Slashdot Mirror
You Won't Recognize the Internet in 2020
alphadogg writes "As they imagine the Internet of 2020, computer scientists across the country are starting from scratch and re-thinking everything: from IP addresses to DNS to routing tables to Internet security in general. They're envisioning how the Internet might work without some of the most fundamental features of today's ISP and enterprise networks. Their goal is audacious: To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management. Researchers are trying to build an Internet that's more reliable, higher performing and better able to manage exabytes of content. And they're hoping to build an Internet that extends connectivity to the most remote regions of the world, perhaps to other planets. This high-risk, long-range Internet research will kick into high gear in 2010, as the US federal government ramps up funding to allow a handful of projects to move out of the lab and into prototype. Indeed, the United States is building the world's largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks so that it can engage thousands – perhaps millions – of end users in its experiments."
Get real, in 2020 we might just have IPV6 to your local PC. Probably with all the consoles, games, etc that require IPV4 even this is optomistic. (I know many of you will have IPV6 end to end, but I mean for the average Joe)
As I came to the end of the article, I saw... "You are not logged in. ... or post as Anonymous Coward."
I wonder, with all these fancy features and identity management, will the veil of anonymity on the internet be removed?
Internet censorship has always been limited because the internet as we know it makes it hard with its anonymity and proxies, etc.
The question is will a government-funded internet make big-brother-ing easier?
"To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management."
I see. They want to end the real protection of free speach that anonymity provides.
Maybe we should just leave all the adult stuff, warez, etc. on the old Internet, and just use the new one for "not that".
stuff |
Indeed, the United States is building the world's largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks
Isn't that how the Internet, we have now, started? So what has changed, except for reinventing the whole thing?
I fear that our beloved open net will become a thing of the past. This sounds similar to previous talks of creating a secure and authenticated email system. Although I would welcome the end of SPAM, I'm sure it would be replaced by "official partner advertising".
I also think this might mean the end of file sharing and anonymous free speech, ala wikileaks.
coffee | nose > keyboard
Guessing "open" and "free" (as in speech) won't be part of the equation
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
If every computer was linked to every other in its vicinity, rather than directly to a limited number of ISPs, I wonder everything would be faster and more robust overall; a self healing network rather than one vunerable to a few cables snapping. The watchers won't be happy losing control but might it be a better net, if not everything had to go through the narrow part of the funnel?
Can this already be done with wireless bridging?.. is it possible to fragment DNS lookup so the ISP becomes redundant?
I'm pretty sure I will recognize the net in 2020. People always overestimate the rate of change in the future.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The current internet installed base infrastructure that would need to be ripped out and replaced is so large that this kind of redesign will never happen. Change has to come in incremental steps, each with a significant, well identified payback. What's technically possible does not matter nearly as much as whether change will make or save money.
"And they're hoping to build an Internet that extends connectivity to the most remote regions of the world, perhaps to other planets."
Sounds like someone plans on stealing the ansible technology from the Buggers.
For those of you not familiar with the writings of Daniel Keys Moran, I suggest you obtain a copy of Green Eyes or The Long Run.
Once there is no way to have free, anonymous speech on the internet, there will be no arena left where one can have free, anonymous speech.
I'm not suggesting total anarchy, but a rather that such total control should be avoided at all costs.
I have a sneaking suspicion that more security will lead to less internet freedom. Sure it'll be nice if you didn't have to worry about phishing sites or spam, but at what cost? A more secure internet means oppressive regimes can track dissidents. It means companies can track your behavior online, and well-meaning governments can limits legitimate freedoms.
I think the real key is considering how we get there from here. The ideas are nice, laudable goals -- and maybe even needed -- but they won't happen unless there's a pathway to get to them from today's Internet. Like a chemical reaction, even if the end result is lower energy than the starting reagents, nothing will happen if the work function separating the two is too high.
...that values personal freedom over corporate or government control, I am for them.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Whatever some people might like to say, I, for one, applaud their efforts. Whether they do create a new Internet or not, the research and development going into the project will benefit the current Internet. And if they do manage to create a new foundation... Well, maybe we'd finally be able to use a network which was designed for use by more than the military and a handful of universities? The tech behind the web is antiquated and was never created to handle such large network. It's already good we can manage, but there are still plenty of issues that a well-designed system could prevent without needing tons of patches that further complicate things. If it can improve speed, make coding for it easier, make it more reliable and more secure, what exactly is there not to love? Plus, if it doesn't really do everything better, it won't get adopted. It's a win-win situation.
I love this BS where a bunch of academics theorize how things should be, if only they were in change and the world was a very organized and authoritarian structure. Then what really happens is some dude with no more than a HS diploma comes up with a workable solution in his garage. It isn't sexy, it just works and the academics either 1). hate him for it and put his solution down or 2). Claim he was simply doing what they suggested in the first place.
Respect the Constitution
It's not the Internet switching fabric that is the problem, it's the end nodes. None of our PCs is provably secure. It's highly likely it won't be by 2020 either, as it appears the money is going into the wrong places in research. Capability Based Security has been around since the 1980s, and yet it's not even being funded to try to get it ready for widespread use by 2020.
Until the ends of the internet are secure, it's not going to be secure. It almost seems the money is always being spent in places where it won't really help the end user, but will allow more control by the authorities. (Or maybe I'm just a bit paranoid?)
. This is the part I worry about, it sounds like what the **AA's would love to have, an Internet without anonymity, one where everything is trusted.
Much like the trusted computing module put onto motherboards, I simply can't have faith in "trusted" Internet. Remember your TPM has nothing to with you being able to trust anyone, and everything to do with you not being trusted with your own computer.
It may not be the researchers intent, but this sounds a lot like a euphemism for centralized content licensing management. The Internet community has been burned to many times, with trust becoming a euphemism for DRM and licensing. These researchers need to understand, that if nothing else they are going to have an image problem, even if they have no intentions of centralizing content management. One way to further look into this to see if this indeed the case would be to look and see what companies are helping to bankroll the research. Depending on the company, they will expect (demand) that things are built in a manner that they would as resolving their licensing issues.
"Why, we could redefine everything, from a new addressing scheme to network management protocols, and we could define a software stack with specific functions performed by each level of the network code.. from packet construction to routing and switching! And get this... for flexibility, we'll allow each layer to communicate directly with its corresponding layer in another application! You'll be able to use the same network code for local shared memory communications and global internet communications! There'll be a new addressing scheme with no shortage of addresses, performance will be better than it currently is, and most of the problems related to security and routing of traffic will be solved!"
"Best of all, the new model for the network will be very logically organized, not the mishmash of software and standards that have organically evolved from the old ARPANet protocols and de facto standards. It will be easily understandable through common sense acronyms and simple models."
"It'll be so superior to what we have now that it's a no brainer.. everyone will obviously convert to it right away, with no one left behind."
"So, you should watch closely and start admiring the folks writing this standard now, and start teaching it to college students so they're prepared to deal with the New Internet when we're done."
Pfft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
If the internet is unrecognizable in 20 years it'll be because of some great innovation from a random guy in his college office, or someone working on a private project during spare moments at his job, or an amateur coder who works on an idea beyond the limit of sanity to turn vision into reality. It won't come from a bunch of bureacrats and government servants setting out to make "The New Internet (tm)".
Erik
That's what they said in 1999, isn't it? We have Facebook and Twitter and x10000000000 web pages and lolcats, but everything else is the same.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
the propaganda that iran, china, cuba, etc., put out as an excuse as they tweak their filters and install technological "improvements" for disallowing freedom of expression on the internet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
With governments and ISPs censoring the internet around the world, we need a peer to peer network that is truly distributed, decentralized, and anonymous.
I don't want to have to pay a monthly fee either. I will pay $$ for my own equipment to connect to my neighbors.
I never see anybody I know when watching porn.
What "other planets"? Occassionally people will talk about travelling to "other planets". What "planets" are they talking about?
You can't land on Jupiter, Saturn, Nepture or Uranus because they are just gas. Mercury has a temp of around 1100 C and Venus is 900 degrees with a sulfuric acid atmosphere and atmospheric pressure 90 times greater than earth.
So that just leaves Mars. So why don't they just say Mars instead of "other planets"?
To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management.
We don't want that.
Researchers are trying to build an Internet that's more reliable, higher performing and better able to manage exabytes of content. And they're hoping to build an Internet that extends connectivity to the most remote regions of the world, perhaps to other planets
None of that has anything to with the first part of their statement. Changing protocols and changing packets won't change the fact that you need the physical hardware at the location. The current internet does not have a problem extending connectivity to the remote regions of the world, or even to other planets. The only thing stopping THAT is the physical wires, servers, switches, etc. that have to be set up.
Before you go on about limitted address space, keep in mind that if we pushed those kinds of projects (the second type) the more we'd be pushing towards IPv6 - and even now we have some silly workarounds like NAT. In fact, I think if they redesigned NAT so it wasn't so... annoying to use, we'd get more use out of that than any other internet protocol they are probably working on.
Does this mean no more nowrap="nowrap"? I have lost any faith in a uniform internet I ever had, I would not be shock to learn in 2020 we will still be making concessions to applications so they run on IE6.
... the internet recognizes you!
the internet will still be a series of tubes, right?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
All concerns regarding free speech aside:
Innovation doesn't work that way. You can't take a decentralized network like the web and make it "a saver place". That's bogus, and in my opinion a huge waste of money.
Needless to say, they'll try anyways.
Ja ne,
Ranma-sensei
Non-supporter of Online Activation and any other draconian DRM
...the rest of the world will hate us for controlling "their" Internet.
(sorry, just read a Digg thread and I'm bitter about dumb people right now)
Tom Caudron
-Tom
one single fucking dirty word : control.
love the way how they pump up the stuff noone needs - exabytes of content, more 'reliability'. reliability of what, exactly ? reliable in which way, precisely ? it awfully resembles shitty catchphrases senators use to push their sinister private interest agendas in senate. 'good' abstract words which noone should object to - reliability.
'identity management'. what a nice way to say 'control'. its like naming a damned private interest feudal law Digital Millenium copyright act. now see, there's the phrase 'digital' in it and it also says 'millenium'. that cant be something bad right ?
so it goes like this. of course, unless we net people, eff and similar organizations starten up and take the initiative to create public opinion rather than waiting for some private interest to screw us all up by brainwashing the public.
Read radical news here
how much will they cost?
rewriting history since 2109
From TFA:
Another radical proposal to change the Internet infrastructure is content-centric networking, which is being developed at PARC.... Instead of using IP addresses to identify the machines that store content, content-centric networking uses file names and URLs to identify the content itself.
Kind of like how the Web works.
We're trying to work around the fact that machines-talking-to-machines isn't important anymore. Moving content is really important.
Which is done by machines-talking-to-machines.
Peer-to-peer networks, content distribution networks, virtual servers and storage are all trying to get around this fact.
Actually, no, they're the methods you'll have to use to build your utopian Internet, even if you hide it behind a new name. Also, how do virtual servers get around that fact?
Jacobson proposes that content — such as a movie, a document or an e-mail message — would receive a structured name that users can search for and retrieve. The data has a name, but not a location, so that end users can find the nearest copy.
There's a name for that "name" -- a URI.
Now, maybe what they're proposing will improve things, but if so, it's going to be incremental -- it's still going to talk IP under the hood. The bold claim that we "won't recognize" the Internet, that this is a "radical idea", is unwarranted hype.
I mean, if I understand what they're actually proposing, the most radical interpretation I could give it is ideas that have already been in Freenet for years.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
We were all supposed to be residing in apartments in the sky and driving flying cars by now, weren't we? Seems to me future predictions always underestimate how long it will take to reach a certain milestone by a factor of 10 or more. And of course they miss completely the radical new developments--notice there's no Internet in "the Jetsons?" With so many businesses relying on the Internet, it will be like pulling teeth to bring IPv6 to fruition, whether or not Windows Vista said it was ready for it. I'm not saying these changes don't need to be made--of course they do. But with every business on Earth pulling in the other direction, I don't believe I'll see these changes in my lifetime. Of course I would have said the same thing about seeing an African-American President, too ...
Can someone print this page and put in a time capsule and place underground for 10 years? I'd say this link would be here to reference, but with a "New" internet... One never knows!
"Indeed, the United States is building the world's largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks so that it can engage thousands – perhaps millions – of end users in its experiments."
Gosh now, China seems to only have a measly 22 NBCLs involved at the moment....and there's nothing 'perhaps' about the millions it can engage.
And those are just the ones that are already built. Who knows have many are in the 'is building' stage...
There is still no way for me to buy something with cash on the internet. Cash is cash. It's money, in and of itself, divorced from my identity. No identity is necessary. I can buy something at the corner store, or the liquor store, or the gas station with cash; the cashier doesn't need to verify my identity to see if my money is "good". It doesn't matter; my cash spends the same as anyone else's. When I meet someone to buy something off craigslist, I don't NEED to check anyone's identity; only to see that they are holding a wad of cash. The cash will spend regardless of who they are. There is nothing like this on the internet. I have to pay via credit card, paypal, or something else. How about getting around to inventing digital cash?
And since cash is "just money", and the property of whoever is holding it at a particular time, why not invent identities which are themselves "just identities" in the same way? In one of the Terry Pratchett books, there were ID cards that were, inherently, identities of themselves. Nobody had to prove you were the "owner" of the identity. It didn't matter; it was a non-issue, just like nobody has to verify if you are the owner of a wad of cash. The card WAS the identity.
I still long for a True Names anonymous internet of pseudoannonymity, multiple online identities, digital cash and annonymising remailers.
Most have forgotten that the Internet Engineering Task Force originally recommend OSI with full implementation of all 7 layers of the ISO model. Of course, no one wanted that ...
You got what you asked for !
To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management
Once it was possible to obtain a car (if you could afford it), sit at the wheel and roam about the countryside, feeling the wind in you hair and scaring the cows. Eventually this became so much the image of freedom that the theme from the "World of Motion" exhibit at EPCOT was called "It's fun to be free." Today you need to license the car (pay fee), license yourself (pay fee), maintain both licenses (pay fee pay fee), keep you car street legal (pay maintenance), learn and abide by an insane amount of legislation (and I don't know anybody who has never had a ticket, no matter how careful they are), pay insurance... Owning a car today is a chore, driving is a necessity but it's far from fun; the moment it becomes fun, you're breaking some law. I know, this protects everybody, blah blah blah, I agree. But it's not fun.
The same mindset, for similar reasons, is now being ported to the Internet. Good bye freedom, good bye fun. Hello taxes, licensing and obligations. Sad.
Unless it adds value to end users it will not be adopted. Works faster? Great. The US/Iranian/Russian government is now reading my emails in addition to google? Not so great.
What would be incredible, is if the US government could implement OpenID on all of their websites. Taxes are rolling around, couldn't they make a site that lets me file directly with them? Or one that lets me see every outstanding ticket i have in my fair city? These systems don't have to be the same to be integrated.
Oh yeah, well I'm a dentist, and neither I nor my 4 dentist friends approve.
Seriously now...
Projects like this make me laugh on a number of levels.
First, "...This high-risk, long-range Internet research will kick into high gear in 2010, as the US federal government ramps up funding to allow a handful of projects to move out of the lab and into prototype. Indeed, the United States is building the world's largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks so that it can engage..." Funny, I thought the US was collapsing and falling apart? Where's all the investment and research $$ for all this essential international infrastructure from say, China? India? Europe? Do we want to talk again about 'internationalizing' the TLD registration and expanding the urls to non-Latin characters, or do we want to wait until the US has (again) made all the primary development investment first?
Second, 'rebuilding the internet' is a bit like reworking the Constitution, isn't it? I mean, the confluence of the varying and irreconcilable intrests of the RIAA, MPAA, EFF, NSA, commercial companies, research organizations, politicians, and even perhaps the needs of the public somewhere near the bottom (presuming you can even get a coherent picture of what 'the public' wants, from the Evangelical Christians, to the Scientologists, to NAMBLA, to people stealing torrents of movies, to 4chan users) all react against each other to make the idea of such a fundamental reworking conceptually impossible. They simply cannot all win, and NONE of them have ever shown a willingness to compromise in any meaningful way. Stalemate. Your choice is to try to cobble together some ridiculously bloated thing that tries to be everything to everyone (witness the Euro constitution, lol), or, you have some neo-fascist organization promulgating their own standard and trying to enforce it on everyone, no matter how much they clearly don't want it (witness again the Euro constitution, lol).
So what will happen, I expect, is that we're going to continue to use the same old creaky, leaky, insecure decrepit system until someone figures out ways to improve it piecemeal, so that as people have specific needs that can be met technologically and modularly (like better authentication, etc.) they can spend what they need to, implement what they need and no more. It's all about $, and perceived cost-benefit. When the need is perceived to be great enough, proprietary solutions will be developed. They'll compete in the marketplace, and the most usable (note I didn't say "best") will win, probably eventually going from proprietary to standard.
-Styopa
But what would Jaron Lanier say about that kind of Internet? :-)
Ten years. Start research now and have a completely new Internets in ten years. Time scale? NASA takes fifteen or twenty years to get a single probe up. R&D companies take that long to get a product on the shelves.
So let's reinvent the Internet and sit in a think tank and somehow come up with every single little thing that could go wrong. Nevermind that the change of IPv6 was defined twelve years ago and that we have not even come close to a realization of it as simple as it is. Sounds a bit like an SBIR idea...we're going to be more likely to get to Mars by 2015 than we are to have this happen.
... to Internet security in general ...
Guaranteed, they won't increase real security, but they will increase security theatre.
Stuff that's very public, annoying, and utterly ineffective, like background and credit score checks as part of Cisco CCNA certification, maybe an official scarey looking badge or uniform for internet security personnel, maybe some very public raids against random citizens, etc.
Heres a thought ... Americans used to be "citizens". Now we're merely "consumers". Maybe with the new internet we'll get a new name like "surfers".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I have to wonder how many of the things they'll get rid of citing "security" concerns are the same thing so many of us (even us benign ones) consider advantages, like being able to view a website without dropping off our digital passport at the door.
This high-risk, long-range Internet research will kick into high gear in 2010
Eh? What do you mean we've tried this before?
There's no place like
"with better trust and built-in identity management"
but what if I don't want anyone to be able to attribute my postings to me? (like a prospective employer?)
-AC
Any "new" internet will be all nicely traceable and controlled. You'll need an ID to log in and your physical address will be in the international database. Your health inquiries will all be reported to the insurance guilds and if you make too much noise about the wrong politician/financial professional, your porn surfing habits will be accidently "discovered" and reported by a media owned "news" site.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I'm on the internet all day every day, I have yet to experience a major 'security breech'. Perhaps this 'second internet' is really more of a 'stupid person internet'.
Blow up my plane? Nuke ten of your airports.
The goatse guy will still be there.
This ain't rocket surgery.
I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
The same people who watched Star Wars and wanted to build the Death Star are now working on turning The Matrix into reality.
This has been in the works for a while, driven by a collusion between security agencies and high tech industry. This is what they meant when they were "caught off guard" by 9/11, and decided to "wage war on the internet" as a response to dissent during Operation Iraqi Liberation. When the entire plot of America's next blatant power grab becomes common knowledge within a matter of weeks thanks to a free global individual communications medium, FBI agents with 486's could no longer successfully pull off the kind of false flag operations they could when television was dominant. They had to pick their donut-stuffed asses out of their plastic chairs and resort to the good old fashioned foot-work of personal attacks, disappearances and discrediting anyone who questions the official line to keep the blood money flowing.
Profit is of course the motive, but not profit for society at large, profit at your expense. The initial purpose is to enable more reliable monitoring of communications by making identification more reliable. Stick your smart-card enabled driver's-license-slash-food-stamp-card into a reader in order to access the internet. Copy a song or movie, or pose a sufficient threat to society, and your access can be revoked. Government are the only ones who might be motivated to pay for such a scheme, with no clear benefit to anyone but the types of delusional control freaks government attracts.
The next step will be to take everything you say or communicate electronically, and to use it against you. This is where the profit comes in. Your ideas are copied, stolen, and then black-holed. Your views are distorted. Everyone from your employer to your landlord to concerned parents would pay for information on you. Those who control it's collection will control it's perception and use, and profit from it. Your health insurance may be cancelled. Your boss may not recommend you for a raise. Your parents may decide to cut you out of their will. Your bank may reduce your credit limit. They will have no qualms about doing so. You will never see it coming. The information they base their decisions on comes from the government, and government is trusted. The information is thus trusted as well, thanks to step one above.
The final step is segmentation. The internet is no longer global. You get your own personal copy. Every search result you get and every website you go to is filtered and personalized. The internet is no longer your link to a larger world, but a fictional creation used to manipulate and control you. Freedom of speech is no longer liberating, but a jail for your mind. This will take a while. But it is coming. It's just targeted advertising for now, but wait ten years and see what it becomes with the Federal government picking up the tab.
Consider this: There is a $200 trillion financial derivatives market in the United States. At 3% growth, this represents $70,000/yr for each and every US household, nearly every dollar earned by working Americans. And it's already accounted for. They know you will spend it. They know to 99% certainty how you will spend it. And if they happen to be wrong, they will get bailed out. There is no room for error. There is no tolerance of paradigm-changing technologically innovative ideas. Every economic transaction is now backed by the force of government. And they have every incentive to increase their intrusion into and control over your everyday life.
My response is to be careful what you wish for. Sometimes it is better not to know whether the cat is dead or not.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
IMHO evolution is the only way. People put too much content into this "old" internet to make it feasible to start from scratch "just like that".
diegoT
I hope you are being sarcastic. Rule of thumb is, nothing is upgraded by consumer until it fails. Even it fails, guy won't upgrade it, he will simply flood your support line and you will have multiple (b)million dollar PR disaster. Do you know why everyone panicked when DNS had a flaw? It was the reason, they knew the average Joe and his way of using computer.
You wouldn't believe how many horribly outdated routers, software and operating systems are out there.
Internet succeeded because of backwards compatibility, a great amount of fallback mechanisms, it is almost like TV which you could use 1960s B&W TV set to receive programs. How many decades and billions spent to make the digital switch? And there is still a way for that guy insisting to use that 1960s TV to watch digital with add-on right?
Remember "Itanic", a clearly more advanced 64bit CPU? Besides they trusted compilers too much, what was the reason of failure? Lack of backwards compatibility. When AMD had this idea of keeping X86 and adding "bonus features" and 64bit but make it backwards compatible so even MS-DOS can run, 64bit took off.
Perhaps they should admit IPV6 was planned wrong, take the AMD kind of approach? I
a different internet that i will still recognize in 2015. More than a pipedream goal for 2020, matters how we evolve current internet to it, while everything is working, at a very cheap or close to zero cost, and in an open way. Without all those components, you wont be able to succeed.
Kids who grow up with social networking are going to experience the internet differently too: http://thealbatross.ca/2009/11/report-children-too-mature-for-social-networking/
Also in the future, we will have flying cars.
Honestly, what has been created in the last 10 years astonishes me but I don't see a replacement for the internet as it exists now in the next 10. Flying cars, more likely.
Let's face it, the point of any redesign is more about knowing exactly who you are and what you're doing at all times. Don't be surprised if it some how involves some sort of identification to even connect.
As far as I can tell, SMTP has, as an emergent property of its definition, spam. Spam arises from STMP the same way that the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism indirectly imply helium. Whatever the "new net" will look like, it needs attention from people who love to see out cracks in the structure and find flaws in the most pristine crystal.
There will be an authoritarian urge, a desire to top-down the whole process, that will make for a sucky internet ripe for abuse by elected officials. If not anonymity, at least pseudonymity, need to be part of the structure. Perhaps anonymity costs more money. "Common Sense" was printed anonymously, but not for free. We need a solid micropayment system.
- You can let the new card generate their own keypair and spit out the public one for signing by the government (no cheating there unless the cards hardware has some backdoor).
- You can let people get their own card at city hall by having it signed in a device disconnected from any communication, without any storage, only containing their private key (no cheating unless the device has some backdoor).
I know there must be enought ways to make this work... *technically*... but even if technically everything is trustworthy you are nowhere further because the goverment can't be trusted and could pull some trick out of their sleeve.
You call it unachievable, but it's only unachievable to the unimaginative... If the goverment is the one pissing over every solution that will actually add some safety and does not censor the people or create artificial inequalities the problem might be the government... not the technology. So i'd say you're barking up the wrong tree... Oppose the people trying to oppress you!
This seems pretty OnTopic to me
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is a natural tendency to be hamstrung by familiarity. "Since the current internet is monolithic, any future internet must also be monolithic." I suspect that in order to actually create truly secure pockets for power grid management, financial data and so forth, new infrastructures will have to be deployed in parallel to the existing network, not replacing it wholesale. Over time Internet 1.0/2.0/X.0 may or may not be supplanted as the most popular public network by a new upstart. At the same time, different communities and entities will create systems that work for them in terms of security, privacy, speed, etc, and mirror appropriate information in a controlled manner to other networks as needed. What is lost in efficiency will be compensated in flexibility and robustness.
This is just what I think is most likely, not some cause that I'm emotionally invested in. It just seems to fit trends we've seen before (which, as I mentioned in my first sentence, should be considered suspect as a matter of course.)
"...To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management."
So, let me get this straight. The same Government who can't even manage to secure their own computer networks is going to try to build a more secure new network?
Hell, you might as well have given the contract to Microsoft.
There, fixed that for you.
Let's compare this with the phone system:
The hand-crank-operator-plug-board system of the late 1800s gave way to manual switches in the very late 1800s, but many places in America still didn't have dial phones until the 1960s. Touch-tone came about in the very early 1960s and "calling features" like call waiting in the 1970s, but they weren't nearly universal in America until the very late 1980s or 1990s.
Long distance went digital in the 1980s and 1990s, but the end user only noticed higher "sounds like next door" quality and cheaper rates, not a difference in how they made calls.
Now almost all calling is digital, but for most of us the only change in how we dial is we push a "talk" button on our wireless handset or cell phone rather than lifting the receiver.
The big changes in "how we use phones" to communicate are voicemail, text, pictures, and as an Internet/email access device.
As far as the Internet being "unrecognizable" in 10 years, no, it won't be. Will it be different? Yes, but in an evolutionary, not revolutionary, way. Remember, in 2000, we had the web but in practical terms it was limited to still pictures, simple animations, and text. Oh, we also had dialup, which nobody misses.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I see seventeen wireless networks where I live, each one of theose sees maybe one or two outside the local cluster... Can't we instantly and easily build a software program that creates an ad hoc LAN, then hooks into every unsecure router around it, allowing connection to the WAN from random routers at any given moment making it a nightmare to puzzle out a trail later? I'd continue to pay my current ISP for MY connection, but if I wanted to do something anonymous, what stops me from firing the program up, and connecting to anyone of a dozen routers near me? If you you had the right software, then you could have the unsecure router then connect to yet another router, farther away, before connecting to the net.
On a related note, If we build a big enough base of people doing this, we could probably build a peer to peer network that stretched for miles without ever actually getting onto the net at all, a darknet of epic proportions
... You must learn control....you must BE controlled...
The new internet will be created by people who have an interest in controlling you, knowing exactly who you are, and limiting everything you do. The new internet will be a one way directional pipe to you the consumer. If you think DRM on files is bad, wait until its built into every dam bit that transfers over the "net"
I sure as fuck WILL recognize the internet in 10 years.
There's money involved. Lots. Money hates change.
I'll still be able to go to cnn.com or whatever. I'll still be able to connect to shit via IPv4. I'll still be able to use HTTP and POP and IMAP and SMTP and FTP and etc.
The internet will be different, but it will still clearly be the internet, and I'll still be able to interact with it as I do today. There may be newer methods of interacting, sure, but they won't kill off the older methods.
As for the bold claims that people are "starting from scratch", all I can say is "lol no". I'm pretty sure we'll still be using wires (be they twisted pair or fiber) and modems and NICs. I'm pretty sure we'll still have MAC addresses and they'll still be relatively useless for 99% of people. I'm pretty sure the internet from a user's point of view will be the same, with more flashy crap. (By flashy crap, I mean both useless shiny baubles for the plebes AND shit like the festering pile of shit from Adobe.)
What's happening is that people are working on making the internet more secure and reliable on the back end. People don't see the back end. They see the front end. People will recognize the internet just fine.
As for the likelihood of there being any success in improving the security and trust and such on the internet: LOL. For tens of thousands of years we haven't been able to develop security and trust in real life. The people are the problem, not the system. People will go out of their way to get fucked every single time.
Imagine the internet was as restrictive as a prison. Now imagine the amount of fucking that would be going on.
... I don't recognise the internet. I'm confused what baud rate is a ADSL2 connection?
Us in 2020: "They don't build 'em like they used to".
Roy Amara said "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
Ray Kurzweil says something similar:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html
"""
I emphasize this point because it is the most important failure that would-be prognosticators make in considering future trends. Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this "historical exponential view" of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Should be +5 Informative
Right now, if you want to do something on the web, you need a web server. Sure, you can rent a virtual one etc., but still.
The model in a peer-to-peer content distribution network is more like if you need to put something up, you just do it by connecting your computer to the rest of the world. The network distributes the content according to demand. If your machine goes down, the content doesn't disappear.
Of course, someone still needs to run a computer somewhere, but the fact is that there's a gazillion of computers out there idling. If you can tap into them... The current way of organising computers with DNS is really fairly static and thus inefficient, even with virtual servers.
So it's about lower cost and seamless handling of failures and scaling.
Of course, this kind of thing is not going to happen overnight, and it might not even be feasible (not yet, at least). But that's why it's research. And yes, these ideas have been simmering for some time, I was in the field when I wrote my Masters three years ago, and at that time I certainly read a couple papers about it. Given what we know today, how could we redesign IP or DNS or the web to avoid some of their flaws? It's interesting stuff.
in 2020 internet won't recognise you!
it's going to take a lot of work to get IPoAC to work between here and Jupiter...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is the only part I liked: "And they're hoping to build an Internet that extends connectivity to the most remote regions of the world, perhaps to other planets." Extend connectivity, improve performance for all the content, and make it easy to access information with no restrictions, even if you live in another galaxy. It'll be nice to know that when I move to AlphaCentauri, the cable company has the jacks hot-wired with the Internet.
"computer scientists .. goal is audacious: To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management"
.. It allows you to install any software you want deep into the network anywhere you want. You can program switches and routers"
:o
We don't need to wait until 2020, all the above currently exist in some form, why aren't they being used.
"One of the key goals of GENI is to let researchers program very deep into the network
Are you sure this project is about securing the Internet
I am really enthusiastically looking forward to it! The New Internet(tm) will be so beautiful!
Whatever happened to Internet2?
Really, should we start volunteering in building our own infrastructure that cannot be misused? WiFi seems to be a good candidate; I expect the price for the components would go down significantly in 10 years, or we can start developing our own open HW that would be independent from what is out now. Anyone would join?
This has been tried before. See the "Clean Slate" program at Stanford. Basically, it's a plan to redesign the Internet to put telcos more in control. The emphasis is on identifiable "flows", allowing the endpoints, bandwidth, duration, and traffic statistics of a flow to be identified. Visualize an Internet that allows cell-phone like billing and you have the telco dream.
Read the OpenFlow white paper. The basic idea is that, every time a new "flow" appears, the first packets are forwarded to Master Control, which decides what to do about them. Deny? Wiretap? Throttle? Report? It's all up to the "Controller". See page 3, col. 1. This is implemented by making ordinary routers "OpenFlow compatible". Most routers already have flow tables. Currently they're mostly caches for routing info. OpenFlow puts them under centralized control.
With relatively minor mods designed into existing router FPGAs, (or software - there's a Linux implementation for test purposes, and downloads for some Linux-based routers) they can be OpenFlow compatible. They can act like ordinary routers until a controller contacts them and takes them over.
The hype is about "enabling innovation in campus networks", but the reality is that it puts a central controller fully in charge of, and fully aware of, each user's connections.
we'll just get back to Fidonet....
Being 40+ years old now and watching technology my whole life starting computers at 7 it's something I am very in tune with.
If you want to see how it's going to change in the future you can just extrapolate from the past.
First let's point out that the internet is a common method for moving datagrams (IP packets, block of data up to 1500 bytes at a time), much like the postal service ships individual letter. On top of this stream connections using (TCP) are created and most of what we see is built on this.
The point is, there are no limitations over what can be sent, or the format.
So telepresents, virtual reality, haptics, Remote control of UAV's, skys the limit on what can be sent over this network.
I remember the Internet clearly as it was 30 years ago. As a hacker breaking in to it was the most LEET thing you could do back in 1980.
I wasn't till 1987 before I finally got my first legitimate access to the Internet.
Let me put a little time line down to put things in to perspective.
1969 CompuServe started.
1972 C Programming Language invented.
1980 -- there was no TCP/IP even is was NCP, no unix servers and it was the DARPANET. It was all 300 Baud Modems! UUCP and Email was there.
1983 BSD 4.2 Unix came out with first tcp/ip stack in . C++ first developed.
Modems and BBS's ruled at this time (sort of like when dinosaurs roamed the earth)
1984 Apple Macintosh first released.
1985 "thin" Ethernet first comes out (uses BNC Coax)
1987 Perl released.
1988 Linksys founded. First Internet Worm get's loose, create massive panic! (Robert Tappan Morris)
1990 -- there was no www, html, , it was telnet, ftp, gopher, Archie First Internet search engine starts.
10Base-T first comes out.
1992 Wais search engine starts.
1992 Tim Berards Lee came out with www and html.
1993 Mosaic the first "graphical" web browser. Before this it was all console text based !!!!!
WiFi was invented. Linux and FreeBSD first Released. Lycos search engine starts.
1994 14.4K modems first started to appear. WebCrawler search engine starts. VRML web based virtual reality.
1995 Yahoo and Altavista search engines start. Vocaltec first VOIP comes out. JAVA released.
1995/6 is when the internet boom started. 28.8K modems appear.
1997 Google & E-Bay started. 36.6K and 56Kmodems appear. PHP first comes out. Netflix starts. 100Base-T first comes out.
1998 Voip is 1% of all phone traffic.
1999 Napster first comes out. DSL & Cable Modems first become available. Metricom Ricochet service comes out. Blogger.com goes online.
Gigabit Ethernet first comes out.
2000 Dot com Crash.
2001 Metricom dies.
2002 Bit Torrent takes off. Wifi Starts to take off for consumers.
2003 Skype first comes out.
2004 Facebook goes online.
2005 Youtube goes online.
2006 Twitter founded.
2007 Hulu Starts
2008 Netflix start streaming video.
2009 HD videos are being streamed from Youtube.
Well as you can see things in the past 10 haven't changed all that much.
I expect the next 10 will not bring any radical surprises unless your living under a rock.
I expect telepresents, and augmented reality to be the next big things.
I am going to try to keep filling this in and post on my blog johnsokol.blogspot.com
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
How about getting around to inventing digital cash?
Look around the internet, or your cryptography textbooks, for Brand's Electronic Cash Scheme (or e-cash scheme).
If you can, have a look at this: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/9746/30738/01423662.pdf%3Farnumber%3D1423662&authDecision=-203
As best I know, the problem isn't that e-cash hasn't been invented. It's that it hasn't been innovated yet. That is, it hasn't been turned into a product or service or thing that regular people can and want to use.
Although, I heard someone chat about being able to store money on our (nation-specific) debit cards.
The purpose I heard was eliminating the delay when the terminals call up the bank and ask whether it should OK a transaction.
The card holder first runs a protocol between him and the bank to store money on the card. When the money is stored on the card, the card holder and the seller can then run a local protocol to transfer the e-cash to the seller, which the seller can then turn into real money (real as in "numbers in a computer") by talking to the bank some other time.
I don't know whether the talk was specifically about Brand's e-cash scheme, but it has the same communication structure (i.e. which pairs of people talk together at which relative point in time).
But as I said: I just heard it sort of passing by. But I think it would take involvement of the state to make changes to what is considered legal tender. And if e-cash isn't, how do you buy anything else than WoW loot (or "faceville" crops, or items from some other isolated virtual world) with it? How does it cross national borders?
Late-breaking news.....the creators of the Narus box have just been named as the sole project manager for the 2020 internet....
It'll be reaaaaaally easy for the government and copyright holders to identify the users.
every so often someone round here stumps up the suggestion that we hack the firmware in all our wifi gear and just mesh the lot, then they got shot down in flames because it might be a bit slow and unreliable. Avoiding parent poster's vision of the 2020 internet seems worth the effort IMO.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
You're mistaken.
If you tell people the new Internet "2.0" is: -
... that will get two-thirds of the population, because they don't want: -
Then, everyone else will follow because suddenly YouTube 1.0, Facebook 1.0, Twitter 1.0 aren't the places where stuff goes down any longer, you can't send mail to your friend on Internet 2.0, and have to go through three extra verification processes to buy something from Amazon 1.0, while it's true one-click buying from Amazon 2.0, now without a need for any kind of redundant registration.
In the end, your ancient free Internet will be a place where only people go who do have something to hide, at which point they'll shut it down as "a crackdown on organized crime", to protect the general populace.
Subject: How Dangerous is the Cyber Crime Threat?
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, in fact, President Obama had talked about doing this as early as May. And then there were reports that it was taking a while to fill the position or to figure out who that person would report to.
JAMES LEWIS: There's a dispute in the White House and in the administration. And I think that slowed things down.
Some people think it's best to leave the Internet alone, let it be the Wild West, let it continue to have a limited role for government, and the Internet community will find its way out of this problem.
I don't happen to agree. I'm not sure where Howard comes out on this, but...
JEFFREY BROWN: Don't you agree why?
JAMES LEWIS: I don't, because we have tried letting the Internet community solve this. We have tried seeing if it was a self-organizing global commons. It hasn't worked. It's just like the Wild West. Time to move in the marshals.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/july-dec09/cyber_12-22.html
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Computer scientists are Across which country??
This sounds similar to the goals of the NewArch project, http://www.isi.edu/newarch/ back in 2003? The original idea seems to have died with the funding?
What many seem to forget is that lately, many late users (I mean users attracted to a higher use of Teh Interwebz by social media and such) are currently worrying about their privacy. The IRC/Usenet generation might still see privacy as "doing whatever I want under cover of anonymity", but the later users see it as "I don't want my boss to see my Nekd Disco Foam Night photos where I'm pole dancing with three transvestites and a horse photos I just uploaded". From there onward it's just a matter of time until someone has the idea to make our online publication a 'real' private belonging. How can it be done without linking it to our IRL identity ?
You forgot two things. First, technology tends to grow exponentially. It reaches a limit at one moment, but overall, the faster it goes, the faster it gets. Second, the impact of the social media is extremely huge, I live in Asia, and in my city nearly everybody who can access a computer owns a facebook account, that's a LOT of people. Online presence will not be more different for the generations born in the last 10 than phone calls are for us, that's a major change.
Actually if you look at the grown curve for any technology it's not exponential but sigmoidal. Which can very much look like an exponential when it's curve first starts to rocket upwards.
If you want to see the trend for the Internet look at the phone.
First was just connecting over 1 line, then plug panels, and then automated electron mechanical switching. A monopoly was given by the government to the third largest company! Still Bell Labs drove so much technology R&D. The transistor, the Laser, Fiber Optics.
Development and growth was very rapid for it's time, but it then slowed down and leveled off.
Still developments occurred. touch tones, Muzac, Teletype, PBX's, modems, fax, answering machines, and voicemail, IVRU's, 1-800, 911, Video Conferencing, Caller ID, ISDN, DSL.
I am sure the same will be for the Internet. At some point it will level off, and development will slow. Limited by the pace of other technologies.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
wow gold cheap wow gold pandora jewellery buy wow gold pandora jewellery tiffany jewellery pandora charms tiffany pandora bracelets tiffany jewelry rolex watches replica rolex replica rolex watches rolex
Point taken for the sigmoidal curve. Though I still believe the next 10 will be marked by some drastic changes both in the technologies used and the way to use them. Think about it, IT is a researching field, where tools are made to improve the making of future tools. The parallel with the phone development is clever, but it doesn't take in account that conputers are made to make computers (when users are done watching the kittens). There will always be bottlenecks at the end of a technology's life, but there will always be discoveries to do things better, or differently, I'm thinking quantum computing. Then again, the social factor is enormous. I see things like broadband for mostly everyone and everywhere, with mostly everyone participating and using it, happening really soon. Anyway it's gonna be interesting.
....in my flying car?
Ask Me About... The 80's!
You think there will be internet in 2020?
When a thief sees a saint, all he sees are his pockets!
I think social changes are going to be the next largest visible effect. It already is. The fact that CNN was forced to grab videos of the new president off youtube was one. Videos that the Internet savy had access to before the major news networks.
Yes, there is the obvious, we all will have broadband, and wireless broadband to our Cell Phones and laptops.
But the "Internet" as a network hasn't fundamentally changed since 1983.
Just new apps.
So the future apps will more more VR/AR Telepresence and things that extend beyond the computer will be next. Think about what a big deal the Wii is, and I think it's stupid, but for most people it's a big shift having to get up and move while playing a game.
There's nothing like controlling an RC vehicle that's 1000's of miles away and seeing video back from it.
The average person had no idea what the Internet can do today. It's just a matter of time before these things trickle down to the public.
I think direct neural interfaces to the internet though a pocket mobile device is where it's going. But that's probably more then 10 years out.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
It's full of buzzwords. And all aimed at people who use the internet, but don't quite understand what it is.