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National Projects Aim to Reboot the Internet

Posted by Zonk on from the do-it-right-this-time dept.

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.'"

6 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My connection works just fine by TodMinuit · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's worse than that: It's one of those research projects created to justify Ph.D's.

    --
    I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
  2. ISA Has Been Pitching This For Years by 1sockchuck · · Score: 4, Informative
    The Internet Security Alliance has been talking openly about an overhaul of core protocols since 2004.

    "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"

  3. Re:Come on, be realistic by Fred+Ferrigno · · Score: 3, Informative

    I can see the banks wanting a private network as well as diplomats, and the military, there is no reason why this couldn't be done. This has already been done, many times over. In the dense financial areas, banks connect to other banks with dedicated lines. Remember the Internet was all about bridging many of these smaller private networks. (Thus the term internetworking.) And when you're trying to connect sites that are physically distant, you can leverage the existing internet infrastructure to connect them without having to run dedicated lines, creating a Virtual Private Network.

    All in all the physical core of the internet is pretty much agnostic to the type of data that goes through it. The Internet as we experience it could change quite radically without much impact on the way the core operates. Even if you create a "new" capital-I Internet, chances are it's going to have to be routed through the lowercase-i internet at some point, though you'll probably never notice.
  4. Re:My connection works just fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    There's no need to rebuild the whole internet for those two items. SMTP is just another "application" that works through the internet. All we have to is come up with an alternative and try to make people embrace that solution, which should be easier and cheaper then switching the whole infrastructure.

  5. Re:Encompassing? by init100 · · Score: 3, Informative

    IP is the canonical example of a robust routing protocol. If an intermediate node drops off the net, IP will find a new route.

    Actually, IP is not a routing protocol, and will not find new routes. This task is performed by routers, talking over specialized routing protocols to forward routing updates to each other. Examples of routing protocols are OSPF and BGP. Note that these protocols run on top of IP, but that does not make IP a routing protocol.

  6. Re:This is a bad idea by ciggieposeur · · Score: 2, Informative

    Could you elaborate on this? When I used to write networking code I never "queried" to figure out what kind of protocol was installed.

    IPv6 certainly did cause some disruption, but that was all caused by needing to support both AF_INET and AF_INET6 addresses. Once you switched from inet_addr() to inet_pton() and made sure to check sockaddr_in.sa_family_t, the rest of the code was pretty much the same.