Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
The proof here is definitely in the pudding. If they can offer some real alternative without making existing datacenters/other infrastructure redundant, they might be in with a chance. However, I put the chance of this at 0.
Something of a community-spread movement might gain success and momentum, for example an anonymity drive, organised by a central website that gives ISPs/websites stickers... etc. Yes, this is prior art.
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.
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.
Well it might be a good opportunity to use IPv6 so IP hoarding won't be too much of a problem.
I think you're being a little optomistic in thinking that the US doesn't want to control what people can do. Given enough time i'd pretty much expect the internet to become the christianet if it was just up to the US.
Instead I think the entire thing should be organised by Yukoslavia, not because they'll be neutral about it, but because they never get a turn at having way too much power.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Without pr0n, the "new" internet will go nowhere. Pr0n drives innovation!
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?
IPv6 addresses many of the current problems. IPv6 is a standard, supported by many vendors. IPv6 plays nicely with IPv4, so you don't have to break the world in order to deploy it. IPv6 has been around for years...
Seriously, if we can't get people to adopt IPv6, what's the chance that people are going to adopt something more disruptive?
I've seen some of these proposals, and technically they're interesting. From the perspective of getting the market to move in a new direction, things will have to get a lot worse before they're even taken seriously.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
People have been talking about this since 1998. On Halloween of that year, Eric Raymond had several Microsoft internal emails forwarded anonymously to him. They outlined how Microsoft could respond to the Open Source Threat. The single most telling quote runs like this:
At the World Wide Web conference in Amsterdam In 2000, Lawrence Lessig spoke clearly about the threat to the principle of the 'end to end' network (i.e. the Internet as designed). At that time he was speaking about the intent of the telcos to subvert it through WAP, but the prophetic nature of his comments are made visible by endeavours such as these.
Make no mistake, folks: the shiny new future that's being laid out for us here will have none of the freedoms that we enjoy today, where access to information is concerned. This is something that needs to be opposed early, loudly and without compromise.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
More like they'll design it so no body can hide. All of your communications, whether political speach or not, will be kept in a file with your name on it. J. Edgar Hoover and COINTEL all over again. The NAZIs and KGB wouild of loved this.
FalconShould there be a Law?
As to the rest of the paragraph, it's just as misguided. When was the last time you weren't able to connect to the internet due to "equipment failures" other than your own CPE? Or the last time you couldn't get to a site because there was no route to it? Personally (and I use the internet every day, and have for the last 7-8 years, just like almost everyone else on this site), I haven't seen it. The only time I get "Cannot connect to site" is when a page tries to access doubleclick, which I have routed to 127.0.0.1 in
This article sounds like propaganda from the Committee for a More Profitable Internet.
Just junk food for thought...
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!
The only reason that the Internet isn't a fascist's wet DRM dream presently is because when it started there was no need (only authorized personnel had access anyway, and the only media was ASCII porn) and by the time they (authoritarians, facists, and control freaks) first realized what was happenning, it was too late.
You better believe that if a new Internet were designed today, it would be another TV: You'd have your choice of ad-riddled corporate crap and nothing more. There would be no blogs, no personal servers, no freedom at all. Anything genuinely good would be a rare exception, not the rule. You would be locked out from doing what *you* want to do and forbidden from taking the initiative.
We're at the rising edge of a frightening tide. Governments are forcing federal spyware into the central offices and trunks of the Internet (see: AT&T installing signal splitters and roomfuls of NSA spy computers in main offices). Media corporations are perverting hardware into limiting rather than enabling you with DRM. Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are all playing along with it, putting in DRM at every level. If something isn't done, NOW, it's gonna get seriously bad. Now they want to do a ground-level rebuild of the software running the internet... You expect them not to install corporate and government control throughout if they succeed?
At any rate, this will never happen... There's far, FAR too much intertia behind the current internet. I hope.
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.
You probably wouldn't want what you're asking for. To my house there is exactly one line. I could of course be sharing it inside the house or running an open WiFi net, but beyond that it's quite limited who the traffic is for. Any serious attempt at anonymization I've seen have been based on relaying information, which means I'd have to use my upload as well. Since upload and download needs to be in balance across the network, you're already down to a 1:1 up/down ratio. I'd say a minimum number of bounces is two (because otherwise you're either the sender or requester of the info), which makes for a total of three connections. Congratulations, you've now slowed down the Internet to 1/3rd of your upload speed. Plus whatever fake traffic you need to fool traffic analysis.
That, and to speak nothing of latency. Bouncing something around the world adds a latency which would in all likelyhood make it impossible to do several things, like playing FPS/RTS games and VOIP. You're down to IRC-like response time, which aren't that great. Nevermind the incredibly annoyance of everything responding as if you were still on dial-up. And even if all that was fine, it still really only solves the client side, there are still limits to the protection a hidden service can offer you. Essentially, if the network can route to your service that very same information can be used to track it down. It might not be enough on its own, but it should certainly find you some suspects which can be traffic analyzed etc. The only completely safe "service" are the ones that are distributed across the network, which is typically limited to just file storage and by their nature can not be interactive.
And once you get right down to it, anonymous networks don't exist on fairie wings and pixie dust. No matter what you need to have a "real" routing layer between the physical hosts. What's on top of that is not really necessary to tie in to it, it'll all be application data in the OSI models (level 7). In thar data you basicly need to build up the OSI model again from level 3 (network, transport, session, presentation) until you get to the real application data. But it's all very nicely layered, and I haven't seen any reasons to mix them together particularly since we haven't actually agreed on any standard or even close. In short, it's neither ready nor would it be wise or even possible to try to make the entire Internet anonymous.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings