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.'"

Comments

Re:Encompassing?

[TodMinuit]

As stated in the whitepaper:

Designed over 30 years ago, the success of the Internet is a testament to the foresight of
a handful of visionary researchers. Hundreds of millions of users rely on it for business
and pleasure; and it is now hard to imagine a world without it.

But our reliance on the Internet makes us victims of its success, and vulnerable to its
shortcomings. Some of the shortcomings are self-evident, such as the plague of security
breaches, spread of worms, and denial of service attacks. Even without attacks, service is
often not available due to failures in equipment or fragile routing protocols. And its
behavior is unpredictable making it unsuitable for time-critical applications. Other short-
comings are less obvious: The Internet was designed for computers in fixed locations, and
is ill-suited to support mobile end-hosts; it uses packet-switching making it hard to take
advantage of improvements in optical switching technology; it neither ensures anonymity,
nor facilitates accountability; and the demise and restructuring of most network service
providers suggests that providing network service is not profitable.

In summary, we dont believe that we can or should continue to rely on a network that is
often broken, frequently disconnected, unpredictable in its behavior, rampant with (and
unprotected from) malicious users, and probably not economically sustainable.

I think the last paragraph is disconnected with reality, but the second paragraph makes a good point or two.

Re:Come on, be realistic

[Charcharodon]

Sure we can, just unplug the main computers and presto, the internet is no more. :)

You are right it'll probably be a second, third or even fourth network. 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.

I think the whole 911/999 VOIP "crisis" is overblown, it would be simpler just to make local emergency only cell phones for the home or just have a emergency registration site for the VOIP providers I don't know why so many people are getting worked up over it.

Now as far as setting up a new internet, the trick is to keep quite a few countries outside of the US and the majority of the EU from having a say how things are set up because far too many of them want way too much control over what people can do.

Complete Anonymity would be a great feature

[Distan]

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.

Re:This is a bad idea

[Eravnrekaree]

I certainly agree with this. I have heard of plans similar to this to force people to upgrade, and at the same time accept DRM loaded software. When we look at this, the current network protocols work just fine. TCP actually works pretty well, its not really something that is TCP does have a few limits built in I believe (i believe it is the window sizes), that might make it a bit limited with extremely high bandwidth connections, but those limits are far from being reached and it is more than adequate for video, audio and other things. New versions of TCP can be developed if needed, and those can be made to work side by side with the older protocols. To say that everything has to be scrapped is just beyond ridiculous, since what upgrades which are needed can be made incrementally and with backwards and forwards compatability. It would be completely wasteful of resources, since most router and equipment actually works pretty well. If needed it can be upgraded, but to say everything has to be thrown own, when it is functioning just fine, is beyond ridiculous. The current internet is working well, and with proper management it will continue to do so.

One of the major problems with IP6 is the lack of really much of an expectation that it will need to interoperate with IPV4 for a very long time. One problem is, no one will upgrade to IPv6 since there are few websites that use it, and since no one is upgrading to IPv6, few websites are inclined to provide it. ISPs, with newer OSs if IPv6 is autoconfiguring, the users computer will automatically configure itself for IPv6. But to expect all ISPs to adopt IPv6, especially before IPv4 address space runs out, is just beyond arrogant. There has to be expected that IPv4 ISPs will be online long after IPv4 address space is maxed out, and IPv4 systems will need to be able to access IPv6 systems coming online then. Ipv6 accessing ipv4 hosts is simple, make ipv4 a subset of ipv6. One of the major problems is IPv4 being able to access IPv6 hosts, new hosts can be given v6 and v4 addresses, but this means that the address space problem has not been solved. But ISPs can be expected to continue using only v4 with some existing users, for some time after v4 address space is exhausted. There are ways for v4 to access v6, through a concerted effort of DNS servers and routers. When a v4 peer askes the local DNS server for a the IP address of a server which is v6 only server, the DNS server will return a fake v4 IP address to the v4 peer, and tell the router (which would have connections to the Ipv6 net) to to route all packets going to that fake IP coming from that v4 peer, to the IPv6 destination, converting the packets to Ipv6 as well. If a IPv4 peer wishes to access a Ipv6 peer by Ipv6 address, a neat trick also using DNS would be used, a special ip6 top level domain would be created, and ipv4 clients could request Ipv6 addresses by specifying ipv6 addresses as subdomains as of this ip6 tld. such as: 2222.2222.2222.2222.2222.2222.ip6 A portion of v4 address space needs to be set aside for this scheme for use for the fake IP addresses. Proxy servers could be provided by ISPs to convert Ipv6 hyperlinks to hyperlinks using the ipv6 tld notation. Newer web browsers could automatically do this for the user if they are on an ipv4 only network. Problem solved! This would require no changes on the user end, and the ISP could even use 6-over-4 to connect their routers to ipv6 networks even if they are not directly connected to an upstream ipv6 provider.

Encryption

[KonoWatakushi]

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.

Re:My connection works just fine

[jc42]

Yup, some "needs" are just impossible to meet with the Internet in its present state. Like the "need" for a single agency to monitor all Internet traffic. Or the "need" for some folks to control every physical traffic channel. Or the burning need of one familiar industry group to be able to decide unilaterally which computers are "trustworthy" enough to connect to the Web.

Actually, we've long had other networking protocols that satisfied all these "needs". In fact, pretty much every network ever invented has satisfied them, except for the Internet Protocol.

The reason that IP won was that it's the only one that scales up to the size we have now. If you implement any of those "needs", you restrict your network to a small subset that doesn't violate that "need".

Organizations tend to prefer nice, neat setups that are organized hierarchically and can be monitored and audited. This is very useful for a single organization. But it isn't workable for a universal system. That requires parallel, independent development of the parts. If there's a central authority with local veto power, the system can't grow past what that authority's management can understand.

With any sort of central controlling authority, you can't have the explosion of development that has happened on the Internet. This can only happen if people have a way of developing what they want on their own. We can see this pretty clearly by comparing it the cell-phone system, which has the potential to give everyone full access everywhere and make the Internet look puny in comparison. But it's blocked by being limited to only devices and apps that the cell-phone companies' management approve and permit.

For a "new, improved Internet" to succeed, it must make independent local development easier than the current Internet. If it has any sort of controlling central authority, it will just remain a niche player that can't be adopted by enough people and expand to replace the current Internet.