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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'.
A series of pipes.
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.
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
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.
Where is that idiot with the goatcx photo when it's finally appropriate?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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
"Normal People do not look at porn on the internet!"
"Ooooooohhhhhh? You have no idea!
Ready Normal People?"
"Ready."
"Ready."
"Ready."
"Let me hear it!"
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
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.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)
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.