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)
"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.
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.
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.
...that values personal freedom over corporate or government control, I am for them.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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
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
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 ...
The internet is based on ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) a military research project to use packet switching over a network instead of circuit switching. I doubt they envisioned it becoming so innocuous. It wasn't until Tim Berners-Lee introduced HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) and subsequently released it royalty free that the Internet's World Wide Web was born. And the rest, as they say, is history. This "new" internet initiative is probably to try and put the genie back in the bottle.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
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.
While strictly speaking not planets, there are lots of other "heavenly bodies" that one might land on. The most obvious is Luna, although Titan and some of the other gas giant moons hold a degree of promise. Then there's the possibility of sending data to other planets but not to their surfaces - Venus' atmosphere may be hot and corrosive, but its orbital space is essentially clear. Suppose we wanted to send a manned orbital observation craft to Jupiter (for whatever reason) - would connecting it into this network not count as extending this Internet "to other planets"?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Damn right. And let's not even touch the point that we DO NOT WANT our identities to be linked to our internet activities. There is not a single person in here who'd want that.