web server. (Remember that idiot in some Southern city who thought the site was hacked because the Apache configuration page was up instead of the home page?)
Run stats on your goddamn Web sites! Then buy another box or pay for more bandwidth! Or better yet, get the fuck off the Net because you don't know what you're doing!
Are you listening,
Anybody who thinks the Net is ready for "software as a Web service" is out of his goddamn mind. No company in its right mind would ever trust company business to the Net as the only option. It's hard enough to get the stuff on the company servers to work right. Trust somebody ELSE to do it right? It is to laugh,
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
We have a winner.
Can anyone reference a national system that was successfully replaced?
exactly what do you call the conversion to the euro?