Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Researchers Aim to Replace the Internet
Gary writes "Japanese communications minister Yoshihide Suga said Friday that Japan will start research and development on technology for a new generation of network that would replace the Internet, eyeing bringing the technology into commercial use in 2020. The envisaged network is expected to ensure faster and more reliable data transmission, and have more resilience against computer virus attacks and breakdowns."
Doesn't this already exist? I mean, seriously, how many parallel projects do we need to do the same thing?
My blog
The thing i snobody wants to pay for it. Compare this to the AOL and CompuServe networks that were available for a long time. Competing with the free internet. They don't exist anymore. Just because anybody who owns it can put restrictions on you. It's not gonna work.
Yes, but unfortunately, because it's Japanese, all genitalia will be censored with mosaic pixelations. :(
Once upon a time, France had complete domination of network information communication thingies.
France probably laughed too, a big gutteral Gaulic laugh: "Silly Americains, think you can replace the Minitel? I fart in your general direction!"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Whatever they replace it with has got to be a) self-aware b) housed in a really cool-looking robotic body c) flail phallic, cybernetic tentacles on command and d) be preoccupied with conquering neighboring nations and cowering schoolgirls. I predict it will be called EcchiNet. Nuclear war and terminator endoskeletons to come later.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
RJ45 plugs forcing their way into a USB port? :)
The american internet is made of a series of tubes, right? Well, then we can guess that the Japanese version will be a series of tentacles.
http://www.nsf.gov/cise/cns/geni/
"With support from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), researchers are working together to design a bold new research platform called GENI, the Global Environment for Network Innovations. As envisioned, GENI will allow researchers throughout the country to build and experiment with completely new and different designs and capabilities that will inform the creation of a 21st Century Internet."
The problem that all these people who want to replace things like e-mail or the Internet run in to is the whole thing that makes these technologies great is interoperability. The great thing about the Internet is that you hook in to it anywhere and barring your ISP or government having blocks up, you can talk to everything. You can switch ISPs, areas of the world, devices, etc it all doesn't matter. It's not like we didn't have networks before the Internet, what we didn't have was a network that everyone and everything could work on.
So if you are going to replace it, you have to do it with something that works with the Internet. I am not going to sign on to a new network, no matter how good you say your technology is, if I can't access what's already out there. Of course a big part of what people want to do when creating a new standard is to cut off the problems that the old standard had, and thus it becomes incompatible and thus isn't workable.
I mean the problem with a new e-mail system isn't designing one that's resistant to spam. That's easy. The problem is designing one that is resistant to spam but not incompatible with existing, unsecure, e-mail. You aren't going to get people to switch otherwise. It doesn't do me any good to have a spam proof technology if all the people who need to contact me don't also use that.
Same deal with the Internet at large. I don't care how cool your new network is, if it doesn't provide me with access to everything on the Internet, and give everyone on the Internet access to servers I run, then it really isn't very useful to me.
Really, the Internet, for all its flaws, is here to stay for a long time I think. It's not that we couldn't do better, it's that we aren't willing to redo everything from the ground up and switch over. Same shit with plenty of other things. With modern technology, a HVDC power grid might be a better system than what we have. However that's not what we have, and we aren't going to replace what we do have entirely, so we keep adding to the existing system. The Internet is much harder given that you are talking about a network that spans the whole world (and that you actually can convert AC to DC and back).
It's a nice thought that "Hey, let's just tear down all this crap and rebuild it right, based on the better knowledge we have now," but it usually isn't at all practical in reality.
erm?
Ok, I admit that networking isn't my strongest suit. But... am I missing something? What do you mean "the fact that the internet cannot cope with anything other than ascii"? The internet is just a protocol for routing information from point A to point B. That information is stored in bytes. By all means correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is anything language-specific about those bytes.
Are you confusing "the internet" with "the web"? Web pages do assume (by default at least) an ascii encoding, I believe. But that's not something that needs to be solved by changing the internet, that's something you could fix just by modifying browsers. Which, surprise surprise, is something people have already done. Heck, for that matter, what's up with your original premise, that they want to "have things in a language that they can understand, using characters that appear on their keyboards"? Most Japanese web sites ARE in japanese... Most web browsers DO support unicode encoding...
Are you possibly just talking about the URLs themselves? They don't have unicode support I guess, although that's something that could [I think?] be handled just by supplying a unicode-enabled custom DNS?
Don't get me wrong, research is generally a good thing overall, and as you point out, who knows what useful things they'll come up with along the way. But most of your reasons for why reinventing the internet might be a good idea, ring hollow to me. That, and the tone of your post feels like you have a specific bone to pick with either one of the previous posters, or possibly just with america in general?
Personally, my main concern with a "new" internet is the climate in which it would be born. The current internet had the benefit of being created for non-comercial use in mind, and was deliberately designed with open access in mind. It's structure is deliberately set up in a fairly idealistic way. It has a crazy-low barrier for entry if you want to put something on it. I find it fairly unlikely that a "new" internet would be as open. Corporations in Japan (or America, for that matter) are unlikely to make that mistake again, and given the current environment (again, in both japan AND america) I find it exceedingly unlikely that any new creation on that scale wouldn't be at least partially beholden to corporate interests.
(And yes, I know, our current internet's high-ideal design is steadily eroding before the face of a never-ending series of attempted power grabs by various groups. But at least it's.... taking them longer? At least such attempts are bandaids on an unfriendly design, as opposed to having the whole thing designed to be friendly to corporate control from the get-go?)
The 'http://' and '.cn' are not Chinese characters - they are ASCII. I'm not sure how a DNS server in, say, Iceland would cope with receiving URLs written purely in Chinese, Russian, Korean and Arabic. The easy answer is that the current specification requires 'http://' and '.cn' to be written in ASCII. But to many around the world, those characters are as meaningless to them as the Chinese characters are to me. That is why there is still room for the system to be improved so that any language can be used without recourse to ASCII. Doesn't the fact that Slashdot won't even accept the URL underline this point?
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view