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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.
So they're replacing the tubes with pipes. I suppose that is an upgrade. :)
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....
I think the last paragraph is disconnected with reality, but the second paragraph makes a good point or two.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
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?
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!
"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/
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.
This is why I prefer the internet the way it is. There's no "political correctness" on here. Nobody tells me how to think. Or rather, they try, but I'm free to argue with them.
And look at boobies. Don't forget boobies.
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.
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?
... 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.
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!
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.
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.
Henry 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!