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Do We Need a New Internet?
Richard.Tao and a number of other readers sent in a NYTimes piece by John Markoff asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced. "...[T]here is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over. What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a 'gated community' where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there." A less alarmist reaction to the question was blogged by David Akin: "If you build a new Internet and you want me to get a license to drive on it, sorry. I'm hanging out here in v.1."
And it isnt really an option either.
They don't deserve (and won't get) either.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Fucking cry babies who literally want to trade liberty for security.
How we know is more important than what we know.
A World without Anonymous Cowards? I thought I'd never see the day!
Build all the "new" Internets you want. As long as you have clueless users on your network, you'll have attack vectors.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
The internet is unfortunately the truest form of Freedom of Speech we have available. We can't even protest in public without fear of arrest or being harmed by police. There are a lot of people with money and power would like to stop the flow of information in its tracks.
Do we need a new internet? Yes, absolutely. My wife informs me that "the internet is down" probably two or three times a week on average.
#DeleteChrome
To the Editor:
Re "A New Internet? The Old One is Putting Us in Jeopardy," by John Markoff (Week in Review, Feb. 15, 2009):
Mr. Markoff both misstates and overstates the security problems faced by the Internet as currently designed.
He never uses the word "Windows," but the virus outbreaks he describes are almost entirely a Windows phenomenon, and due to the poor design of that operating system. Microsoft's apologists have been saying for years that this was only because Windows' market share made it the more attractive target. But Apple's share of the desktop market has skyrocketed recently to 15% without any outbreaks of viruses targeting the Macintosh. And Microsoft has never commanded more than about half of the server market; the other half runs open-source operating systems such as Linux (used by Google) and FreeBSD (Yahoo), on which viruses are essentially unknown.
Markoff says it's hard to prove your identity on the internet, and proposes government regulation as a solution. But many people have been proving their identities for years now using proven technologies like public-key cryptography. The U.S. government played a negative role in the development of these technologies by attempting to regulate their distribution through export-control regulations originally intended for munitions.
Find free books.
the success of internet is based on its freedom and anonymity.
Read radical news here
I, Mr. Anonymous Coward, hereby give up my anonymity. Now excuse me while I browse fake porn/warez malware sites with unpatched IE6 - after all, I am now safe!
A "gated community" with fewer abilities for users? Why not call it "Access Owned by Large corporations" or AOL for short?
This comment was thought up very late at night and does not necessarily reflect my views at a more reasonable hour.
No.
This so-called new Internet isn't about privacy as it is criminalizing bad behavior. So, you get to face charges when your machine gets a virus and now you have to prove that it really wasn't your fault.
Are you ready to handle that? When your car or your gun gets stolen, you can report it. Then you're off the hook if someone commits a crime with it after you report the incident. Most folks won't be able to tell when their computer gets owned in a botnet. Most people would rather quit the Internet forever than risk criminal prosecution over something they don't really understand or have any confidence in managing.
> ...asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced.
Yeah, I agree. Anonymity on the internet is completely broken. It is trivial for law enforcement to get a subpoena to force websites to reveal the IP addresses of users, and also trival for law enforcement to get a subpoena to force ISPs to reveal who had that IP address at a given moment in time. Granted, there are ways to make sure that the IP address you are using can't be traced to you, but those methods are kind of a pain in the ass.
> ...where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety
WTF? Any rearchitecting of the internet needs to have subpoena-proof absolute anonymity built in from the beginning. This "proposal" is like suggesting we rearchitect transportation to make sure that vehicle occupants receive no shelter from the weather.
I propose the new internet be named the patriot net.
You cant "go" there.
The Internet is a communications network. I happens to be a "the world's" communications network, more or less.
Just like in the real world, you are (mostly) anonymous as long as you chose. Just like in the world you can choose what information you want to send, and what information you want to request (Notwithstanding the tendency of certain mainstream operating systems to make some of those choices for you)
Just like in the world, there are certain networks which are connected to the Internet in a restricted way (compare to 'gated communities'). To communicate with them, you may need some form of credential (password, public key, etc).
The Internet as it exists today is an entirely different network than it was even just 10 years ago. Its continuously being 'rebuilt'.
Also, there are many 'private' networks that are built on top of the Internet as it currently stands.
Basically, this is never going to happen, and yet is already is happening, it's just hard to see for the average clueless moron.
It was called AOL, and it didn't work. It became, in fact, what Congressional investigators called "a magnet for pedophiles."
This isn't about safety. It's about control. Control of piracy, control of political agitation, and control of the truth. For all its faults, the net has created a populace that at least has the opportunity to be far better informed about the real world than our parents' generation.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
THIS scares me more than anything... "create a 'gated community' where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety" Oh yeah right....leave "safety" in charge of some government idiots, or the UN...no thanks!
In places where the best of the haves hide behind gated communities, you know what happens? That's where the really enterprising criminals go. All of that faux security hasn't done a damn thing in countries like Mexico for the richest, who still have to worry about things like their kids getting kidnapped. The military still faces attacks on its secure networks. The fact is, no one and no institution is an island. If you don't participating in purging the world of ne'erdowellers and their ilk, you are just deluding yourself into thinking that your investment into your own safety is helping to get rid of the problem. That's why I advise friends and family to invest in a dog or two and a gun for defending their home, not a security system that can usually be defeated by a serious criminal.
Look at the bright side - no more tracking cookies needed if you surf from: firstname.lastname.age.sex.city.phone.address.com
Nooooooooooooooooo.
I do think we need a new internet, in that we can then properly use the plural form of internet i.e. as in "give me back my internets you bastard"
Of course no-one will use the new internet due to lack of porn and free warezes and advertisements. Part of the appeal and success of the original internet is largely due to lack of accountability, and the ability to share ones own sick fetishes with the world completely anonymously.
Not to mention the target your painting on your forehead.
I mean seriously if your going to setup a new network simply for the purpose of being secure then why not just use a vpn? assuming you manage to setup a new "secure" internet, and advertise the fact that it's secure. It's a little like posting your ip on a hacker board and saying "bEt YoU CaNt HaCk Mez"
hmm yeah good luck with that
No anonymity on the Internet? China, North Korea, and other totalitarian states would love this.
Anonymity just allows more options. Someone might find it worthwhile to get a fact or slander out in the open at the expense of it not being trusted because the source was anonymous.
Someone else might hold back a bit on the truth or the vitriol, but back their comment with their reputation.
I think there is room in the world for both.
Their they're doing there hair.
If we cant make the comparitively tiny step of moving from ipv4 to ipv6 I think its nigh impossible to move to "a new internet".
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
What neither of you seem to understand is that the physical infrastructure is irrelevant, and always has been, by design. Internet2 is a part of the Internet. The Internet runs on fibre, serial, cable, wireless, whatever, just fine. TFA talks about (actually, only sort of scrapes the surface of) architectural changes to the Internet. IPv6 (which is only tangentially related to the security issue), DNSSEC, BGPSEC, encryption by default, and so on-- these are the things that need to happen to make the Internet a safer place. But even those aren't "a new Internet". They're the same old Internet with some improvements.
The people working on core Internet protocols have known that these things have problems for a long time. This article doesn't contribute anything to the conversation. Microsoft themselves could contribute a lot to the problem of an "insecure Internet" if they just fixed their f'ing OS.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Ben Franklin 1775.
If I have a choice between the people who gave us Echelon, Gitmo, Abu Grahib, DCMA, COPA, and failed to stop 9/11 versus virsuses and spyware...Ill take the viruses and spyware. I can protect myself from viruses and spyware much easier than I can protect myself from encroachment upon my liberty.
This is simply a horrendous idea that certainly has no place. It is basically seems to be a ploy of those who long for a tolitarian police state to get their way. This is a very tpical pattern that we see with shutting down an open society and create a police state, create fear and some horrendous problem, creating a reaction and then you can get people to demand a solution, offer them your solution which is taking away their freedom. You can basically get people to beg you to enslave them. The reason they want to do this is to gain greater control and mastery over the people and keep them from exercising control over their lives and government. They want to be able to monitor what everyone says and does, so they can then punish those who are saying things which run contrary to their agenda or who are advocating for democratic change. To stay in power indefinitely a tolitarian state needs to supress all dissent. Getting rid of privacy is the first step on the road to totalitarianism since to supress dissent they need to know who has what opinions and views so they can attack and punish them. They want to supress views and opinions as well, and want to manipulate and control information to psychologically manipulate the population by with-holding information and providing propoganda which manipulates people to support whatever objective they wish or behave in the way they please. Yo can bet that the desire to prohibit for instance pornography as a psychological and social engineering purpose, for instance.
The internet is just fine the way it is. No censorship should be allowed and anonymity should be a basic right. Only with such rights can free speech exist. There can be no free speech without anonymity since they can suppress and attack those who hold opinions they do not like.
Sure with how things are now there are spam messages in my mail box but I would rather have that and choose to opt in for a filter in my own software, than to have some mass surviellance scheme. I also think that government and the big brother nanny state poses far greater risk to our children coming from the tolitarian terror state that emerges from this than anything they will see on the internet. Those who give up their liberty for so called safety will be creating out of the government a much worse menace than anything it was supposed to protect them against.
The main thing that needs to be addressed with the internet has nothing to do with increasing surviellance or reducing privacy. There needs to be more use of SSL and there needs to be secure encrypted BGP and DNS to make sure that routing tables cannot be hacked.
It makes me quite angry that after we have fought so hard as a country to secure our liberties from a tolitarian oppressive government prying into our lives and deciding what we should look at, that we have people who are actively trying to undo these hard won liberties and turn the country into a totalitarian nightmare where people live in fear of an oppressive and tyrannical government, like china.
"Those who give up essential liberty for safety will deserve and shall get neither" -Benjamin Franklin
Whenever I read this kind of stuff I really don't think any of these people get what an "internet" is... Once more with feeling the internet is not a network; it is a network of networks.
Last time your home windows computer went down with a virus, my computer worked fine. Even with the incompetents we have in outsourced IT support, last time your corporate network collapsed under attack, mine didn't. The internet is the cess pool^W^W happy village square where we all meet together. Your own network is not the "internet" and you can run it any way you want; it won't influence the rest of the world. If you cut off the internet it by declaring "a gated community" as the article (you did read the article didn't you?) suggests, you are no longer part of the internet.
Anyone trying to build a "new" internet should be encouraged at the same time as given a gentle education in basic network theory. If it's any good, then enough people will join it that when other particular bits of the internet collapse, they can still continue with their own useful lives. We need this kind of thing. If someone could build a network for their own country which could be relied on for emergency calls and at the same time let me read slashdot that would make a real difference (no BT's "all IP" network doesn't count). Definitely it would have to have some priority mechanism so that my slashdot couldn't get in the way of your emergency stuff; however, there's no way that such a new network can be successful if it can't cope with being connected to the current internet. That would just be security through obscurity and uselessness. Like claiming a computer is secure because it's had concrete poured into it.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
We just need to educate people on how to use the internet and not fuck up their computer. It would go along the lines of, 1. Don't go to shady porn sites 2. Don't download software to turn your cursor into a piece of glitter covered shit 3. Don't send money to people in Nigeria 4. Do use anti virus/spyware/adware programs 5. Use open source software when possible 6. If you want to figure out how to fix your computer/internet go to google.com and type in your problem By my estimation this would solve around 90% of computer/internet issues. Without giving up our freedom just because you are so fucking incompetent you don't know how to work your own machine.
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What we really need is a return to bang-path routing. Everything after there was just downhill. Hard to use for newbies and not terribly hard for anyone with a clue.
And if the net was slow, you might actually be able to do something about it, not just hope your upstream got a freaking clue.
give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety
so I'll be safer by exposing myself?
factor 966971: 966971
The new bourgeois world order demands it.
There is nothing more subversive and abhorrent to the owning/ruling classes than this peer-to-peer network, on which nobody can know you're a dog.
That the smallest pipsqueak running Apache can pass for the largest media conglomerate, oh! the humanity!
What is needs is a strict pay-as-you-go, one way network that will feed what the big media conglomerate want to the masses, in which nothing negative (to the owning classes) can travel. A virtual Disneyland(TM) where everything (appears) nice so that the masses can be fond of the status-quo.
I think the AOL system was pretty much what the op is suggesting--a gated, fee-driven system that is safe for the kids and spam-free.
The problem is that systems like AOL are inherently limited, with a corporate team that decides its content and direction from week to week.
The Internet is amazingly varied and dynamic by comparison and it's little wonder that AOLers eventually left to join the greater outside world.
Comparing a Net 2.0 to a gated community is an intriguing concept, but in reality it would probably be too self-limiting for people.
It's possible today to stay in your own backyard on the wild and woolly Net 1.0. Just don't publish your email address, or else change it whenever you start getting junk mail. A lot of unsophisticated users just use the email assigned to them by their broadband vendors anyway, xxxx@verizon.net for example, and whenever they move or switch services their addresses change, too.
Also, just stick to a few trusted web sites, don't browse promiscuously, and you'll be fine. But life will be boring.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I'll build my OWN internet...with blackjack...and hookers. In fact forget the internet and blackjack part.
here it is.
It has long been recognized by the courts that without the ability to "speak" (communicate) to the public anonymously, the whole concept of "freedom of speech" would be a joke.
It is necessary for proper political debate to be able to express one's views without fear of repercussion. If anonymity were outlawed or otherwise prevented, people would NOT be able to express their views without others knowing who they are... and potentially threatening them, or their wellbeing, or their employment, or their families...
It all fits together. But truly, without anonymity, freedom of speech would not last.
Keep in mind that the "Federalist Papers", and other important publications of information about the formation of our country, and the war of independence, were published anonymously or under pseudonyms. If they had not been, surely the people who wrote such things (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, etc.) would have been harassed, arrested, or even killed.
The Internet itself isn't broken, not by a long shot. What's broken are certain applications that run across it.
And even then whether they're broken is arguable. Take SMTP for instance. One of the big complaints seems to be that SMTP doesn't make any guarantees that the sender is who they claim to be. My response to that is "And?". The USPS doesn't make any such guarantee about physical mail either, and we get along just fine anyway. It's just acknowledged that the identity of the sender isn't determined by the return address they put on the envelope, but by the claims in the letter inside and even those claims have to be verified independently of the Post Office. And when people are naive enough to believe any important letter just because it claims to be from someone without actually contacting that someone to verify it, we laugh at them. So when people say "I got an e-mail claiming to be from Bank of America and it was fake!", why don't we laugh at them and go "Well, YES! When the e-mail said there was a problem, why didn't you call BoA directly and ask about it?".
Same for Web browsers and web sites, and dozens of other applications. People want the transport layer to substitute for their own judgement and common sense. The Internet doesn't do that, any more than UPS or the USPS do. We don't need a replacement for them, do we?
Hell, we need a new reality because the one we got is full of war, famine, crime, misery and all manner of grief.
Technically, murder-suicide does not violate the golden rule.
A new internet? But I haven't even beaten the old one yet!
There have been several occassions here on Slashdot where I've made posts giving information that I didn't want other people to know I was giving.
For example, I might not want my employer to see that I'm on Slashdot saying, "Password security at my current employer sucks," or something like that. Unless you know who my current employer is, the information is useless, but I don't want to leave it up to them to make that connection.
Besides stuff like that, I just don't want everybody I know to have full access to everything I do online. IRL, I may not want my coworkers to know how I spend my weekends. There's no IRL Google, so as long as I don't tell them, they can't really find out. If I don't want them to know how I spend my time online, the easiest way to do that is by using a psuedonym they don't know of.
I don't do anything illegal. I don't "pirate" music/video games/movies or anything like that. I don't troll. I'm just a very private person, and I don't want people to know anything about me unless I feel like telling them.
User maintains more than a dozen sockpuppet accounts on Slashdot.
I'm guessing you're from the US. Guess what, there's other countries out there as well.
Imagine if the ISPs in *other countries* didn't give a shit about some *US* law regulation dictating that *US* ISPs stopped supporting TCP/IP *in the US*, and happily continue to use OSs that support them.
Not only that, but you would have to do far more than "just" roll out a software update. How about the ISPs infrastructure? Modems? Routers?
Never gonna happen, and if it does, it's never going to be global.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
The reason why you are bombarded with spam is because IDIOTS BUY IT. If they did not buy from spam, then spam would stop within a month. And the reasons why virus are sent on Windows is because it is an easy system to crack. Once it is no longer dead last on the security trail, then the spam writers will target the easier system. Put the blame where it belongs; BOTH the fools that buy the spammed products and use bad OSs as well as those that send the spam and the virus.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
600 people every year manage to defeat themselves and get killed by gun accidents
Yes, and over 40,000 in car accidents, 3500 in swimming pools. Where are cars and swimming pools mentioned in the constitution? It seems like it would be a lot less work and more useful to ban them first.
Actually most of the problems on the internet come from to much controll, not to little controll. The 2 big problems are net neutrality and privacy. Both are in danger because companies are able to record information like your IP-Address.
So if you want to make a new Internet, get rid of source IP-Addresses. Make the router aware of connections.
Public key cryptography can be used to assert identity in an otherwise anonymous communication medium. Anonymity cannot, however, be layered on top of an attributed communication medium.
Heck, even if it DOES happen somewhere, you think someone won't write some kind of proxy or gateway to establish communication between the two or more "internets"?
What exactly are you proposing? What changes in existing APIs and protocols would be required to implement your proposal?
Obviously, we need to be able to freely specify the destination address! And the source address already cannot vary much: that's what egress filtering is for. Sure, you can give your outbound packets any source IP you want, but unless source IP matches your ISP's records, your packets won't be forwarded to the larger internet.
What benefit does your circuit-switched proposal give us that TCP doesn't?
The concern that I have with any so-called 'Clean Slate' approach to reinventing the Internet, is that it would tend to focus on problems perceived in the current Internet (security, mobility, etc.). The danger is that the strengths of the current architecture are likely to be overlooked.
Any new Internet architecture should hold true to the principles articulated in RFCs 1958 and 3439.
A focus on security issues without respecting current Internet architecture strengths is likely to result in something more closely resembling the PSTN or Cable TV networks. Both those networks are highly secure (relative to the Internet) and both are centrally managed. Of course, the downside is that the network manager exerts a large degree of control over what can be done on their network. This naturally has an negative impact on innovation. Innovation can only occur within the limits of what the network owner can currently think of and allow.
Internet architecture (in broad terms) differs from PSTN or Cable networks in using intelligent end-points and a relatively simple network core. PSTN and Cable networks are just the opposite: The 'intelligence' is contained in the network core and end-points are relatively 'dumb'.
I'm all for blue-sky investigation into all possibilities, but lets not rush forward with a focus on current problems without recognition of exactly what has made the current Internet a success.
I will take Internet 1.0 with all of these assholes any day over a safe/secure sterilized Internet. Long live the Anonymous Coward! But please, watch your fucking language here, okay? There are mindless sheeple that may take offense to your goatse shit. Cunts.
Invest all the money you'd invest into the new internet into improving the OpenBSD firewall (incoming and outgoing), installer and mandatory access controls, Wine, X's DRI and a next-gen 3D game engine with insane powertools and not only would you save a shitload of money on the long run, you wouldn't even have to start over with internet v.3 because you wouldn't need any.
Kthnxbye. Grow some brains.
Here be signatures
We already have gated communities on the web: they're the "web2.0" sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc.
1. You have to give up some identification when you enter/join (even if it's quite weak: ie. usually you're verified email address)
2. You have to introduce yourself (or be introduced as in LinkedIn) before you can send anyone a message.
3. All you communications are through a central server that verifies the identity of both endpoints and records all communication (possibly for ever!).
And, yes, it's been seen that people happily give up a whole heap of private info to be part of these clubs...
It would be interesting to find out what the ratio is between email and social-site IM'ing these days.