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.
The internet and the undernet.
http://www.tenjou.net/
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
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
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.
Well the internet is very much a creation of a bunch of academics with state funding, so lets not stereotype so much.
... 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
...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
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 ...
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.
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.
But what would Jaron Lanier say about that kind of Internet? :-)
... 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
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
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.
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"
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
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.
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