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GENI To Replace Internet, Gets $12M Funding
Postglobalism writes "A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations. Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a 'clean-slate' approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969."
Do we have enough porn for an entirely new Internet?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Web 2.0 isn't good enough, let's have OSI 2.0! Love them X.400 email addresses, wot?
Oh goody, nothing better than the knowledge that we can just instantaneously shift the entire world from the Internet to something else effectively... I get the feeling big outages will happen... what about backwards compatibility?
Never disregard the raw power inherent to stupidity... they call it "dumb luck" for a reason...
Other challenges, indeed. Such as surveillance, "trusted" computing, IP "protection", etc.
The new internet will be locked down much tighter, I am certain.
They need to ditch this open, uncontrollable Internet for something the governments have more control over.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And the data mining treasure hunt begins as the internet becomes an ancient temple, hooray.
Maybe they can make it like Neuromancer and we can dive in brain-first. >:3
Because that worked so well with Vista. Oh wait. . . . .
For better or worse, I think that we're stuck with what we've got. We'd really be better off improving the Internet we have (DNSSEC, end-to-end encryption on all protocols by default, PKI for the masses) than redesigning it from the ground up.
Even if they had 12 billion dollars, it wouldn't scratch the surface of the cost of recreating the Internet.
Will it run linux? and Will it finally be able to handle IPv6?
But seriously there are more pressing issues that could use that meager 12 million dollars. How about we cut the defense spending in half and invest it in alternative fuels? That way we won't need to milk other countries for oil. My super over simplified view of the world is entirely mine and no one else!
First off, once you read past the sensationalist headlines, the article just says that they are establishing a very high capacity research network to study new protocols, not trying to create a parallel infrastructure. However, that being said, trying to redesign the Internet's protocols from scratch isn't necessarily a bad idea, the current model is definitely showing its age. For example, TCP has a lot of issues on links with large bandwidth-delay products, resulting in lots of extensions and forks to support these links.
The real problem is getting a critical mass to switch. Just look at the state of IPv6 support in home networking gear and the lack of implementation all over the web. My guess is that this will lead to some new standards that will maybe be used by people doing experiments with tons of data and nobody else. Don't expect to see this work coming to a router near you.
This new version of the wheel offers an anti-bubblegum coating, side curtain airbags to protect it from damage during a crash, and laser-etched tread for maximum efficiency. Seriously, why use tires when you can have a shiny new set Wheels 2.0?
Typical. I've only just finished printing out the current Internet.
This is enormous waste of time. I vote to redirect that 10Gbps line to my house and we can split the 12 mil on beer.
Putting this in a little bit of perspective. 12 Million isn't really all that much money when you consider the cost of a data center, or even a fair size building.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
And all were abysmal, expensive failures. The marketplace can be extremely conservative at times.
Since the Internet is really just a collection of smaller privately-owned networks connected on common backbones, is it even possible to 'replace' it? I'm not sure what the goal is here. Sounds like herding cats to me.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
... control, as in censorship, and target marketing. Where you can have a web site but nobody can see it .... now that's security....
So, a system where being on the internet is a right, but being seen on the internet is a privilege you have to pay for.
Invest in Tubes Industry.
They will need a lot of those.
nt
I can donate some tubes.
Subject is from The Simpsons, in case you didn't know.
Interesting news. Big issues, though: compatibility with the old internet will have to be maintained during a change-over time period... compatibility with old infrastructure must be maintained (running old IP, IPv6, and whatever else they develop for the "New" Internet on the same lines will be a challenge)... and government regulation and intervention should be minimal, regardless how much $$$ they pump in.
If they pull this off, they'll have really accomplished something worthwhile. Otherwise, it's just vaporware and an interesting experiment in re-designing the wheel.
The internet we use today is totally different from 1969 (or 1981, or 1991). The internet evolves Darwin style already. Who uses DecNET or Banyan Vines? How about uunet, gated, gopher, or telnet?
It's gone, baby, gone.
Hell - we're having enough trouble replacing a simply-ass DNS server... who can imagine a peaceful replacement of entire the Internet (other than power-hungry numbnuts?)
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
How about cutting wellfare in half and have ten times the money. Exactly how many poor people do we really need anyway?
GoreNet and not GENI
A new architecture means there are thousands of things to be worked out and fixed before it can get to the same level as the current implementation. Think a decade or two, with significant funding (think billions).
Systems that evolved are often not ideal or perfect, but they do work. Iterative evolution is important, because sometimes it's just not feasible to design something.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
$12 million dollars to design an infrastructure to replace a multi-billion (maybe trillion?) dollar network from the ground up?
I know that they're not implementing the new network right now, but I don't see how this isn't just throwing money away. $12m dollars is the governmental equivalent of chicken scratch
Check out my sysadmin blog!
So... the new Internet gets less than half the funding than a search engine that don't do searches very well?
Alright, you guys make this whole "new internet" thing, and we're you're done we'll just all switch to it all at the same time OK? We just need to schedule a date for when to switch to that new Internet thing. We should do it during a quiet time of the year, the month of December sounds appropriate, and I reckon it should take you guys quite a few years..
How does December 21st, 2012 sound? I have nothing in my schedule for *that* day... Too apocalyptic maybe?
You just got troll'd!
As previously stated, this new internet will be a surveillance (gov) / marketing (corp) tool that will resemble cable TV only providing approved "channels" (urls) and streams of content.
Windows Vista Help Forum
This thing has boondoggle written all over it.
I assume the Internet2 will be an attempt to change the networking protocols from the ground up to remove any inefficiencies that exist in the current protocol and build a faster more efficient internet. But, the main problems that they're definitely going to face are;
a. Rolling this out over the current infrastructure. Any compromise on this will result in a slower speeds wiping out any advantages that the new protocols provide.
b. Requiring both the current and the new protocols to co-exist. No one, especially in developing countries, is going to take in the massive up front costs to rollover to Internet2. It has to be done in phases.
c. Adoption by telecom companies. This is the only way Internet2 will succeed. But in the current state of affairs, they're not even willing to support IPV6. Who's going to convince them to move to Internet2?
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
The internet 3.0 has been laucned, superceding both the internet 1.0, as well as !The!Internet!Public!Beta, and the Internet 2.0. We are taking our time, inching along with this one, as we are completely reinventing the wheel on this one, ( 18 Wheeler, +steering wheel, +3rd wheel comes to an even x14 ( Thats Hexidecimal for 20 )).
Just another private network only for use in ivory towers. Nothing for us serfs....
( Isnt there some long-beard inventing Internet 4.0? )
Why not cut the half the poor people in half, and feeding the other half of the poor people with the halved poor people? Then you would have (roughly) a bajillion times the money.
Oscar Goldman:
The Internet, A network barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic internet. GENI will be that internet. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, harder, deeper, faster.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
The current internet was DESIGNED to be a peer-to-peer system, so that the more computers hooked to it, the more capacity everyone theoretically can access. Given what we've seen of attempts to create choke points (throttling) and thus artificial scarcity and high prices, it is logical to suspect any alternative architcture, if it better-accommodates the greed behind such attempts.
I'm not saying, by any means, that our present internet is perfect, it isn't, but I am inclined to view any attempt to rebuild it from scratch with grave suspicion. We got lucky the first time, since the academics managed to build something worthwile before the regulators, incumbents, and other vultures took notice. That will not be the case this time. All too often, when somebody says that the internet is broken, they are talking about minor little details like its peer-to-peer structure, relative openness, and concentration of intelligence at the edges of the network, not performance of TCP-IP over high-latency connections or similar.
What a revelation. I had this 'clean-slate' approach in mind 3-years ago when I removed the Ethernet controller + modem from the PCI slots of my home PC.
When they're done, and they go to replace the Internet, can they also please get rid of Fortran?
Somehow I think they'll have about as much luck with that as they will with replacing the Internet.
And not have a single clue as to why their efforts failed.
Nice ideas. Too bad they would make the world come crashing down around America's ears. Our leadership has completely pissed off so much of the world, that if we cut our defense spending NOW, we'd be welcoming our new Chinese or Middle-Eastern overlords within our lifetimes. I'm not saying that we can't cut it later on, but it'll take DECADES to fix the problems that that Bush & Bush & Company have created for us.
...says Dr. Evil, pinky into corner of mouth.
Yeah, right.
What are they going to do? Get a Honeywell DDP 516, an SDS-940, an IBM 360/75 and a DEC PDP-10 and put it in four universities?
Come on...
http://www.gizmag.com/go/3603/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's a very green environmentally too!
I know we can call the food...Soylent Green!
gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!
I dont like it. They don't spend 12M bucks for nothing. Hope they will fail to kill p2p and porn.
A whole new Internet? If you guys really want us to use IPv6, you could have just said so. I mean, damn...
and while we're at it, can we toss out and redesign HTML/JavaScript/CSS/etc? Even the whole stateless HTTP protocol.
Web apps make me sick. Poor debugging tools, haphazard implementations and markup languages that have been over-extended make web development feel like we've gone back 20 years in terms of capabilities for software.
AJAX is a hack built upon other hacks. Framework libraries are a dime a dozen and none seem to be flexible enough to do what you need to do. QA'ing a complex web app is a mess. As an aside, does anyone know of any good QA scripting packages (that test the UI? JUnit doesn't count...)? Selenium isn't bad but misses the mark in several areas.
If we're rebooting the Internet, can we scrap the whole thing and rethink it all while we're at it? (yes, I know www != the internet, but the way things are going it might as well be)
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
2007 US Military spending: $549.2 Billion. Domestic spending: $457.9 Billion. Welfare is a small fraction of domestic spending, so it cannot be 10x defense spending.
But can't we at least learn from their mistakes?
I somehow think MS pumped more than petty 12m into MSN. And? Failure. Why? Because it was not what people wanted.
Is that "new internet" what I want? Most likely, it's not. Can we be sure that it will be rife with tools to monitor, to snoop, to dissect my behaviour so to "serve me better" (read: target the ad spam better)? Or to do even worse? I'm kinda inclined to think so, considering the recent developments in laws in general and the "old school" internet in particular.
Do we want that? Can't talk about you, but I for one don't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Privacy and access come to mind...
Privacy: Lets face it the governments of the world *all of them* would love a system that is easer to keep an eye on, protocols that are easier to track, ...., .... The Internet is not perfect but a person with even a modest amount of knowledge can pretty much get around without leaving footprints. You want to read a wiki article on explosives? not without getting flagged you don't...
Access: Corporations would love nothing more than to make sure they are the only ones who can do anything, forget bandwidth shaping as a problem imagine when the mega corps can get together to make sure that small businesses or media that speaks unfairly of them are shut, or slowed down, with more ease than can be done today.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
Yes, plenty. Though there may be a shortage of lolcats.
when you begin to address privacy and security at the protocol and architecture level, you also begin to enable governmental control
one of the biggest philosophical issues that people don't seem to understand is that there is no such thing as centralized privacy, or government-enforced privacy. you constantly see stories on slashdot bemoaning government's inability to protect your privacy. its completely absurd. the only one who can protect your privacy is you
it is an utter oxymoronic, paradoxical way of thinking to believe government policies and privacy can coexist in the same thought process. people constantly inveigh the government to do more about privacy. no. you don't want to involve the government in privacy, in any way. if you want privacy and security, YOU need to take steps to make that work, on your own. to involve a large controlling entity to do that... what? can we say not getting the concept?
any system built to ensure "privacy" is essentially a command and control system... that can snoop on anything it wants
the same with security
it is GOOD the internet as it is has no internal safeguards for privacy and security. it means it is controlled by no one. get the point?
the riaa and beijing should fund this GENI project
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How about cutting wellfare in half and have ten times the money. Exactly how many poor people do we really need anyway?
People like you make me laugh. Do you really think poor people choose to be poor?
I know alcohol and drugs are an issue but still though people don't want to sleep in shop door ways and have to beg for food.
I think their first priority should be rebuilding the email protocols. We are all wasting too much time, money and bandwidth dealing with spam.
TFA basically boils down to this single statement: "We've got money and some shiny toys to play with, wheee!!!!". It doesn't say anything about what their long-term intentions are specifically. I for one reserve judgement on the issue until I see something more concrete -- with the exception that I agree that nothing of any real substance will come of this for at least a decade.
And in this case, there are tons of temporary fixes all over the Internets.
The internet is more than just the data lines. Its the entire 7 layer burrit... errr ... OSI model. Are they planning on re-defining every protocol implemented? At the very least they would need to address every layer 5, 6, and 7 protocol... on a budget of $12m? heh. Smells like a researcher who knows all the right buzzwords to really confuse a government appropriations committee. mmmmm pork.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
That's a great economic idea!
No, it's not.
Without poor people, there will be no riches, as they depend on exploiting the poor.
Oh wait, maybe it is a good idea after all..
factor 966971: 966971
I'm gonna build my *own* internets. With hookers, and blackjack... oh wait, it has that already.
That's why there is a race to replace the governments with the internet instead.
Which will come first? Complete totalitarianism through the shining screen in your house (exactly like 1984)? Or complete freedom, where no single individual has power over others, and where all individuals collectively define their government?
The decision actually is yours, the nerds, to decide if you want to act or continue to let action be done onto you.
You made the internet what it is. Are you going to let it degrade into order?
Eh? Spending on welfare (TANF) is a very small part of the budget, $16.5 billion. At a population of 301 million, that's $54.80/year/person, fifteen cents a day per person. The base defense budget - not including war funding - is more than $481 billion, $1598/person/year, $4.38 per day per person. U.S. military spending makes up the bulk of world military spending. We could cut ours in half and still enormously outspend all potential adversaries.
Conservative politicians like to conflate "entitlements" all together, which includes not just welfare but medical spending (prices for which are driven up by the for-profit model and by drug patents, both of which are made possible by government action), veterans affairs and military retirement payments (which should be properly counted under defense), and Social Security spending.
The NSF's budget is $6.065 billion, $20.15/year/person, about five and a half cents a day per person.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Micro$oft could learn a thing or two from that.
Yes, because poor people are useless.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Will everyone's IP-number be 8675309?
[Hint:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqUPApCUt90
]
I sometimes wonder if people actually understand technology.
An average person realises that an average car has a top speed of 100mph but an average person views a computer as some magic device that makes everything possible.
This is an easy one.. They want to make something the government can control and TAX! They're not getting their taxes, guys! That's what this is about.
True. The hard part is staying on that tiny horse.
Is that going to be addressed, or just made harder to detect? A spammer can only cause me so much damage, a mistaken government agent can do a lot more.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Your paranoia isn't contagious, I hope. There's nothing yet to imply your fears. And should some of these things come to pass, we'll find ways to bypass them. We always have.
And $12M in funding is one of the better jokes of 2008.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
...all those series of tubes? I wonder what they're gonna use instead?
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
I for one...Oh wait...let's keep that defense budget.
That is, as soon as we end the transition from IPv4 to v6...
Geez, I thought we should be reading it on the spanking new $12M "controlled" In2ernet ...Guess /.ers aren't invited there.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
I don't really expect the cost or adoption of this thing to be a big issue since we are not talking about a private entity providing the funding. There have been numerous indications that the government wants a new internet for a myriad of reasons (ranging from security to special interest) and it looks like they are getting close (5 years or so)to making it a reality. I'd expect that you will start seeing bills appear in the next year or so that will lay ground for making transition mandatory by a certain cutoff date. This legislation path will provide funding for Government, Education, and a few of the bigger corporations to make the transition a little easier. Then it will start appearing in international circles and since it will provide more control why would any nation stop it? The comparison of the internet to the American wild west comes to mind and we all know what happened there.
Some might argue that it would be better to just evolve what is already there. However, from a government standpoint they have encountered strong resistance to legislating the current internet for years so creating a new network with their desired features from the get go would be much easier than continuing the current stalemate on internet policy.
My real question is what will happen to usenet, the highlander of the internet.
I hope they remembered to include Al Gore - since he did the first one..
The President's actual budget for 2007 totals $2.8 trillion [...] The total requested military budget of the United States for 2007 was $699 billion.
Social security is the biggest domestic at 586G$, unemployment/welfare is 294 G$. Your point still stands, though.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
If not, then what's all the rant about? Security? Censorship? Tracking? Less spam?
Let them track me when I use my credit card online. Let them control what I movies I download. Let them find the spammer who's abusing me.
As long as they let me use the "old" Internet for anything I want. I'll decide which alternative to use.
You need to check those numbers. I know the budget is not necessarily the exact same as what the president asked for, but for 2008 Bush requested $324 billion for welfare, plus $608 billion for social security, $386 billion for medicare, and $209 billion for medicaid. Domestic spending far outpaces the military, though it is clearly not 10x.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget%2C_2008
WTF is the point of this?
1. Nobody is going to fall for it.
2. goat.cx isn't obscene anymore
3. It doesn't even make sense!
What, is this the trolling equivalent of "i'm not touching you! i'm not touching you!"
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The GP's point is that lots of the protocols used on the internet were abandoned (as in the case of gopher) or improved (as in the case of http) as the needs of its users and capabilities of the network improved and that we have not locked in to a fixed set of technologies.
in other words, you want to clamp down on file sharing and make the AA's happy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If they can keep out the chuckholes that are beating my cars suspension to death every summer, im all for it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
People will flock to it in droves, buy HD routers with HD cables and HD service plans.
I for one would like to see a complete overhaul of domain names, and the URL format.
http://www.domainnname.type.country/directory1/Subdirectory2/page1.html
Should become
http://www/country/type/domainname/directory1/subdirectory2/page1.html
In my opinion. Not that my opinion has ever been regarded as important.
Russian Proverb "Better is the enemy of good enough"
Oh no, they'll be sure to implement the financial and political layers this time around. That's what this is all about, after all.
Maybe 3x defense spending. I'd call Social Security and Medicaid welfare and they're over 1.1 Trillion alone. Then there's another 1 Trillion that goes to who knows what...
For years I have heard uninformed people use the phrase similar to "I sent it from my internet to your internet, did you get it?". Now they may actually be accurate.
no comment
If you think the Internet is the equivalent of CB, then you must be pretty young.
Or you somehow missed out on UUCP and Fidonet (AKA Fight-O-Net), not to mention RCPM and BBSes.
It's not the lack of regulation that's the problem... the Internet has plenty of that. It's the size. Ham Radio with even a fraction of the number of users as the Internet would be unusable. Can you imagine it? You'd have enough time for your callsign and a couple of words, then you'd be waiting a couple of days for another turn. You'd give up and go back to CB.
Ham radio is just starting to try and scale up, with things like D*. Do yu really think you could regulate a D* network the size of the Internet? Hell, we barely managed to keep the cap on Usenet after September 1993...
...I mean, that Aladdin software was awesome, along with the CB chat and playing Hundred Years' War and the discussion forums and...
Wait. I sense you're talking about something different.
(and I sense I'm the only one here who will get that joke, since it's predicated on remembering a late 1980s pre-Internet computer network)
Advice: on VPS providers
Right, but they often want to do those things more than they want to do the things the rest of us do to keep us from having to sleep in doorways and and beg for food. :) The homeless folks I've spoken with want to keep doing drugs and resent any attempts by shelter organizations to "control" them by asking them to go into rehab, be back at night by a certain curfew time and so on. There are a distinct minority that use the system to get back on their feet, but the remainder are always in and out of shelters because of their rather childish world view. Throwing money on them only encourages that view to become more widespread.
Didn't we already have a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie ?
Clean slate approach?
Worked for Raccoon City...
You gotta look deeper when someone wants to take on the herculean task of radically changing something that is globally pervasive... like the internet.
To me, when they say "security" and "other challenges" you know it's not "security" it's the "other challenges". And those other challenges are related to piracy. Who is behind this, the xxAAs?
No-one is going to seriously try to rebuild the internet due to viruses. Nor for Spam. Not for phishing. Nope. Not going to do it. The fact that they have government money for this tells me that the xxAAs have lobbied so extensively they actually got funding from the government to try and rebuild the intertubes with DRM built in. It's like Vista with the DRM built in. No-one will bite except those that get their new PCs with the intertubes2.0 already installed.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
...as they don't call the new internet Skynet, we should be OK.
Sure, they're extending the 7-layer model to include layers 8 and 9 (financial and political).
It was only a matter of time.
That's how the British JANET addresses worked. They translated them at gateways, and it worked fune until they tried to figure whether uk.foo.bar.cs was a department at a university in England or a site in Czechoslovakia.
Will it interfere with "old" Internet?
I would imagine that's what the MAFIAA intends, yes. I mean, who'd think they could shut down analog TV and force everyone to switch to digital? Never happen in a million years!
They'll replace the "tubes" with a "trusted universal bandwidth encapsulation", kind of like the "trusted audio path" in Vista, but slinkier.
The simple fact of the matter is that the big lumbering ogre we call congress looks at the internet and goes
"Unregulated thingy!! Gives other people power!!! Congress no like unregulated thingy. WE SMASH
So the Microsoft--Big Brother--Borg thing is all coming true? Wouldnt resistance just be futile?
came out of a bottle... of bottled-in-bond, 150 proof bootleg booze... and once out of the bottle, putting it back IN the bottle is a bit more difficult, unless the bottle is made by a guy named Klein...
Yeah, we've all learned such "code" words long ago. They're trying to "fix" the problem of freedom on the internet. I mean, people being able to express themselves equally and anonymously on a level where everyone is the same as everyone else? The nerve of some people! The internet is what it is because of its very nature. If it were vastly redesigned so there would be less privacy, easier to track everyone's PC, etc, I think that the market demand would give birth to another "new" internet, completely outside of whatever crap shoot these clowns are dreaming up.
let me tell you what this is all about :
an internet that is easier to control and less free. they have been trying all kinds of approaches to make public accept something that they can put to that end, for some time.
Read radical news here
Yes but does it:
-Let you upload your traveling stats to blogger, facebook, tweeter and myspace?
-Run Linux?
-Can be arranged in a Beowulf cluster?
But... the future refused to change.
Since this is obviously about more power for elected officials. More power and easier ways to snoop. Hell, let's replace EVERYTHING! A new country, new planet, new universe......
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
"I'd call Social Security and Medicaid welfare..."
And you would be mistaken in doing so. Call anything you like welfare, but that doesn't make it so.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The headline this was posted with is weapons-grade stupid. Nowhere in the GENI plans (which have been being formulated by academics over the last several years) is there any indication that GENI should "replace" the current Internet. There are a few people involved in GENI who think that the Internet of the future might look a bit like GENI in some respects, but a much more likely outcome is that future Internet innovations will emerge from experiments carried out with GENI. GENI will be a very sophisticated research platform that allows researchers to carve up the research network into reasonably isolated slices via virtualization so that experiments into new protocols, switch architectures, etc. can be run on a full-speed network in parallel with one another without interfering. Access to GENI, much like Internet2, will essentially be restricted to researchers running experiments and essentially limited to interconnects between major research universities.
Nowhere is there any suggestion that GENI will or should:
* replace the existing internet
* develop protocols to remove anonymity from the internet
* give control of the internet to any particular government
It's a research platform for academics who think that the field of networking could benefit from large-scale research projects that are more ambitious and forward-looking than the sort of thing that can be reasonably carried out by the R&D departments of large tech corporations. Full stop. There is a ton of information available about the project from their websites, and in papers that have been published over the last several years.
Ok, 12 Million to lay the groundwork... What about the cost passed on to Large & Small Businesses? You can't just make everyone switch over their infrastructure and not factor that into the price. This will never happen.
You're all giving academics too much credit. My adviser is trying to get funding under this grant and most of the people involved don't seem to be aware of or concerned about social implications, or if they are, they get sidetracked into internet style flamewars about NATs in IPV6. The internet today has several severe flaws usually stemming from the assumption that everyone is mutually trusted. This gives us everything from SPAM to ARP poisoning. Hell, many networking researchers have been convinced that UDP will be the death of the internet for years. If you don't think that researching networking technologies that can survive the greater internet idiot theorem is worthwhile, then you must be new here.
I'm guessing you like IPv6 on the primal nerd level, but are pessimistic.
Jaron Lanier has an interesting perspective on internet anonymity/big brother in this article. I'm just curious about the slashdot collective's thoughts on the subject. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/jarons-world-internet-and-the-war-on-drugs/?searchterm=internet%20anonymity
While your Internet = CB radio analogy is ok, I'm in disagreement with the suggestion that govt. regulation and licensing was the main (or sole?) reason Ham radio developed a group of "more serious" users.
I'd argue that Ham radio was simply a far better, more useful technology. CB radio has always been hamstrung by govt. regulations limiting the power output (to what, 4 watts?), and only 40 channels total (plus the single sideband garbage that tries to squeeze more channels out of those 40, but usually winds up with poor quality audio and noise). Anyone wanting to do serious radio communications pretty much has to rule out CB, because the channels are too cluttered, reception is spotty, etc. In fact, MOST people using CB regularly are doing so in gross violation of the law, running "black market" signal boosters/amplifiers that let them transmit FAR more than what's legally allowed. Since this is "illegal" though, the quality of such amps tends to be very poor - causing bleed-over onto many other frequencies when they transmit.
By contrast, Ham radio has a whole "infrastructure" of repeater towers and such, more complex and cable radios, etc. You don't need to resort to some poorly made power amp to allow your friend to hear you speak if you're more than a few miles away from their location. The fact govt. requires a HAM license and enforces all sorts of usage rules (must broadcast your "callsign" when speaking, etc. etc.) isn't WHY it's popular. It's just bureaucracy they put up with to be able to use the technology.
There is plenty of past evidence to suggest that completely rebuilding something can have consequences (e.g. introducing new problems). And I would have to have complete faith in the competency of the people doing it, which pretty much disqualifies modern government.
But here's another question: why the hell start with *this*? Of all the aging infrastructure in this country that could use millions of dollars invested, the Internet is not very archaic. How many outdated things are holding the power grid together? Roads? Bridges? Air traffic control? I'm sure if they actually thought about this, they could spend $12M wisely.
As it is, it sure feels like somebody just doesn't like how free and clear today's Internet is. By becoming a founder in a "new" Internet, they'd be in a great position to control the universe, which sounds like a pretty stupid thing for the rest of us to buy into.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
...you DO realize that we're spending like $729.7B on defense and $447.9B on welfare, right?
And soon GENI, being so advanced and everything,controls almost everything, will be the end of humanity :-)
Not to mention, if we cut off buying oil from the middle east tomorrow, you would would be faced with total chaos as an entire region of the world saw a their only resource suddenly becoming worthless. You know all of those 'save the world' movies based around some super villain figuring out how to destroy the worlds economy by manufacturing gold or some such nonsense? Well, that is exactly how the middle east would see us. We would be taking a barrel of oil that has a value of over a hundred dollars, and reduce it's value to an amount that might not even cover the cost of shipping it. It would be like arming a small lumber town with military ordinance, and then shutting down the mill. People would get hurt.
I'm all for renewable, locally generated power, but thought has to be put into what will happen to the middle east if we cut off the flow of money overnight. Heck, we have to consider whether the results will be worse or not if we cut off the flow slowly.
This could, if and when implemented, kill all free software because the protocols might all be locked down with Royalties. Am I paranoid? Sure, I am, but the way things are going I am also quite right.
problem solved
http://www.internet2.edu/about/
TFA says Internet2 is "donating" bandwitdth to this project? Can we please focus if we're going to be serious about it? Can't BBN join Internet2 just like the 70 other corporations "leading the way to a new Internet"?
Oh sorry, these people all consider themselves CIO's and so this is the Second Management Unit coming up to speed. Excellent. Internet 2 should finally be complete in one more Mythical Man Month. Just wait!
-Matt
P.S. Where did these guys rematerialize from? They got eaten and re-eaten back in the 90's! BBN has been shat out from the telecom industry like a seed from a bird. (And that bird seems to have diarrhea.)
I think it's rarely a good idea to try to start completely over to accomplish the same thing. Like most things, the simplest and most pragmatic solution is to throw more hardware at it.
I think you missed step 4. Profit!
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Yeh, but I inadvertently gave it an accent. Should have been ::00fe:436a:9cf9. :)
Fortunately, the Gates-Government-Collective crashes pretty consistently, so most people just ignore it. :)
That seems like a fairly modest proposal.
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
Feed the poor to the hungry, and we won't need welfare at all.
Feed the poor Iraqis to the hungry ones, and we won't need that much of a defense budget either.
As with most things in life, cannabalism will solve almost any problem.
OK, this is not meant to be a troll of any sort. I have a genuine interest in this queston:
Who's they?
Who do you think has an interest in locking down conversation in a systematic manner and forcing who to communicate via their means in only their approved ways? I ask, because I'm not sure. See, Google for example has a genuine business interest in data that could very well lead to people's privacy being compromised in a bad way. Even without a restructuring of the Internet. So far, Google's behaving fine. Some privacy issues here and there, some dubious interaction with China, but overall - a good trade-off for the average Westerner.
OK, wrong example. Dooh, I'm too drunk to formulate a nice description of my queston. Let's try another time: What if I say that there is no such single group having the power of controlling everything (all information, here), without having to first compete with rivals of at least equal strength.
For now, companies can only control a single, very limited amount of a certain market, while government (overall) is losing influence on people's life in pretty much all western states - or at least that's what I'm pulling out of my ass right now (Remember that Soviet Russia line? In Soviet Russia, the the government controls commerce). If I take a look at Europe and compare the average today's citizen's life with that of the average life of a citizen who lived here a hundered years ago, I'd say that companies nowadays have a lot more influence on your life than goverment had (has, dear $DEITY, I'm not really able to formulate adequate English sentences anymore. Forgive me, it's my 3rd language).
So, I'd argue that Google doesn't want to keep information down.
Neither does anyone else really interested in the Internet as business platform.
I'd argue that noone wants to seriously keep porn down, just as well as most of government's war-on-drugs-propaganda is bogus - a lot of companies/government institutions are making way too much money on that stuff. Porn, illegal hacker/cracker darknets (wohooo. How many bad-buzzwords can you put in one minimal sentence?), drugs, terrorism. There's always profit for someone. Whether they're selling drugs, guns or people. As long as there's money, there's power. And power equals safety for your branch of the Dark Side's path. If someone devises a secure Internet (haha) that's going to be a) too boring to be picked up by too many people or b) too insecure to not be hacked.
Big media corps don't have an interest in shutting down communication and controlling it. Some of their CEO's might think it's like this, but they don't and they would notice as soon as their strategies would prove to be successful. As long as there's demand (and we, the people are here to ensure that demand) there's going to be a demand satisfied, or a revolution of some sorts. I don't trust humans in general, I just trust their social momentum. It's a crisis/pain equation: if the crisis is big enough, the pain you have to go through to revolt against that crisis becomes bearable. A pressure thing.
Ok, that was a long post that didn't make any sense. Good thing I've got some Karma to burn. Here's the gist: locking down information is locking down progress. Nobody's interested in locking down progress, since that's what most people make their money on: progress. As soon as someone tries to, this will horribly backfire (see Soviet Russia), leaving a demand unfulfilled, that will then develop into a crisis. A crisis is in no way a bad thing (overall), since it also means progress (when it's overcome).
I better shut up now. No, I will not use the preview function. Good Night.
I'm an infovore...
How about SKYNET?
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
Twelve MILLION DOLLARS!!!
I mean
TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS!!!
Seagoon: Shut up Eccles!
Eccles: Shut up Eccles!
Stupid Internet...
I'll build my own Internet, with Black Jack and Hooker... ahh screw the Internet!
You never step in the same internet twice. It's always flowing by, renewing itself.
At least, that's what my grandpappy always used to say...
So will this be Internet3?
Current backbone architecture costs billions.They could not afford to discard it.
The goal is improving routers/hardware and the underlying protocol stack.
Why do we need a new internet? Did the tubes wear out ?
And you would be mistaken in doing so. Call anything you like welfare, but that doesn't make it so. When I pay in alot in every month and can plan on getting very little out at the other end, because they are giving it all away to someone else, I'd call that welfare.
Check your numbers and then try it again.
Risk or a paranoid delusion?
Many sites have registered traceable accounts. Just like camera protect us when everyone is a watcher, everyone knowing eachother makes the internet no different or less diverse.