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The Internet Is 'Built Wrong'
An anonymous reader writes "API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne, writes today that the Internet was 'built wrong,' and continues to be accepted as an inferior system, due to a software engineering philosophy called Worse Is Better. 'We now know, for example, that IPv4 won't scale to the projected size of the future Internet. We know too that near-universal deployment of technologies with inadequate security and trust models, like SMTP, can mean millions if not billions lost to electronic crime, defensive measures, and reduced productivity,' says Payne, who calls for a 'content-centric approach to networking.' Payne doesn't mention, however, that his own system, Twitter, was built wrong and is consistently down."
Does that translate to "owned by the big media cartels"?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Okay, so a guy who works for Twitter a crash prone, non-scaling application, says that the internet is "built wrong", where one of the examples of wrong is scaling. He goes on to list a few specific apps that he thinks are good example of "wrong" like IP4 and SMTP, which won out against better designed (but strangely unmentioned) alternatives because of wacky market stuff, which, again, not described.
No one who knows anything about the Internet would say that it was perfect. It's not even close. There are a lot of places where unholy cludges exist and are perpetuated because it's a lot easier to live with them than it is to try and change everything that depends on them. Things like, for example, Twitter.
Sure there were alternatives, but they were all either patent-encumbered, or hard to deploy, or too complex to easily develop for. They died. It's called competition. TCP/IP and SMTP came out the other side, and grew into cornerstones of the largest network this world has ever known, in a shockingly short period of time. No, not perfect, but pretty damn good none-the-less.
It's very easy to sit back today and say, "Wow it could have been so much better!" But that is armchair crap at the best of times...I'd sneer if Vint Cerf said it. Coming from someone who demonstrably can't do better, and can't even be bothered to champion a specific alternative...That's as pointless and lacking in content as most of the crap that comes through his crappily coded service.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Van Jacobson, an award-winning specialist in networking to whom the Internet owes its continued existence, gave a talk at Google in 2006 outlining a content-centric approach to networking. Jacobsonâ(TM)s approach leverages wide distribution of data across a variety of devices and media, while baking in security and simplifying the development model for networked applications.
If the majority of Internet usage continues to be about content, an approach like Jacobsonâ(TM)s would be not just prudent, but necessary. You neednâ(TM)t do more than attempt to watch a streaming video on a busy office LAN or oversubscribed DSL circuit to understand that even the best-served markets for Internet connectivity are struggling to keep up with demand for networked content. Add to this that providing adequate security models for such content is a virtual impossibility on todayâ(TM)s Internet, and the need for a better approach is even clearer.
When Jacobson says things should be focused on content, I think all he means is that you should ask for content and the internet should be able to find it using many different ways (IP, VPN, zeroconf, proxies, you name it). That's what he means by that stupid buzzword "content-centric." And that's not going to solve anything! Everything else he preaches sounds like disseminating content once from New York to Seattle so that when an Oregon resident wants to read the Wall Street Journal they don't make 8 hops across the country for every article. You move the data once closer to the consumer and then you have less network usage.
I may be misinformed but how is this any different than a Content Delivery Network (CDN)? I believe these were all the rage years ago (look at the commercial list at the bottom of the article). They are nothing new. So are you proposing that the internet have these built into them to increase efficiency and network usage? Wouldn't it just be easier to let people pay for these services like we've been doing? Oh no, my bandwidth is being ate up and people on the other side of the country are experiencing huge latency! Time to fork out a monthly fee to a CDN, I guess. It'll be more expensive to host a large site but nothing some ads couldn't take care of--free market to the rescue.
I'm sick of people that get up on a soapbox and rip apart a good idea because it's not perfect. Bitch bitch bitch IPv4 has been broken from the start. Well, duh, do you think IPv6 is any less flawed? There's still a limit, who cares if it's 10 or 10,000 years in the future because it's going to have to be dealt with at some point!
This article really is a piece of work. A man who works on the API of something that thrives on "a broken internet" bashing said internet and pointing at others to dream up ideas to fix what he thinks is wrong. All I see is griping, not a single original solution to these problems. Yeah, I'm sorry consumers don't have the same priorities and requirements that you do but, well, that's why you're going to see a technology like Windows 98 triumph over Linux. Align yourself with your user or consumer and you'll start to understand things.
My work here is dung.
So was a 1932 Ford. So were the highways in 1932. So was an analog computer in 1959.
The only thing wrong about the internet is that it has become obsessed with money rather than information. Technical issues will be worked out over time.
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The internet wasn't designed to be used the way it is being used today anyway. So, you keep finding shortcomings and try to work your way around. SMTP has problems? Well here use some PGP and *some* of the problems are taken care of. Most things work in an evolutionary way anyway.
This is very ironic coming from a web-2.0 junkie who captains a site that is *constantly* having outages.
I think this may be semantics, but the Internet was not built wrong, it was *used* wrong. The original design perfectly met the needs of the time. Expectations change, and all we are seeing is that under our *present* needs the system can bend in some areas, and break in others. If we could go back and "fix" it we would do it a lot differently, of course. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
I, for one, think it was put together pretty well. It's up to us to keep it working, the internet is always ready for re-invention.
HTTP and JavaScript on TCP/IP over IPV4 is "not the best it could be"?
Wow, I'm fascinated by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The only thing wrong with Twitter is that it has too many users. The way to fix it is to stop using it.
He quotes Alan Kay:
"HTML on the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that understands its formats... You don't need a browser, if you followed what this Staff Sergeant in the Air Force knew how to do in 1961. You just read [data] in. It should travel with all the things that it needs, and you don't need anything more complex than something like X Windows."
Whoa.
I'm not sure which is worse; the idea of every screen being rendered on a server and then piped over to the user, or every interaction is an object being sent with its data, which seems like a security nightmare.
besides don't most of us download, say, the browser anyway? Kind of a boot strap thing.
It's kind of like those "enhanced" DVDs then, put in a PC, offer to install some weird ass player...
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This can basically be summarised as "Hindsight is a wonderful thing.....if only we knew then what we know now..."
This spurious argument also equally applies to:
amongst countless other things...
(Oh noes, someone is wrong on the internet)
Thank you for that. It's exactly right.
What he fails to realize is, everything is an incremental, transitional technology. Nobody planned out this current hideous jumble of technologies we call teh intertubez, it started with a simple message protocol on top of a network protocol and evolved, and evolved, and evolved further from its inferior predecessors; at each state incremental improvements happened as necessary.
Web 1.0 was "good enough" for some tasks. But when it wasn't, the technology adapted. It remains is as good as the need requires and the market demands at this moment. Mistakes are culled, successes survive. A giant, electronic petri dish, if you will.
SMTP is a terrible example. Ultimately the users are the ones opening e-mails, getting browser-jacked and their passwords stolen because they don't know what is in front of them. Sure clients were the problem for a while but that "phase" has passed, developers have learned how to mitigate most attacks.
The only thing that is "wrong" fundamentally with the internet is the separation of DNS and the routing protocol.
For all intents and purposes a DNS failure causes a network outage. It also dramatically increases client latency when it is not configured correctly which look like network issues, but are not.
I'm sure when IPv4 was created the notion of mixing both services was unthinkable due to the additional amount of data needed to move names around at layer 2/3. This is no longer the case and we should really try to move away from a central naming system.
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I've found that a simple crank-operated can opener works far better than a shotgun.
And soup? Screw the soup, stockpile beer!
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Code
It's code centric. It shouldn't be. It should be design centric. Then we could dump all these expensive programmers and get some work done.
Computers are code-centric. If you can't handle it, GTFO.
On the shoulders of giants we stand.
Any of these ideas of improvement are not new. But neither are they working. And the internet as we know it is working quite well. Far beyond what anyone would have predicted.
Are there things to be fixed? Sure, around every corner. But I'm not going to listen to some guy from some wicked kewl startup in SFO tell me how to do it.
"We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code." - David D. Clark, former chair of the IAB
You get to say the internet was "built wrong" as soon as we see your "better" idea run.
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Meh. I've got access to a block of addresses that is so hilariously larger than anything I'll ever need that I NAT some of my home servers through proxies at work for the static IP. If we reclaimed all the unused addresses, we could string out IPv4 for another decade or so.
Moving to IPv6 is one of those things that sounds like it's going to be soooooo easy, and has the potential to be hell on earth. Adoption is happening, slowly and surely, but it's still happening. I see no reason to panic and try and force a quick transition when the only thing that that will get us is chaos.
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It's hardly going out on a limb criticizing IPv4 -- it has proven an easy target for going on two decades now, with its weakness apparent to all.
And the switch to IPv6 is happening. Many backbone providers are rolling it out, and it is gaining wider support among mainstream operating systems and applications. The only reason it hasn't been a hastier migration is that NAT really did undermine the necessity for expediency.
Best explanation of what Twitter is that you'll ever find.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
This guy sounds like the kind of twat who joins our company, bitches about how badly everything's been written, then leaves behind a load of shitty unmaintainable code that's "really clever". And somehow he's in charge at Twitter? Christ.
Internet protocols and standards were originally implemented for academic use. Decades ago, TCP/IP, SMTP, DNS, and HTTP were created with an implicit assumption of trust between client and server--indeed, between all nodes in the network. The Internet was an exercise in efficient data transfer across a network. It was not designed for spam, or DDoS, or phishing; nor was it designed for shopping, bank account management, or YouTube. That we can do these things now is a reflection of the workarounds that have been developed in the meantime.
Furthermore, hardware at the time of the development of these protocols was not what it is today.
And then, over the course of several years, the monetizing and commercialization of this academic project occurred. ISPs, in order to reach the masses, established an inherently unequal system of access that encouraged consumption of content but discouraged users from hosting it. The solution that has come about in more recent years, with blogs, social networks, and so forth, was to have users submit content and have it hosted by large, ad-revenue based corporations. This has led to serious problems concerning the nature of ownership of information.
And now, we have one of the people running such a site, complaining that the underlying model on which their company relies is "built wrong" because it doesn't suit their needs. Well, isn't that rich? It smacks of willful ignorance of not only what the Internet is, but more importantly, the original design principles (egalitarian, neutral) that the Internet embodied.
The pace of technology is rapid. History, however, is long, and the danger I see here is not that you have one idiot who hasn't learned his history lesson, but that as time goes by, more and more people and corporations and politicians will forget why the Internet was originally built. That's why we have companies against Net neutrality. They have forgotten or ignored history. They took something free and made billions off of it, and they want to milk it for all it's worth. And therein lies the real problem, because when you forget where something came from, you become disconnected from the past and blind to the future.
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that Twitter can do this?
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“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
1. You don't get modded up by asking.
My entire modding strategy revolves around searching for the phrase "I know I am going to be modded xxxx for this, but.." and then meeting their expectations.
wow, and here i've conscientiously avoided those trite phrases. i know i'd be modded insightful for this, but unfortunately, ac...
Maybe I'm just too wordy, but if I can say it in 120 characters, whatever, it's probably too banal to be shared.
Twitter is the new Haiku?
We've already got one, you just didn't get an invitation.
It's really nice though. Unlimited high res porn and chatrooms with actual girls in them.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
You miss the point. A good designer and a bad coder creates better output then a poor designer and a good coder.
Are you really suggesting that a clean, efficient design that crashes constantly because it is rife with coding errors is better than a kludgy mess of extensions and exceptions that somehow works anyway? I think you're nuts. Or are you suggesting that a good, clean, open design makes a bad coder irrelevant because you can always fire him and start over with a good coder? That's even MORE nuts.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Why does everyone try to divert attention from his claim that the internet does not scale well, to attacks on his own works?
If his claims have no merit, refute the claims. Do not attempt to instead discredit the source.
You run the two protocols simultaneously for years, add AAAA records to DNS which get looked up and tried before A records, and when you notice that no-one is connecting to your services over v4 any more, you have a v6 only network.
Look:
Try it yourself. Your box will look up the v6 address, try to connect, and if not, use the v4 address.
It's quite depressing really how people (mainly American, it seems) on Slashdot are so anti IPv6. They bleat on about NAT, and how there are loads of addresses, and why on earth would you want your fridge with an IP address. It's not just to do with the extra addresses. There. Did you get that?
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Actually, the funny thing is that Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0 wasn't even supposed to be about technology as such. And the inventor of that buzzword still insists that it isn't, long after the Grinch... err... the marketing bulshitters stole it and ran away with it.
Web 2.0 -- and by contrast Web 1.0 -- wasn't about techno-fetishism, but about techno-utopianism. It has nothing to do with PHP or any other particular technology.
The basic idea of Web 2.0 was that if you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, they're still monkeys. But if you interconnect them and let them write and edit each other's content, now that's teh nirvana and age of enlightenment. Give the users wikis instead of writing your own content. (I'm sure you'll be thrilled to discover that your product was made from baby seals and your CEO blows goats, but, hey, if the users wrote it, it must be true. 'Cause emergent collective intelligence is never wrong;) Have forums. Let the users tag your content instead of categorizing it or any other automated way of finding it. (I'm sure the tags on Slashdot would be sooo much more useful to find an article than full-text search;) Etc.
At a basic level, none of those _really_ needs PHP or JavaScript or anything. You could make a primitive almost-wiki back in the day, by just giving the users FTP access to the site and letting them edit and re-upload the HTML files.
Anyway, in true zealot fashion, where no price is too high for his utopia if someone else pays it, this was packed in a further lie: that, see, that's also the path to making the big bucks and verily everyone will beg to give you their money if you only had a wiki. I guess you can't really preach stuff like, "why you should blow your money to give us our free, collaborative online utopia", so it had to be repacked as, "you could be the next Google if you do!"
No, seriously. If you listen to him, Tim O'Reilly looked at what companies survived the dot-com bubble and what were their defining characteristics. And somehow he managed to completely miss the fact that it's those who had a business plan, silly. E.g., that why Google thrived was because Google became the damn best ad provider. Nah, what he saw is that it was those with wikis, and bittorrent and other collaborative stuff. That's the way to the big bucks.
So he envisioned and preached a DotCom Bubble 2.0... er... Web 2.0 golden age, where everyone has those, and someone gives them money for nothing for doing it.
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