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What Does the 'Next Internet' Look Like?
Kraisch writes with a link to the Guardian website, which again revisits the subject of reconstructing the internet. This time the question isn't whether it should be done, but what should the goals of a redesign be? From the article: "'There's a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you're talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you're really doing so,' said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. At the moment we are still using very clumsy methods to approach such problems. The result: last year alone, identity theft and online fraud cost British victims an estimated £414m, while one recent report claimed 93% of all email sent from the UK was spam ... Many ideas revolve around so-called "mesh networks", which link many computers to create more powerful, reliable connections to the internet. By using small meshes of many machines that share a pipeline to the net instead of relying on lots of parallel connections, experts say they can create a system that is more intelligent and less prone to attack."
1984.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
[So sorry! I just had to!
I've been hearing about for a long time, but never materializes?
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
A series of pipes.
It looks just like any other Unix implementation. Maybe a little black cube with some multi-colored letters on top. I call them sprinkles.
Oh, you mean after the Web 2.0 bubble bursts? Probably like a deflated weather balloon just waiting for capital to be pumped in for Web 3.0.
>>"'There's a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you're talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you're really doing so,' said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute.
How does that jive with anonymous cowards wanting to keep thier identity hidden?
Same as the old Internet...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
What should the "next internet" be? Wireless. Configuration-less. Always connected. High speed. Low cost. Cross-platform, cross-device, and accessible by even the simplest devices (wristwatch syncing to online time server?). Access/infrastructure not controlled by single corporations.
:)
Ever seen the Ghost in the Shell movies and series? Make that "Net" real.
Sure we could have identity- at the cost of allowing either the government or a business 100% access to our surfing habbits. No thanks. Not to mention that it still wouldn't work- you'd need some way of identifying yourself to the computer, and thats still a weak link. Humans are easily tricked.
Mesh networks? Interesting for some uses, useful for places with no cellular or wifi connectivity. Otherwise just a hassle- low speed, sharing issues, and a high risk of man in the middle attacks.
I'll keep the internet as is, please.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The game.
We don't need a new internet, the internet serves a purpose, and it does it well. What we need is something like the internet but designed to solve particular problems. A network with certified identity of all participants would be good for banking, and financial transactions, although it would be terrible as a internet replacement because part of the good of the internet is the possibility of anonymity. Similarly, I think the push to cram ever more rich functionality into JS and AJAXish things is probably a bad idea, when what we really need is a application browser in the same vein as a web browser. Don't take working systems and cram more stuff into them, make new systems designed to do what you want.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
exactly the same as the old one
except with more high quality Blu-Ray porn of course
"'There's a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you're talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you're really doing so,' said Jonathan Zittrain" The second part is HTTPS. The first part is probably client authentication.
the current one.
We're running out of IPs? Enter netmasks.
Too much SPAM? SPAM filters are top-notch now.
Virri? That's what *nix is for. =)
Seriously though, we need more bandwidth. The overall addressing scheme is fine: IPv6 works just great. BGP you say? That's fine too, so long as you configure it properly. The Internet is great and will continue to grow. Good luck overhauling the whole thing - just sit back and enjoy the evolution.
Website Hosting
If you have to ask, you're not invited.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Skynet
This internet fad is about to die. BTW, it's kind of funny how close this is to an article about the next web bubble bursting... It seems like to me we would need a lot of programmers to work on the next internet.
Since the current internet is just a series of tubes, the next generation will obviously be a big truck.
This will ensure that an internet (e.g. An EMAIL) sent by my staff will reach me. I depends on those Internets for my secondary income: bribes.
Sincerely,
Senator Ted Stevens
FTA:
Researchers in the US want at least $350m (£175m) to build the Global Environment for Network Innovations (Geni), touted by some as the possible replacement for today's internet. In Europe, similar projects are under way as part of the EU's Future and Internet Research (Fire) programme, which is expected to cost at least £27m.
Why not just allow the current internet to evolve in the direction it will, as it has thus far? Why such an overt "redesign" effort?
(Yes, I'm aware that underlying protocols will (and have) gone through formal design processes, but there's still a certain level of "evolution" that occurs along with that formality.)
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
"Identity Management" implies the existence of "Identity Managers", which I find a bit distasteful.
Also, a non-anonymous internet provides even more incentive for identity theft. "No, no it wasn't me who was looking at gay porn. See, look at the ID"
That sounds like a man-in-the-middle attacker's dream. I like today's system of "connect directly from my desktop to my bank". Count me out.
The first thing to come to my head when reading this article was Kate monster saying "The Internet is really really great...". /sigh I spend way too much time on here.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
...to fill your heart with joy.
"again revisits"
there fixed it for ya. to declare your age and to know that when you're talking to Because damnit i need to know its a real 14 year old and not Chris Hansen and Dateline!
The new internet, if it ever comes to pass, will be designed by governments and large corporations. This will mean the following:
* No more anonymity. You'll need to identify yourself just to get onto the network, and protections will be in place to keep you from hiding behind a proxy. Your computer's unique ID will be registered in your name, and it will be available to the FBI, CIA, and RIAA upon request (no warrant required).
* Large barrier to entry. No more setting up your own server without getting special permission to act as a server. There will be a barrier between servers and clients, and consumers will be second-class citizens in this regard.
* Probably less spam. Tighter controls will make it harder for spammers to get their unwanted traffic into the intertubes. Also, now that it's possible to implement an email tax, email spam could be made prohibitively expensive.
* Better security. Locking the internet down will help somewhat in keeping the criminal element out, because it will (theoretically) be a lot easier to trace where they're coming from.
So, you win some, you lose some. There's a use for this kind of network, but only for secure transactions. I don't think a "new internet" is something that anyone here would want to use.
Wiretapping and privacy concerns are already very prevalent as even at this point in time it isn't outrageously hard to track someone down online unless they are very good at covering tracks. I can't imagine how bad this would be when such information is kept and record as a standard.
I view this much in the same way as why a presidential election is kept as a secret ballot. Much of the information about browsing history and activities can reflect both positively and negatively on your own personal views which one should have the ability to keep private if they wish. In this way we can choose our religious, moral and personal views much more freely and need not tolerate unwarranted persecution.
I just hope this idea isn't being considered too seriously.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Will Al Gore be invited back to invent this one, too?
tubes don't provide enough bandwidth
Where is that idiot with the goatcx photo when it's finally appropriate?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Someone, please? Anonymity and freedom are the greatest qualities of the internet. If anything internet should seek hinder those who would sensor it, not help them.
I'll build my own internet, with backjack and hookers. Forget the internet and blackjack. Ahh, screw the whole thing.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. --Arthur C. Clarke
Whatever the change, it will be evolutionary not revolutionary. We've got too much invested to have another red-letter day like the USENET Great Renaming.
Within a few years, expect almost every computer to have a TPM-like chip installed. It will be up to the user and the operating system to provide support for this chip. However, banks and similar web sites may refuse to talk to customers who are not using these chips.
What will the future hold? Some entities, like Banks, will insist on stronger authentication than today's 2-factor authentication schemes. In some countries, all web site owners and managers will have to register themselves in an authenticated way, so the government can track the owners down if the web site is used for illegal purposes.
Citizens in free countries will be torn between the need for accountability and the need for anonymity and privacy.
In non-free countries this will not be an issue except for those trying to evade regulations requiring all Internet users to register with the government or those trying to avoid tracking.
In relatively free countries, expect government regulations in the name of fighting terrorism, thinkofthechildren, and fighting fraud. Barring a major scare, expect such regulations to creep up slowly so the general public won't rise up in revolt.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well Excuse Me, But, two attack vectors are immediately apparent:
The single pipeline is a single point of failure.
Low power jamming, or simple data flooding, of the mesh.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
ID theft is not limited to the internet. The waiter who takes away your credit card, or people who steal from your mailbox, or people who file a change of address form to intercept your mail, or employees who have access to the credit card numbers in the sales/accounting dept, employees in doctor's offices or hospital billing dept, can steal identities.
It is stupid to assume id theft is an internet problem or to find technical solution for it when there is no incentive for the credit industry to cut down on it. If a lender damages my credit rating by lax lending, the lender is liable for a sum like 10% of my annual income. Then they will clean up their act in a hurry.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But hopefully we can adopt the Australian method.
Again, a mesh network will only be as secure as the individual system on the network. Once a compromise is found, then all computers in the mesh can be compromised if they are all running the same OS or software. Even having the mesh itself run checks on each other and disabling/re-installing on the corrupt systems will only work so long against any real attack or rapid prorogation security breach.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Trolls and spammers got left behind along with everyone else who relies on anonymity.
I personally would like to see a decentralized, encrypted p2p network. Using PKI, we could create a system where you send an encrypted email out into the p2p network. It's passed around until it gets to its intended recipient, who has the decryption key. Since it's encrypted, nobody else can read it. Because of the PKI, you can be certain of who sent you the email, that it's really from them, and that nobody intercepted it on its way.
Now instead of just email, change this to any kind of data. Create your own username with a private key, and you can use it to get access to data directed to you on any machine connected to the PKI network.
Want anonymity? Just create another identity.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
We don't need another Internet. We already have one.
The Internet as we know it will always improve a series of small steps and as time goes by it will get faster, and improved. The one year your local Telco will offer 512k DSL lines, the next they suddenly have 4mbit lines available. But inbetween there was 768k, 1024k, etc.
--deckert
If you can't beat the criminals, just slow them down to the point that it is more lucrative to go back to traditional crimes like robbing corner stores.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This certainly solves the problem of anonymous hacker gangs!
There are only a few major issues:
- Identifying sellers. If you're a seller, you can't be anonymous. That's the law in California and the European Union, but enforcement is weak. We're dealing with that at SiteTruth, where we try to find the business behind the web site. If we can't, we downgrade their search ranking.
- Identifying buyers. That's a problem for the credit card industry. If they really considered it a problem, they'd fix it. They have the tools. One-time credit card numbers, confirmation by cell phone, smart credit cards - solutions are known.
- Spam Spam by legitimate businesses mostly died with CAN-SPAM, because anything clearly identifiable can be easily filtered. Everything left comes from crooks. And not very many different crooks. Notice how few different spams get through your filters. What's left is a law enforcement problem. Someday the main Viagra spammer will be found and arrested, and that problem will shrink. The US SEC is working the pump-and-dump problem.
- Vulnerable clients Make Microsoft financially liable and the problem gets fixed, fast.
We don't need to redesign the Internet, much as some telcos would like to so they can raise rates. All the major problems are at the endpoints.As long as I can stab someone in the face through it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The funny thing is, is that he wasn't joking. Read some of his other posts for reference.
Good enough idea, but internet[0] can already do this.
Proceed to shitlist everyone that you've yet to arrange a keyswap with, and enjoy fully encrypted communication.(--If both parties agree that a bond via electronic communication is 'important enough,' you'll soon see your f[r]iends converted to encryption in an eyeblink..)
Should you wish to 'invite' more people once they turn responsible, you're free to do so.
(Effectivity by using lowest acceptable sanity-denominator.)
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
It will be exactly the same, but with a new 3D shiny logo.
It's a big ball of wires and tubes, but that's not important right now.
...as Thomas Genius. Thomas was quite adept at taking ideas from his sons and then spreading the word that his sons were "special". Like the time he fixed the fuel pump on the outboard. He practically killed his son before he finally listened to the suggestion of "prime it" and then proceeded to tell everyone how he had fixed it out on the lake using a screwdriver and a pair of needle-nose pliers.
English not being the dominate net character set. The main character sets of the Indian, Chinese, and Russian languages being dominate in most net content and urls.
Just having most Chinese and Indians on the net. The governments quickly find that they don't need grand cultural firewalls. China and India making editing/expanding wikipedia a primary school class that students start in elementary school and have every year thereafter.
Fry: Wow. In my day, the only reason people went on the Internet was pornography.
Professor Farnsworth: Actually, that's still the case.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
If you really want supporting evidence you could have searched Google with "average american household debt historical" and read the links. You could, at the same time, leave your mother's basement and actually walk through a middle or lower class neighborhood.
But you don't want facts. You just want to troll, as usual.
Tell me more about what you think you know.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
This time, make it a dump truck, not a series of tubes.
Do your own research. You're the one making claims. It's your job to back them up if you have any legitimate interest in a discussion.
Searching for "average american household debt historical" provides nothing to support what you have said or implied. Perhaps you could point me to a specific example? Once again, obviously not since you never have before.
Adding in that (unsupported, suprise, suprise) ad hominem also shows your lack of interest in contributing positively to slashdot.
The sound of the sarcasm whizzing by over your head.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
They provided nothing relevant to this discussion.
Provide an example of such imaginary support the search result supposedly provides, rather continue avoiding doing so as I know you will.
They provided everything relevant to the discussion.
Please tell me more about what you know of imaginery support.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I disagree. Please tell me more about the imaginary support that you have provided.
It'll look exactly the same, but more glowy.
And better, um, fonts.
Please tell me more about the set of Google results produced with the search terms "average american household debt historical"
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
on TCP or IP packets to mark them as encrypted.
Gosh... can it be so difficult?
Bender: Behold: the Internet!
Fry: My God. It's full of ads!
Please, tell me more about how you've continued to avoid giving any support for your claim.
Please tell me more of what you think you know about me.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Sorry, not going to happen with existing hardware in people's homes and businesses. True verification of age is not currently possible online. True age determination and verification will require no less than three biometric modalities, and continuous monitoring of these metrics while the computer is in use. Sorry, a credit card does not cut it, any kid can steal those.
AI and biometric hardware is not currently up to the task (at least in the consumer marketplace for ubiquitous home use), granted this field is progressing rapidly. Considering the success of Dell I'd say that customers simply will not be willing to pay the extra money for the required hardware, they will only be willing once it is so cheap that is is unreliable.
I admit I did not RTFA, and am not aware of the timescale of the discussion, but regardless true remote age verification is a long way off.
Please, tell me more of what you think you know about me.
You're an anonymous coward with enough time and financial support to trail a homeless man on the internet.
Please tell me more of what you think you know about me.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
It won't last. Once geeks realize they can't stay anonymous, they'll do something different to exchange ideas. They'll dust off their modems, and set them to call each other at a set time. Then they'll set it up so messages are exchanged, and the receiving program will sort those messages to different internal mailboxes.
Other people will catch wind as their buddies talk about how awesome it is. More people will connect in.
Eventually, a corporation or two will realize that if they have a computer that they guarantee will be up all night, others will pay for the privilege of connecting to that computer. That computer can then route messages between connected computers. Another business will connect.
You'll have the current Internet all over again.
Simple reason: Humans don't learn from their mistakes.
You're a troll and unlikely even homeless.
Please, tell me more of your paranoid delusions.
I'll take the spam.
You're wrong.
Please tell me more of what you know about paranoid delusions.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
The Internet is fine. The problem is the people using it.
Everything is subjective.
Privacy (Anonymity), Accountability, Connected.
Pick 2.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
The trap which the Guardian falls into, and it is a common one among the public, is the notion that because people now use the Internet for certain tasks, which it was not specially designed to accommodate but rather *could* accommodate in a layered approach, that it must be redesigned to carve out special support for tasks which it now coincidentally supports, but may or may not in the future. They forget that among the original design goals of the Internet (the ARPANET rather) was to have the most robust, generic, expandable, and scalable system possible, even at the expense of support for more specific and advanced features which could be built on top of the basic protocols anyway (and they have been). In networking it is not so much what one puts into a protocol, but rather what one judiciously leaves out in order not to limit what can built on top. The basic protocols of the Internet have served us well for over 30 years now and really do need to be changed much if at all. If they want to offer new "services" then they should submit their proposals to W3C and build a special banking layer which clients must support, on top of basic HTTPS, to support the features that they want so that the principle of least knowledge applies. Alas, the principles of good engineering and good software engineering are lost on the consumer society which loves all-in-one devices that do nothing really well and don't force people to think about really *good* solutions.
From TFS: last year alone, identity theft and online fraud cost British victims an estimated £414m
My Question: How much did it cost British victims to have a correct identity and have a clerical error or other problem occur with their accounts? I bet it's 10-20 times this number. Which goes to show, there are bigger problems. I hate it when newsies put a dollar figure on something like this. Identity is not really a big problem in groupthink anyway--just abstract the individual as an average of the group. Thus, identity theft is no longer an issue, and any costs of dishonesty within the group get spread over the entire group. Then, instead of all of us wasting time proving we are who we say we are, we can spend it finding out who's dishonest and punishing them. It's a positive feedback loop instead of the negative one constantly proposed (adding more ID, not less). It's quite simple, let society do it's work. We need less regulation, not more. Just need to look at everything differently.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Paranoia is a common side effect of long-term marijuana use, as is short term memory loss. Since you seem to have forgotten your basic science principals about providing evidence for a claim, and in the next breath you claim to be the victim of a giant conspiracy, your symptoms match your drug habits. Face facts: you couldn't even remember that you made a claim earlier in this thread. Further, you're not special enough to warrant a conspiracy against you. There's no conspiracy, its just a bunch of isolated incidents of calling a spade a spade, related only by the fact that the spade in question is the same in all cases, and is very vocal about calling itself a shovel. Your fragile, pot-addled mind cant take the thought that you really are the worthless piece of human garbage that everyone around you says you are, so you instead set yourself up as some persecuted figure in your own mind, the victim of a cabal of people hellbent on ruining you, a cabal that might include even your own family (the ingrates threw you out didn't they? It can't have anything to do with the fact that you were mooching off of them, jobless, for ages, because they should have been HAPPY to pull your weight for you, magnificent creature that you are).
Please tell me more of what you know about failing - I know you have a lot of personal experience to draw upon for this one.
You have presented no evidence to support your claims.
Please tell me what else you think you know about marijuana.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Do you mean like what happened to Archibald Buttle,Something like this.
/ you may note the Official. It was the guy who played Arthur Dent in the TV version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The mesh network code name......skynet!
I'm afraid, Dave. My mind is going....I can feel it.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.
If you really want supporting evidence you could have searched Google with "marijuana symptoms" and read the links. You could, at the same time, leave your mother's basement and stop smoking.
But you don't want facts. You just want to troll, as usual.
Tell me more about what you think you know.
Why do I get the idea that, ever since Slashdot covered the FAUX "investigative" report, /b/tards have been lurking and occassionally partaking in Slashdot conversations?
I dunno if that's good or bad, but a lot of comments crack me up now. Welcome, anon.
Rudd-O - http://rudd-o.com/
And yet you cannot provide a single link.
Tell me more of what you think you know about marijuana.
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
can we make it out of real tubes this time? politicians will like this, they wont sound like idiots when describing the intertubes. Also, imagine the bandwidth potential of zipping physical DVDRs to your friends? What would bittorrent be like with real tubes! probably a big mess but whatever!
Balderdash!
just like the internet is now, but with porn. Lots and lots of porn. . .oh wait. Nevermind.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Since you never present any evidence to support your claims, I felt no obligation to do the same. The evidence is there, go find it yourself, unless you're willing to pay me to do your research for you - not that I need the money, but if you don't have it then you can't give it to the drug dealer, who in turn can't give it to the supplier, who in turn can't use it to make more poison to sell in the streets.
Please tell me more about what you think you know about the scientific method.
"Please enter your user ID and Password and Press Enter."
Or maybe
"By visiting this page you are agreeing to all terms of the EULA. Please read below. The terms of the EULA are subject to change at any time without notification."
You haven't told me anything of what _you_ know about marijuana.
Please tell me what you think you know about marijuana.
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
What does the internet need?
* IPv6
* Improved infrastructure between backbone and modem.
Maybes...
* Local Squids for static content, to reduce redundant transfers?
* Decent and supported multicast protocols, things like RDM, etc?
With the possible exception of multicast, all of these things do not require any fundamental changes, and simply require some new boxes and cables at the fringes.
As for security, annonymity, spam, ads, ID, blah, all that can be dumped quite easily on top of IP and the existing infrastructure without needing to raze the existing perfectly fine system to the ground and build ""The Next Internet"", if it ain't broke, don't fix it...
You could even call it Web 2.0, adding some over-hyped corporate/governmental junk to an over-used buzzword saturated with undiluted meaningless, whose very existence is indicative of managerial ignorance and the persistence of some web designers to "build" broken, crappy websites which overuse and overdo otherwise useful frameworks, in the mistaken belief that this is somehow better than simple, concise, cross-platform websites which actually *work*, and don't slow client machines to a crawl.
http-über-s://bank.bank anyone?
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
It's easy to see what the corporate oinkers and the dot gov goons want, an internet that looks like a blend of your cable TV package and your cell phone package. No more nomadic wandering as you choose, no, no, no, that would not do. They want you to be cyber licensed, pay tolls on every different internet tube road you travel,your machine will have to be "trusted" just like cars get inspected, and have cyber cameras recording all those travels. They want you to pay a hefty bill forever, and really restrict how you use it. This is easy to see and it's been coming in stages for several years now.
This is one time where the car analogy really fits. Street traffic only, registered and insured vehicles, licensed drivers, no off roading or engine mods, etc.
Please tell me more about the set of Google results produced with the search terms "marijuana symptoms"
Look's like the memory loss has affected you again. See the above posts.
You have not told me anything of what you know.
Please tell me what you know.
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
Please tell me what you know about memory loss.
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
You have not understood anything of what I have posted.
Please tell me what you can understand.
Please tell me what you think you know about my thoughts on your memory loss.
Please tell me what you know of understanding.
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
Please tell me what you know of knowing.
Downloadable V!@gr@ and wireless teledildonics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics
crap.
We're already climbing it, there's no going back down without going backwards.
The current Internet is good, but lacks the necessary capacity to meet demands.
They're using their grammar skills there.
WINTERMUTE
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
is that they should build this internet for them and let us have our unregulated internet- I am fine by that - I would rather have multiple connections in my house and if I wanted to I could browse their crappy network of ads and stores and "regulated" propaganda boards- but I could then flip a switch and be on my unregulated smaller network where we can share files and ideas and discussions without dealing with morons who seem to think that everything that we do online if not kiddie porn related is somehow supporting terrorism.
Yup. The the stuff that makes the internet cool is the simplicity of the implementation, and the anonymity. The first step with all "new" internets is to break both of those things in the name of making it "better".
... and that sort of overhead is exactly what a lot of people seem to want to put back in.
You got that right.
Every time some idiot starts blabbering on about the "new internet" that they want to create, usually with lots of authentication, encryption, or error-correction / security features built in at very low levels, I can't help but point out what happened the first time such people tried to create a global packet-switched network: it was called X.25. And except in niche applications, it's dead.
It died for a lot of good reasons, too. Compared to the Internet-standard protocols that eventually won out, X.25 was complex and too heavy at low levels; it was difficult to implement, and the equipment was expensive. (Although, X.25 with a lot of the error-correction stripped out is still around, as ATM.)
Whenever people design protocols, particularly low-level ones, there is a tendency to try and "forklift upgrade"; force any features that seem like they'd be useful on everyone. In many ways I think this is one of the things that's currently holding IPv6 back -- rather than just replacing IPv4, they gave in to the siren song of additional features, and mandated stuff like IPSec, which would be better (and in most current implementations are) done at higher levels when users want security.
It's important to understand why the protocols that we use today, succeeded -- they didn't win because they offered the most features. They became dominant because they were flexible, cheap to implement, and worked. They let developers and engineers do what they wanted to do, without having to implement a lot of crap that's unnecessary in most applications
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think you have an odd sense of "poorest of the poor".
I'm 25 years old, just finished at university (with a crappy degree that won't be of much use to me), and have been working between half and full time at about 2x minimum wage for the past five years while in school. I rent a room in a four-bedroom house with some friends of mine, at the lowest rates I can find in this town. (Admittedly an expensive town - Santa Barbara, CA - but it's where I grew up and I'm still here). I couldn't afford to rent the whole house out at these rates, much less make payments on a house of my own. I have a crappy 15-year-old car (which I own outright), a five year old computer, and not many other possessions besides clothes, bedding and kitchen wares. I've got no debt, and I managed to save up a few thousand dollars before moving out of my father's shit hole of a house (parents are dirt poor), but if it weren't for those meager savings, "one fender bender, one alternator failure, one radiator failure or one medical emergency" would put me in the dire straights you describe.
Yet apparently, I'm well above the government-defined poverty level (I make between $17K and $20K a year; poverty level is apparently around $10K/yr), and I appear to be better off than most of the people my age I know in person (though people I meet online seem remarkably more wealthy for some reason). The only reason I have any money saved up is because I worked a year or so without paying any rent before moving out on my own, and because my folks are poor enough that most of my education has been free; and because I work every waking hour I'm not in school and live within the limits of what I can make off of that. I don't have to live off ramen or cup-o-soup. But I'm still in with the "poorest of the poor" in your book - because I rent, I own an old car, and one big catastrophe could put me back at ground zero or worse, into debt.
I'll totally agree with you that people who make $50K+ a year and are drowning in debt just don't know how to live within their limits, but not everybody who makes less than that is "the poorest of the poor" - some people are a lot poorer. (And this is only considering within America; by comparison to most [though certainly not all] of the world, we're all stinking rich). I honestly don't know whether or not to consider myself poor anymore; in comparison to most of my friends I seem to be rich, but then the impression I get from people like you online is that I should be paying off my own home and investing in a retirement fund by now.
I guess the point I'm making is regarding your comment "But for this section...". Not everybody reading Slashdot is a successful engineer making big money in Silicon Valley; and the people besides that group aren't all "the poorest of the poor". We may be poor (I really don't know anymore), but there's a lot of us out here, and we're not some kind of marginalized minority fringe group with no representation on the Internet, so please don't talk about us in the third person and lump us in with the poor kids working the fry basket at McDonalds.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I'm less interested in what it's going to look like but far more interested in how politicians are gonna try and describe it!!
I guess a "PLEASE_CACHE"-header might be something cool to have.
In IPv6 you can add extra Information to your packets in headers. One of those could simply say "if you can cache the data from this connection, please do it". Essentially if a router gets such a packet it would try to run it thought a transparent proxy. If this should not work, it will just be passed on as it was.
The effect would be trumendous. The network of routers would become a gigantic content distribution network. Imagine a podcast, if the router closest to the server supports this header there would only be one true download. The rest would be done by the network.
Of course we _have_ to go to meshed networks. Every participant of the network should have (wireless) lines to his neighbours. The equipment must be in the hands of the users. This not only gets rid of network "hotspots" where a lot of connections combine, but also makes the network immune to censorship and business practices. A meshed network would be considerably cheaper to operate. People already have WLAN routers at home. More carefull placement and different firmware would do it.
As for phishing I'd simply say, "get a life". This is not really a problem. Sites dealing with sensitive personal information should just use HTTPS and publish their fingerprint via another means of communication. Encrypt and sign your e-mails, especially when in a company. But this is outside the scope of a "new internet", that's just normal day to day stupidity.
Sorry if this sounds too obvious, but the next internet will be invisible. It won't be "crammed" into a web browser because new standards will be created and adopted to accomplish new tasks. The OS will essentially be the browser, and vice versa.
It will be like a network terminal in that most of the operating system will function remotely, but it will still allow users to customize all the local hardware and store things off-line like a normal PC. The difference is, everything will "just work." You add a new video card (that is, until video processing becomes remote as well), the remote operating system instantly has the correct drivers ready without any further user interaction. Apps, including storage-intensive apps like games, are stored remotely and are never installed, only "launched" with the click of a button (or perhaps purchased first, and then launched). The bandwidth and server horsepower will both be there.
Performance will be sacrificed at first, but as hardware technology advances nobody will care anymore. Remember back when we wanted all our games written in assembly language? Control will also be sacrificed, but again, people will stop caring. Those who want a machine they can have control over will stick with old-fashioned operating systems like Linux, but the general population will just relinquish control and go with whatever InterOS interface ships with their PC. The technology will be so standardized that every PC manufacturer will have their own custom version of it. Either that, or Microsoft will just start giving it away for free.
With less local control over software, more privacy concerns will be raised, but, even moreso than today, this will be battled via a natural system of checks and balances, where various apps are sold or freely provided to counter the privacy concerns raised by other apps.
I think that's "93% of all email *received in* the UK was spam" ;-)
The internet is fine as it is. What we need is a new World Wide Web, i.e. a standard for distributed interactive multimedia applications that is secure, safe and scalable.
The problem has never been what will we build next, but whose will, will be honored in what get's built next.
We can create a utopian masterpiece, the machine upon which human evolution will be pinned, or we can create an information toilet, a retched bowl of immense proportions into which we each can defecate our basest opinions and urges.
To begin with, we must separate commerce from other human enterprise. Business has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt it has no capacity to play nice, play fair, play at all. It lives by only one rule, he who has the most marbles wins, and gets all the marbles at any cost. This is no infrastructure upon which to build the future of human communication, and it's certainly no place to expand what's possible for human beings.
Business needs a network, it needs to communicate and interact. Give it the WWW and the resources to help it advance, and then draw a line between commerce and the rest of human endeavor. If the primary human network should create new business opportunities, if forays into art, and thought, and invention, and communication, and human evolution, produce viable new products, then very happily, take those products to an appropriate commercial venue not on the primary human network. We need to do business, because it's a necessary human endeavor, we just need to keep it separate from other endeavors because it doesn't coexist well with other human endeavors. Similiar to the idea of separation of church and state.
While we're at it we should probably take religion and politics out of the primary human network, not because they aren't important, but because they are the source of so much human contention. Conversations about religion and politics would be perfectly fine, the actual practice of religion and politics should probably be restricted to a set of special service networks designed to empower and promote critical social processes, while at the same time having powerful resources for managing coexistence, contention, conflict, and the normal byproducts of the clashing of ideologies.
The primary human network should be ubiquitous. It should have massive bandwidth capable of handling whatever new possibilities become available (e.g. telepresencing and even brain to brain communication.) It should have a nearly infinite memory. It should be easy to access, easy to use. It should recognize human rights, and honor them to an exceptional level. It should transcend religion, culture, political systems, and ideologies, while at the same time connecting people and allowing the majority of humanity to learn and appreciate their wonderful diversity in these areas (the real blow for freedom here is it will become so valuable, that only the worst despotic regimes would deny access to it, because it would so improve the quality/value of life for his/her people.) The primary human network should be robust. It should use powerful authentication technology (biometric or better) to eliminate fraud (though the elimination of money and commerce on this network, should make most of the really offensive problems go away.) Anyone caught trying to perform an egregious or offensive act (soliciting sex from minors, engaging in violent or illegal activities) should lose access privileges up to and including the rest of their lives. In a world where human productivity, growth, connection, and full self expression would come from such a network, such a banning will be a truly powerful disincentive. Tremendous repositories of human knowledge, human culture, art, philosophy, science, and common interest should be made freely available. Commercial enterprise will have no say whatsoever in controlling, limiting, adjusting, or profiting from the information commons. Copyright and other IP laws will be amended to protect the sanctity of the information commons, and limit the abuse of business to prevent works of IP from becoming part of the information commons in a fair and reasonable amount of time (no extensions.) All views will be fairly shared, and eva
I'm not a teen (far from it) and I've managed to completely lose patience with Freenet, too. I want anonymity but Freenet isn't a usable answer. Every Freenet advocate always says the same thing: "Leave your machine on for a while and it'll do all sorts of data transfer in the background enabling it to better access resources. After it's been on for a while, things get faster."
That's a lie. Over the past couple of years, I've tested this 4 or 5 times. I've set up a dedicated machine, installed Freenet, given the machine a dedicated connection, made a bunch of information requests, and walked away for a week. Sometimes two weeks. Freenet *never* gets faster. NEVER. It NEVER approaches a usable state. Click a link to a small amount of data and it may arrive tomorrow. Click a link to a file of more than a meg and it NEVER arrives.
I'm told that *sites* on Freenet are a lost cause but if you only use Freenet for Frost, then it becomes useful. I may try to test one more time but my experience thus far is that Freenet is nothing but a fraud.
The move from v.5 to v.7 was the last nail in the coffin as far as I'm concerned. Freenet has now moved from an attractive concept that bitterly disappoints to a stupid idea (anonymity doesn't exist if you have to know somebody to participate) that probably won't get a chance to disappoint me since it's not even worth investigating anymore.
Maybe, if I've got a week to waste in the future, I may try one last time to use v.5 and Frost. But I kinda doubt it. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 5 or 10 times, shame on me."
I am sure he is working on the upgraded version. But don't forget - Google will be black. In fact, so will /. !
Navy Tim www.navytim.com
Bigger tubes.
Are the governments and institutions now calling for better identity management the people who could have helped promote public key based id technology in the 1990s, who could have encouraged better user interfaces, the infrastructure needed to verify ID etc.? Or are they the people who either stuck their heads in the sand or actively discouraged the development of a public-key based system?
Why is it that I still cannot give my bank my PGP certificate and tell them I want any emails they send me encrypted? Why does my bank not sign its emails? Why is it that even companies that used to offer PGP-based communication (Network Solutions, Twate) don't any more?
Two answers: governments wanted to discourage the use of encryption technology in the 1990s; anybody working in the security industry wanted to control every aspect of it and nobody wanted to promote the use of interoperable standards.
And, of course, the OpenPGP crowd didn't help themselves by opposing features (additional decryption keys) that made PKI attractive to business, andengaged in endless arguments about when you should and shouldn't sign a particular key.
The truth of the matter is this: we could have strong identity on today's internet starting right now - if governments stopped being scared of the technology that makes it possible, and if institutions and software makers adopted open standards wholehartedly.
That's funny, all of the thought I've put into this involves making a completely anonymous, untracable network, with identifiable information only existing if it is explicitly turned on. But what do I know, I suppose I should just plug myself back into the Matrix like a good little monkey.
"By using small meshes of many machines that share a pipeline to the net instead of relying on lots of parallel connections, experts say they can create a system that is more intelligent and less prone to attack."
... doing what again? Intelligence at the edge, speed at the core - that's what makes the Internet scale. Academics and bureacrats, even when well-meaning, frequently confuse what's good in theory with that works in practice, due to a lack of operational experience.
... it's good for you, citizen!)
so by reducing redundancy and parallelism (and creating more single points of failure that affect larger swaths of the Net), we are
"The Internet is failing! Film at 11!"
(please stop using it so we can build one that gives us more control
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
The first thing that we need is to consider how we can design a network that is immune from centralized authority. Security, anonymity, and privacy should be primary concerns and considered as a basic right of all humanity. Once we bear this in mind, it becomes quite obvious what we need to do to redesign the Internet. We need to control by not controlling. The mistake that is commonly made by people in our industrialized societies of today is that fear leads them to believe that, to paraphrase a historical great citizen of these United States, we must exchange liberty for security, when in fact it is that very liberty that results in our security.
Tyrannical private corporations and governments the world over are doing everything in their power to ensure that your basic human rights are denigrated in favor of their power-seeking and profit-driven motivations. It is within our power to stop this peacefully and relatively quickly, though it may mean at least temporarily abandoning some of the seeming benefits of living in such a technologically advanced system. Ultimately, though, we face much more serious long-term problems, such as energy scarcity and global climate change, that may obviate the ability of any organization to maintain the levels of centralized control and authority that they evidently crave.
Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom all want to be free, and so do People. Let us promote the cause.
But deregulation is working fine where I live in the US. I can get broadband three or four different ways (cable, DSL, satellite, etc.) and I pay ~$20 a month for a 6mbps(down) connection.
Mind telling what you pay and your speed over there in the central planning paradise, just for comparison?
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Bigger tubes!!
I can't wait for Al Gore to invent it!
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."