NSF Tags $30M For Game-Changing Internet Research

coondoggie writes "So you want to build a better Internet? The National Science Foundation today said it would spread $30 million over 2-4 projects that radically transform the Internet 'through new security, reliability and collaborative applications. The NSF said its Future Internet Architectures (FIA) program wants: "Technological innovations and the requirements of emerging and yet to be discovered applications, the Internet of the future is likely to be different from that of today. Proposals should not focus on making the existing Internet better through incremental changes, but rather should focus on designing comprehensive architectures that can meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century."'"

Comments

Likely to be different?

[Chris Burke]

So, the internet of the future isn't going to be a general-purpose protocol-agnostic world-wide data network for sharing and communication of information?

Uh, can I opt-out of the future?

Re:Likely to be different?

[icebike]

If only the future had opted into the past.

Quote from TFA:

From the Network World article: The NSF says it won't make the same mistake today as was made when the Internet was invented, with security bolted on to the Internet architecture after-the-fact instead of being designed in from the beginning.

"We are not going to fund any proposals that don't have security expertise on their teams because we think security is so important," says Darleen Fisher, program director

And this really is the crux of the problem isn't it?

Rampant SPAM (95% of all email), deep packet inspection, attacks, bot nets, the list goes on. Almost all the abuses we suffer daily on the internet are due to the security-as-an-afterthought model.

There will be those (there always are) who insist that this is nothing more than a government take over and the installation ob yet more back doors. There is nothing that can be done to appease that viewpoint, even open standards and open source will not suffice.

But I am not prepared to believe we can not improve upon what was done 40 years ago given the number of minds and the level of technology we have to apply to the problem today.

We defend the status quo because we know it, not because it is optimal, not because it is even close to being fully functional, and certainly not because it is fair.

Deal with political problems in the political arena. But in the mean time, lets fix our tools.

Re:Likely to be different?

[Chris Burke]

Rampant SPAM (95% of all email), deep packet inspection, attacks, bot nets, the list goes on. Almost all the abuses we suffer daily on the internet are due to the security-as-an-afterthought model.

Not really.

Bot nets exist because you can never stop people from installing software no matter how scary your warning dialogues about untrusted sources are (and in fact throwing up too many is counter-productive).

Spam and DOS attacks are because you can't prevent the bot nets.

Most of the real security problems are at the OS/application level. Not the underlying internet.

Re:Likely to be different?

[raddan]

Actually, rethinking global addressing schemes is on the table for many next-gen Internet projects I've spoken to researchers about. The reason is that router-table growth is not adequately handled in IPv6, nor is the meaning of an IP address very clear in the current Internet. These are major issues. Have a look at Jerome Saltzer's work on naming and addressing. If you want the short version, have a look here.

Step 1:

[swanzilla]

Abolish Flash, immediately.

Re:Time to disolve NSF?

[goose-incarnated]

There is much better use for 30M such as spending it on education, which is broken rather than Internet which isn't not so broken.

Yup ... you're seriously making a great case there, trust me on this ;-)

Best to keep doing patches

[Darkness404]

Its a lot better for the world as a whole if we keep doing small improvements to the internet rather than a total overhaul. For one, it will create a -huge- amount of waste in a short period of time, for another, it will not be entirely global, corporations, governments, etc will aim to reduce global communication, global trade and such. If we do create a "new internet" it should be decentralized as much as possible, nearly untraceable and fully global (no Geolocation-IP address based discrimination), however, governments do not like us to exercise any freedoms they have on paper and corporations want to maximize profits, so this will never happen.

Adoption

[cosm]

Wishful thinking. What makes them believe anybody will adopt? The general theme I gather from the Slashdot community is that the preexisting design aesthetic (if you can even call it that) for the internet is actually pretty solid, its just the implementation that people & organizations botch. The IPv6 bandwagon isn't about to collapse from all its passengers now, is it?

The folks who generally engineered the internet had decent enough foresight from a technical standpoint. It is the BIG Telco's and all their 'peering', 'filtering', 'throttling', and combined unwillingness to invest in new infrastructure that puts the choke hold on our tubes (pun intended). Do you expect the major Tier 1's to drop billions of $$$ to adopt, 'cuz I sure as hell don't.

Re:Time to disolve NSF?

[Truth is life]

There is much better use for 30M such as spending it on education, which is broken rather than Internet which isn't not so broken.

That's not the point of the NSF. Besides, as this link http://nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10001/toc.jsp to their FY 2009 report shows, they already spend almost a billion dollars a year on education. Or over 30 times the value of this award. I really don't think you can claim that canceling this award and giving the money to the DoEdu (or even shifting it to the education side of NSF) would be better value for the money.