The Internet's Broken. Who's Going To Invent a New One?

aarondubrow writes: "The Internet has evolved to support an incredibly diverse set of needs, but we may be reaching a point at which new solutions and new infrastructure are needed in particular to improve security, connect with the Internet of Things and address an increasingly mobile computing landscape. Yesterday, NSF announced $15 million in awards to develop, deploy and test future Internet architecture in challenging real-world environments. These clean-slate designs explore novel network architectures and networking concepts and also consider the larger societal, economic and legal issues that arise from the interplay between the Internet and society.

Each project will partner with cities, non-profit organizations, academic institutions and industrial partners across the nation to test their Internet architectures. Some of the test environments include: a vehicular network deployment in Pittsburgh, a context-aware weather emergency notification system for Dallas/Fort Worth, and a partnership with Open mHealth, a patient-centric health ecosystem based in San Francisco."

Comments

The NSF

[Sigvatr]

Don't shoot. I surrender.

WILL THIS NEW INTERNET HAVE THE SPYING BUILT-IN

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Or will it be "bolt-on", like the one we got?

Re:WILL THIS NEW INTERNET HAVE THE SPYING BUILT-IN

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you read?

"These clean-slate designs explore novel network architectures and networking concepts and also consider the larger societal, economic and legal issues that arise from the interplay between the Internet and society.

So yeah.. that's spying and censorship and making sure you pay extra for it too.

Re:WILL THIS NEW INTERNET HAVE THE SPYING BUILT-IN

[Opportunist]

Then they can keep it.

Something new must be better to eventually overcome the old. It's already hard enough to convince people to move away from what they know, when it got bad press it's not really something that will sell well.

Re:WILL THIS NEW INTERNET HAVE THE SPYING BUILT-IN

[davester666]

governments will NEVER permit a new internet that didn't have built-in spying [and will kill people trying to implement a new system which didn't permit them to spy].

they know how powerful the current internet is, and they are busy trying to reign it in as fast as they can.

Re:WILL THIS NEW INTERNET HAVE THE SPYING BUILT-IN

[ComputersKai]

Can't you read? "These clean-slate designs explore novel network architectures and networking concepts and also consider the larger societal, economic and legal issues that arise from the interplay between the Internet and society. So yeah.. that's spying and censorship and making sure you pay extra for it too.

To design a "new Internet" also presents another unfortunate opportunity for commercial entities to influence its making.

Imagine if advertisements were an integral part of the Internet infrastructure. Consider the implications if the RIAA and MPAA, media content providers, and ISPs had their way with the development of a new web framework. An of course, the serious issues resulting if the government got itself involved.

Re:WILL THIS NEW INTERNET HAVE THE SPYING BUILT-IN

[Opportunist]

That they WANT that is a given. That is pretty much confirmed.

What we may hope for not becoming truth is them GETTING it.

Waves!!!

[jeff13]

I've got it!!! We could send some sort of waves out that would be easily picked up by some sort of antenna. We could have stations transmit these waves so there's no gap, and best of all they would cover wide areas as the waves would bounce of the atmosphere. People would only have to buy a receiver set with the antenna and all the programing could be paid for with advertising alone! No more bills! ;p

Re:Waves!!!

[j35ter]

Apples got a patent on that, and you infringed on it by posting it onto /. ! Please report to them immediately for settlement negotiations :)

Re:Waves!!!

[VortexCortex]

You jest, but that's exactly how NASA's Disruption Tolerant Network (space Internet) works. We should just implement that planetside. Store and forward naturally moves data closer to endpoints and a DHT's infohash for data identity provides better security and automatic deduplication. The one to many problem is a solved problem since radio. No more fees, you buy a node and become part of the mesh.

Space Internet + shortwave packet radio + distributed hash table = replacement for Internet. Anyone who says it's impossible should piss on their cell phone.

How is it broken, exactly?

[mark-t]

Honestly, the only thing I can think of that might qualify as really so "broken" that it simply needs replacing with something different is ipv4.

A replacement for that has been invented already, but nobody seems to want to use it. I can't imagine it would be any different with anything else people might try and point out about the internet that they think is broken would get any better public reception.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[NapalmV]

How about starting with TCP & UDP? They were somehow designed on the assumption that all participating machines are well behaved good citizens. In practice this ain't happening (see SYN flood for example, there are "mitigation" measure but none is a definitive "fix"). These need to be replaced with something that would be resistant to mischief by design.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[ArcadeMan]

Everything these days should be designed from the ground up with the assumption that the requested actions are hostile in nature.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[im_thatoneguy]

That sounds great in theory, but at this point I'm kind of reserved to the fact that "resistant to mischief" just means we would have a year or two of peace before the inevitable flaws were so totally exploited that we were right back where we started.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Opportunist]

It started to become broken once corporations butted in. Now it's probably broken beyond repair.

Next time you plan an internet, keep the beancounters away from it.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Opportunist]

Then that "new internet" should keep that in mind as part of its design. It needs to be updateable without breaking compatibility. That's the core element of making something secure: Making it patchable.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

And add to that TLS/SSL. Layering encryption on top of an insecure protocol like TCP results in a network layer that provides authentication and privacy, but fails to provide robustness. A secure transport layer should provide all three: robustness, authentication and privacy, and I would add a fourth: authorisation.

Of course this is all protocol that can be fixed by adding another IP protocol value to the proto field in IPv4 or IPv6.

There is a problem in IPv4, that is partially but not sufficiently mitigated in IPv6, and that is the lack of topological addresing. The IPv4 address, with CIDR, in no way reflects the topological location of a subnet, and even in IPv6, large national routing tables have to be maintained to find the optimal route to a single-homed network. This is a small enough problem today that every PE router at the edge of the multihomed internet can simply have a large lookup table, but scales quickly out of control when you start talking about mesh networks, where every node is potentially and likely multihomed. The addresses are also centrally allocated by a very expensive bureaucracy, I won't say corrupt, but the cost per IPv6 address is certainly high considering their abundance and the seemingly low effort required to store an allocation into a database.

With topological addressing, the node addresses would be allocated dynamically based on the position in the topology and supplementary information like GPS coordinates or public key (in onion networks).

The DNS system is an enormous problem. The architecture is very flaky, totally insecure especially with the addition of DNSsec. relies on a very expensive, and in this case, I will say corrupt bureaucracy for the allocation of names and is a generally ill thought out and ineffective way for locating network objects.

HTTP is a massive failure for end-to-endedness, breaks peer to peer expectations of the internet, adds massive protocol inefficiencies that buy next to nothing in the way of added function, and is generally ill specified. A good protocol is one that both allows reservation for future extensions in an efficient manner, and tightly constrains how the protocol must be spoken to the bit. By contrast HTTP allows vast latitude in the spelling of protocol messages, resulting in a large probability for implementation failure and failure for two implementations to interoperate, and yet has very inefficient and unreliable extensions due to the lack of foresight in designing efficient reservations into the original protocol.

Every protocol built on top of TCP fails robustness tests, as it necessarily inherits the irrobustness of TCP. Yet every protocol built on UDP, where one could implement robustness, fails because of the epic clusterfuck that is NAT. And yet there are utter morons out there who are considering (there are RFCs published) NAT for IPv6.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[w_dragon]

SCTP already exists, and is reasonably well supported. No one uses it because it turns out TCP and UDP actually do most of what we need pretty well.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[WaffleMonster]

How about starting with TCP & UDP?

I would rather start above layer 4 with DNS, SNMP, NTP, SIP and other niche UDP based offenders giving away insane DOS amplification to any script kiddie in the world who wants to cause havoc. These are relatively trivial problems to fix from protocol design perspective and provide highest returns on investment even after factoring in lag time to get changes propagated thru a good enough percentage of worlds network stacks.

They were somehow designed on the assumption that all participating machines are well behaved good citizens. In practice this ain't
happening (see SYN flood for example, there are "mitigation" measure but none is a definitive "fix").

SYN flood has never offered an attacker amplification..it was limited to a cheesy device to overload host TCP implementations. Cookies have since been universally deployed rendering these attacks useless. Today they are only useful for covert signaling and masking source of non-amplified attack... More importantly these things only work at all because operators are lazy and refuse to implement Ingress filtering. It isn't IP's fault.

These need to be replaced with something that would be resistant to mischief by design.

I'm all ears ... what do you propose?

Personally I think the premise is invalid. All the network need do is deliver packets with some degree of probability of being delivered. I think it is architecturally correct to leave the edge to sort out how to conduct business in in a mischief avoidant manner.

Otherwise as far as I am aware the only way to stop "mischief" is to turn the Internet into a trusted network. A trusted network is not a free and open network...neither is it particularly practical as we have seen again and again the demonstrated futility of managing planet scale trust anchors.

If ever there was an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions this type of "secure the Internet" thinking I assert fits that bill.

I think our time is better spent looking above IP layer to fix what is most broke and that which causes most actual damage to actual users. (e.g. SMTP)

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[swillden]

SCTP already exists, and is reasonably well supported. No one uses it because it turns out TCP and UDP actually do most of what we need pretty well.

A more recent alternative, which gets through firewalls better, is Google's QUIC protocol (successor to SPDY). It's built on top of UDP which means it can't do quite as much as an IP-level protocol can, but it can be and is a lot smarter than TCP. It also provides multiplexed streaming, server push and other performance features and has NO unencrypted mode. It's all encrypted and authenticated, all the time.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[im_thatoneguy]

Not really possible. Usually people expect very specific responses. Even if we "upgraded it" then everyone would have to rewrite their code. Some people may never rewrite the code so we'll by necessity then also have a "legacy mode" for those older solutions. All of the attackers will simply communicate in "legacy mode" and we won't be able to tell if they're a way out of date grandmother on a 10 year unpatched machine or else a hostile application.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[NapalmV]

Otherwise as far as I am aware the only way to stop "mischief" is to turn the Internet into a trusted network.

Not this won't really work, what would you do, after verifying the identity of the other party and comparing with your whitelist you would assume that it's "trusted" and thus well behaved citizen. Which may not be true (compromised host with a trojan sending malformed packets etc).

The only robust method would be to assume at protocol design phase that the stack would be connected to a hostile environment where every single packet could be mischievous. "Trust no one" and design to not crash in such conditions.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Jane Q. Public]

Why are you posting as AC?

I don't consider topological addressing to be a real problem. In fact I consider it to be an undesirable security concern.

Switches and routers are supposed to learn and adapt to optimal routes during the course of an exchange. That's PART of what the Internet is all about, and contributes to robustness. Robustness does not require perfect information all the time. On the contrary: adaptation is desirable and in fact a requirement, because you don't get both at the same time.

The DNS system is an enormous problem. The architecture is very flaky, totally insecure especially with the addition of DNSsec. relies on a very expensive, and in this case, I will say corrupt bureaucracy for the allocation of names and is a generally ill thought out and ineffective way for locating network objects.

Yes, DNS *is* and enormous problem, and I think you hit the nail on the head, but only inadvertently because you were in fact aiming at something else.

The Internet will never be "free" and secure until we have a robust and reliable distributed DNS. That means adaptation, as I mentioned earlier. But no other scheme can even possibly be "secure", because by definition, if you don't have distributed DNS, then DNS is under the central control of somebody.

So either trust "somebody", or develop a distributed DNS. There is no third option.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[CBravo]

They seem complementary: There are technical and functional checks you can do to avoid misuse or abuse. And then there is reputation to check if you have previously conducted in a bad manner. All good predictors of things you don't want.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[wonkey_monkey]

Why are you posting as AC?

Maybe he doesn't have an account. Jeez.

Didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition...

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Andtalath]

Everybody expects the spanish inquisition!

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[wonkey_monkey]

True, actually. They'd write and give you notice of their pending, uh, inquisit.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I lost my account password, and I can't recover it, and I don't feel like being someone else.

Topological addressing is only a security concern if you have such an asinine authentication design that you consider a network address as a credential.

Topological addresses are no worse than dynamically assigned public addresses or dynamically assigned private addresses on a network without secured access (like say, a Wifi hotspot). Done right, they are just a tool to assign addresses efficiently to minimise the size of routing prefix tables. They should be ephemeral and assigned based on reachability. A node with some knowledge of the network structure can then choose which of it's topological addresses to use as a source based on proximity to the destination.

On this present internet of ours, very much of the network allows arbitrarily spoofed source addresses, and as they are too often treated as credentials, using a spoofed source allows for all sorts of amplification attacks and asymmetric path attacks. Assuming a network without robust reverse path verification (our current global internet), there's not much you can do better than sending the barest minimum in response to a datagram until you have authenticated, but many protocols, DNS for example, send much more than the original request. If you follow DJB's example in CurveCP, then the initial reply contains only a short EC handshake. If you have spoofed your source in that case, or in the case of topological addresses, you never see the reply, and you can't generate more traffic. Having the parameters of an anonymous handshake should be considered the barest minimum authentication for *any* amplifying network transaction.

BTW, switches don't learn routes unless they are L3 switches, which are basically just routers. What they learn is forwarding information which is like routes but MAC addresses, and is the equivalent to an IPv4 router only learning /32s or an IPv6 router only learning /128s. Regular and fast STP based ethernet is also totally non-robust. You must trust every node on the ethernet forwarding domain, as every node can bring down the entire FD. This is why people buy managed switches which implement alternate forwarding domains for ethernet and extensive layer 2 filtering.

I tend to like IPv6, because there is plenty of room to implement *some* types of routing overlays such as topological addressing, which is very important to mesh networking. In a mesh you must have topological addressing, whether it's implemented in the IP address, or as an external RIB which can lookup your current topological address from an ephemeral ad-hoc address (say the hash of your expanded topological address).

Topological addresses do not need to be static, though many static address layouts in real networks are topological. In MPLS networks every link on every router must be assigned an IP address, even as every packet forwarded within the MPLS domain is source routed, and for management the routers are typically assigned sequential non-topological host addresses from a private pool which do not belong to any of the interfaces of the route (typically they are assigned to a dummy interface).

I sort of agree that what is needed is distributed DNS, though I would advise against calling it DNS to avoid confusion. What is needed is really two distinct services. One is a distributed service to locate a peer or service's present address(es), which doesn't require name lookup, as you already have the peer or service's public key(s). The other is a service for looking up memorable names, to find the public keys of services of variable trust, We sort of already have that in the form of internet search engines. To establish absolute trust, you have to get the public key of the new peer from a peer your already absolutely trust. That's not usually possible, but in cases where it's important, like banking, a good way to accomplish it is key exchange in person. For most other purposes, colloquial tru

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Wootery]

But, as WaffleMonster already pointed out:

A trusted network is not a free and open network...neither is it particularly practical as we have seen again and again the demonstrated futility of managing planet scale trust anchors.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[goarilla]

How is DNS made more insecure by DNSSec (which is an abbreviation for Domain Name System Security Extensions) ?

Re: How is it broken, exactly?

[jones_supa]

What do you mean? Of course we can't change the speed of light, but it's likely that we could still make also some latency improvements if we redesigned the networking and Internet to the core.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[rizole]

What, like politics, banking, business, commerce, media and the law?

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe we need to just bite the bullet and drop backwards compatibility once a security flaw is discovered. Even if it is only a privacy issue. Let consumers whine to the device manufacturer. After a few years they would all be doing fairly timely patches, or be out of business.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Jane Q. Public]

Topological addressing is only a security concern if you have such an asinine authentication design that you consider a network address as a credential.

Unfortunately, much of the internet does consider it a credential, regardless of whether that is fallacious thinking.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[dataspel]

Because I lost my account password, and I can't recover it, and I don't feel like being someone else.

Did you try "password", "123456", and "letmein" ?

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Kjella]

True, but you always have the ultimate threat which is to yank the offending machines/networks/ISPs/countries off the Internet. That we don't seems to indicate we don't really care that much that, no matter how virus infested and trojan-laden we keep them online.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[Opportunist]

With a sensible system of abstraction, it's unlikely that you'd have to rewrite too much.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[605dave]

Damn my mod points just ran out. But you got an out loud laugh, so you deserved to know.

Re:How is it broken, exactly?

[enip1]

Consider visiting www.enhancedip.org.

No one!

[plopez]

We just let the Free Market, may its name ever be praised, sort it out. As stated in the immaculate scripture given to us by the
Profits (sic) Rand and Smith points out we just need to deregulate and the miracle will follow. Praise be!

Re:No one!

[geekoid]

Smith actually new we would need regulation. What people quote from him was about a economic based society that could only exist inside the head of an economic philosopher, and he knew that.

So don't blame Smith, blame the jack asses that either don't read him, or don't understand them.

These people cherry pick his quotes out of context... just like they do with the bible..hmm I see a pattern.

Re:No one!

[VortexCortex]

I actually have a mesh network replacement for the Internet in my garage. We came up with it right after Fidonet -- The BBS version of the Internet. If you deregulate the HAM radio spectrum I'll give it away for free.

Internet2

[antdude]

What about Internet2? :P

Buzzword bingo 2.0!

[grasshoppa]

So I guess we've moved on from "TEH CLOUDS" to "The internet of things"?

Fucking shoot me.

Re:Buzzword bingo 2.0!

[Anonymous Coward]

internet of things was a buzzword before the cloud was a buzzword

be that as it may, i agree whoever shoots him shoot me too

Re:Buzzword bingo 2.0!

[Virtucon]

You forgot terms like "paradigm shift" and "monitization" also "hashtag."

Re: Buzzword bingo 2.0!

[lazybeam]

Don't get caught up in the synergy!

Re:Buzzword bingo 2.0!

[geekoid]

well, one depend on the other, so not moved on so much as just about solved and now dealing with the next advancement.

But hey, people like you have no grasp of technology and society, so you just belittle the terms.

Re:Buzzword bingo 2.0!

[grasshoppa]

No, I'm the poor bastard that continually gets sucked into meeting after meeting with ignorant salesdrones spouting nonsense like "Internet of Things" and "Clouds" ( when they, themselves, haven't got a god damned clue what they're saying ), wasting time I should be spending on actual IT work.

High enough to be technical lead, not high enough to farm that shit out to my staff.

Ah, but if I don't go to it and correct the bullshit as it happens, it will have time to implant itself into management's head, and by the time I become aware of it it's already gained enough momentum to be called a "Project".

Re:Buzzword bingo 2.0!

[phantomfive]

internet of things was a buzzword before the cloud was a buzzword

Everything old is new again. The cloud was around long before it was called the cloud.

Just no.

[pla]

The internet has nothing wrong with it that we couldn't fix with a combination of net neutrality and convincing American ISPs to get off their asses and bring us up to speed with the rest of the third world.

As for this BS marketroid term "Internet of Things"... Please people, just... Don't let them win. The internet has always had "things" on it. Whether that "thing" means your PC or your phone or your microwave. The idea of having every device in your house online should terrify you, not delight you, so fuck upgrades that make it easier for your fridge to tell the NSA that you eat the same things as Joe Terrorist.

Re:Just no.

[dnavid]

The internet has nothing wrong with it that we couldn't fix with a combination of net neutrality and convincing American ISPs to get off their asses and bring us up to speed with the rest of the third world.

Net neutrality and speed increases would not solve the intrinsic problems with DNS architecture, NAT proxies breaking things, gigantic non-aggregate BGP tables, limited IPv4 address space, limitations of TCP protocol, ICMP mismanagement, lack of standards to address continuous disruption in mobile environments, and a whole mess of other problems that are currently addressed by patchwork solutions, or simply no solutions.

As for this BS marketroid term "Internet of Things"... Please people, just... Don't let them win. The internet has always had "things" on it. Whether that "thing" means your PC or your phone or your microwave. The idea of having every device in your house online should terrify you, not delight you, so fuck upgrades that make it easier for your fridge to tell the NSA that you eat the same things as Joe Terrorist.

At one time, people said the same thing about PC connectivity to the internet. Who are you that you need to connect to the global internet. The internet is for mainframes and important computers; why would you want anyone else to be able to connect to your computer, and why should we allow you to connect to everyone elses?

Paranoia notwithstanding, it should be up to individuals to decide what they connect and how they connect and what capabilities they decide to leverage. But if you think its bad for your fridge to be connected to the internet, I have no idea why you would allow your computer to be connected to it either. That's infinitely more dangerous.

Re:Just no.

[geekoid]

Security.

Simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

We must integrate cloud solutions with modern app interfaces. Then we can utilize a lateral optimization strategy to compete on a global level.

Re:Simple.

[maliqua]

i love what you've done there

sad thing is, I've been in meetings which you would have only just barely met the minimum level off bullshit buzzwords in a sentence to hang out with the cool kids

We can do it.

[Virtucon]

We'll build our own Internet. With Booze, Blackjack and Hookers!

Wait, that's the current Internet. Uhm, how about faster speeds, lower prices and some privacy? That'd be a good start.

Re:We can do it.

[Opportunist]

I'd already settle for lower speeds, higher price sand some privacy. Like, say, it was two decades ago. Before the arrival of corporations.

In other words, the easy fix for better internet is simple: Kick corporations out and hang spammers from their nuts.

Re:We can do it.

[gewalker]

Actually, I like being able to order stuff online, maybe watch a funny vid from YouTube, org check the news online, or run a search, etc.. -- I don't have an inherent problem with commercial activity on the net -- Not that there isn't a lot of total garbage from commercial sources.

I would really like to see the proposed action against spammers. Unfortunately I don't know how to achieve this reliably and quickly (so as to discourage spammers and other evils) using the current trust every packet by default design internet.

I remember explaining email to my dad many years ago. Once he understand it, his first question? Who pays for it. This is in fact part of the problem on the Internet (spammers push the cost onto everyone else) and will continue to do so as long as the current design is used. Look up the history of mail delivery in England and you will see that changing from receiver pays to sender pays fixed major problems with the mail system.

Switching costs to a better design are unfortunately very high as well. So fixing real problems is slow indeed, even when well-designed and mostly up-ward compatible

Re:We can do it.

[Virtucon]

So you want like AOL and Earthlink back?

Re:We can do it.

[nschubach]

As badly as it would get abused, I'm not opposed to having every house connected to the town/village/city it belongs to and that would uplink to a State switching network that connected to each of it's neighbors It would have to have multiple paths in and out making monitoring more difficult since your packet could take one of many paths. Of course, this would be different outside the US... but each home would be a true node on the Internet without some Virtual network called an ISP lording over it all.

Re:We can do it.

[Opportunist]

I thought I'd never say it, but the times were better when they still existed. Though I guess that's more coincidence, not correlation.

Re:Commercial Internet

[im_thatoneguy]

Or it should have been setup in such a way that we had no TLDs in the first place. It's just obnoxious to have CocaCola.org Cocacola.net Cocacola.org Cocacola.tv Cocacola.biz etc.

Just have CocaCola. The end. Nothing more.

Re:Mesh

[maliqua]

seems that the internet already is a mesh network...

The only broken

[Stumbles]

thing about the Internet is numbnuts like you and others thinking it is broken. Mandate that ISPs be nothing than dumb pipes and any "perceived" problems disappear or resolved.

Re:Commercial Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at how well this worked for .edu. (must be an accredited, four year, degree-granting organization).

Community colleges are not four year schools and they all have .edu addresses.

require a test

[funwithBSD]

Just like getting a HAM license, and use call letters as unique identifiers too.

Re:require a test

[Virtucon]

CQCQCQDX..

Re:Commercial Internet

[Obfuscant]

1. Require a business license to get a .com

A business license from whom? Not everyplace requires a business license to have a business.

2. Require 501 non-profit status to get a .org

Good. Limit .org to US only.

Look at how well this worked for .edu. (must be an accredited, four year, degree-granting organization).

Really? The local community college has a .edu name. As I recall, phoenix.edu too.

Re:Um..

[j35ter]

Yes, but your future 4k Pr0n will need more than just 100mbps (filtered by Comcast) :)

My ideal internet

[MpVpRb]

It's fast and secure

Anonymous if you want, although I think most people really don't care

Totally free of any and all censorship..of any kind..absolutely..no exceptions

I don't care how compelling your argument is..no censorship..ever..for anything..ever

Reality may be ugly..but truth is good, no exceptions

Re:Commercial Internet

[ArcadeMan]

Just have Pepsi.

FTFY!

No wait, screw that.

Just have Water.

There we go.

Here's our chance

[ArcadeMan]

Let's make the evil bit flag a reality!

my guess?

[Connie_Lingus]

Al Gore's son.

The internet is not broken...

[Eddy_D]

If anything, the ISPs are broken, in that they see no justification in expanding their bandwidth as there is no profit in it. True that IPv4 has reached saturation, however that rolls into the ISPs attitudes (including wireless carriers) who are sitting on the fence instead of upgrading to IPv6. It all comes down to the bottom line... there is no profit in going to IPv6 for them.

Internet is broken. Health care is broken.

[SensitiveMale]

Immigration is broken. The VA is broken. Congress is broken.

Can we please stop labeling everything as being "broken."

so really the point was this:

[nimbius]

NSF:$15 million to support three, multi-institutional projects that will further develop, deploy and test future Internet architectures.
news toilet:: science men confirm internet is fucking broken, and will efax new code to ensure epals can cyber talk better. Possibly related to hillary benghazi female kidnapping tea party obamacare, actually.

Re:so really the point was this:

[phantomfive]

Possibly related to hillary benghazi female kidnapping tea party obamacare, actually.

I knew it all made sense!

Its not broken

[nurb432]

But it is being perverted into something it isn't intended on being. ( a privacy sucking marketing tool )

Re:Commercial Internet

[gewalker]

Surprisingly, Phoenix University is accredited, although it has been placed on notice -- i.e., subject to losing its accreditation as documented on their website

Of course, this indicates that accreditation is not exactly a true Gold Standard.

OSI ?

[ArmchairAstronomer]

I spent a lot of time OSI-ing (Open System Interconnect) in my youth. Had lots of great features, even way back then. Much thought went into how to solve many of the problems that we seem to have with today's Internet. No need to start from scratch. We could even run DECnet over it. I could hook up my old VAX!

Needs an IQ test to enter

[hessian]

The problem with the internet is that if you add commerce and a clueless general population, you get behavior that is only appropriate in dive bars.

Make the same internet, put an IQ test on the door, and let in 120s and up and you'll have someplace worth attending.

Re:Needs an IQ test to enter

[nschubach]

Sometimes it's actually the smart ones that are bored with normal interactions with people and are looking for ways to disrupt others.

Replace IP addresses with public keys

[Baldrson]

You shouldn't be connecting with "host IPs" but with services addressed with their public keys.

Re: Replace IP addresses with public keys

[Anonymous Coward]

And how would you route those packets?

We should have content-addressable and identity-addressable protocols. But we can build those on top of IP. The problem is firewalls. Unless your app uses TCP, or in many cases HTTP, you cannot reach a good portion of the end nodes.

Uh OK

[drinkypoo]

How about we just make use of the technologies we have already, namely mesh networks and IPv6, to make backbone providers irrelevant aside as links between countries? Oh wait, the entrenched powers writing the laws won't have any of that shit.

Re:Uh OK

[phantomfive]

I'm absolutely in favor of mesh networks, and think they are great idea.

However, they have a problem I've never been able to see how to resolve. In the mesh, everyone has a limited amount of bandwidth, maybe gigabit or even let's say terabit or something, but still limited. The people who live next to Google or Netflix or Facebook are really going to be screwed, because all that traffic is going through their wireless routers.

How do you solve the problem that ultimately most of the traffic on the internet goes to a few places?

Re:Uh OK

[Virtucon]

Mesh has it's pros and cons, it can be more secure but the tradeoff is that you suffer a performance penalty the more hops that are incurred. This doesn't give you some of the layer three switching optimizations that are available now in most backbone networks. I'm not saying it couldn't be accomplished but it's not there now. Secondly it doesn't have to be wireless, it could be but it doesn't have to be. I think there's also some great opportunity with the emerging MIMO over Multimode Fiber (MMF) work that's going on which helps solve the traversal of traffic going to a few places. It's in the research stages but probably in the next 5 to 10 years we could probably see an order of magnitude or more in performance over existing links if the research is successful. Of course we'll have to probably wait another 5 years for all the players to come up with standards etc. to properly dominate, er commercialize the tech.

When RFC 791 was introduced, IP was given the ability to enable loose or strict Source Routing. It's just that over the years there's been very few Internet based uses that I can think of where Source Routing is applied in a practical sense and a lot Channel based ISPs (and Network Admins) don't respect it. In fact, I doubt a lot of people realize it's even in there but it gives peers the ability to choose the best route either for security or for performance. It's really up to the peers to decide and for the interceding hops to allow and respect the Source Routing information. The VLAN concept pretty much obviates Source Routing as well since you have a virtual network infrastructure presented may not show any hops at all for example.

Re:Uh OK

[drinkypoo]

How do you solve the problem that ultimately most of the traffic on the internet goes to a few places?

There will still be ISPs, and you will still subscribe to them if you want lots of bandwidth. Anything that's not instant streaming that needs lots of bandwidth can be buffered. People who don't feel the need to stream mostly won't even need an ISP. Some sites which are currently streaming-only will implement buffered playback if there is demand. For everything else, there's a traditional long-haul ISP. If you don't actually need an ISP to do the basic things that we take for granted these days like IM, email, and research, then you don't have to even take on that set of problems.

Most people will probably subscribe to an ISP. But casual users won't need one at all.

Re:Uh OK

[phantomfive]

I think we're at the point where most casual users at least stream video from youtube

internet of things

[rogoshen1]

shut up, just shut the fuck up.
ahem, sorry.
i definitely look forward to the day when my fridge and microwave can start blogging about about what a pig i am.

I was about to say about the same thing

[Marrow]

The DNS/IP thing is a nightmare. The system should be based on discovery, and not a distributed list like it is.

I was going to go with some kind of md5hash deal, but your idea is much better. And I think ports should become
part of the address. So that you can run thousands of services on the same machine. Instead of the virtual hosts
thing they do with websites.

Re:I was about to say about the same thing

[Baldrson]

Just have a different public key for each service whether they are on the same machine or not. Every public key is a "port" into the service space.

Re:I was about to say about the same thing

[Marrow]

Hmm, I kinda like my idea better. I think having the port in the key, will cut down on extra connections. The port could be delivered during discovery, but I would hate to get that mangled by evildoers running a service on the same machine somehow.

But I am probably not undertanding your idea. Anyway, well done.

Re:I was about to say about the same thing

[coolsnowmen]

Looks like your should apply for that NSF grant!

So?

[paiute]

Will this newfangled Internet still have to come into my house over the Comcast wire?

Re:Internet2

[Darinbob]

Why do we even need an internet when we can just get all our data from the cloud?

Re:So...

[Virtucon]

Ted Stevens is still dead.

What?

[s.petry]

Wait a second, analogy time and I'll even use a car analogy.

Any time 2 more more cars are driving down a street, there is the potential for one person to cut the other off, crash into them, or slam on their brakes in front of them. When it's critical that you can commute from point A to point B, and assuming you own point A and point B you make a private road to reduce the chances of a shithead messing up your commute. If you don't own both points and are forced onto public roads, you expect that there may be a shithead. Cops can stop them, but maybe not before your day gets ruined.

Claiming automatic driving cars are the answer is a crock. I can break an automatic driving car and make it manual, or even better I could even build a mini-bike and mess up a whole Freeway really fast. I can even stand near a Freeway and throw bricks into people's path, so I don't have to be on the Freeway to mess your day up.. just close.

This is human nature, documented long before we had cars or even roads (read Plato's The Republic if you are a doubter, it'll change your life).

Cars above is obviously your data and computers, roads are networks, private roads are VPNs, and Cops are Firewalls. I could have gone into more detail about traffic lights and such but no need.

Considering my amazing car analogy, why would you think you could possibly design a set of public roads without a shithead driving on them? Seriously, I want to know.

Actually...

[s.petry]

If you are referring to Adam Smith you had best read him again. Adam Smith was very very clear that regulation was essential for a functional economy. Smith attributes much of the failure of mercantilism to not having regulation which caused monopolization of nearly everything.

Re:Actually...

[m.alessandrini]

No, he was referring to Agent Smith.

What about when it's true?

[s.petry]

Immigration is broken. The VA is broken. Congress is broken.

Can we please stop labeling everything as being "broken."

I don't mine the label if people actually took it seriously and started trying to fix all this broken stuff. Yeah, really is all broken. Lets get workin!!

broken is relative

[devent]

The Internet works fine for 99% of the users and stakeholders. Good enough is better than perfect[1] and the Internet is good enough. What we need is legal protection, because the current problems of the Internet are not technological, but political. Privacy is a political goal, for example. Do-Not-Track Header[2], I was laughing when I first heard of that and of course it's a failed concept.

The new Internet must be 200% better then the current Internet. You can see how slow and reluctant new (and even necessary) technologies are adopted (IPv6) because the current tech (IPv4) is "Good Enough". If you want that 1 billion websites[3] to switch to Internet2 your new Internet must have a lot of incentives.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
[3] http://www.internetlivestats.c...

Re:Internet2

[JWSmythe]

Dammit, you beat me to it. Oh well, I'll have to wait until this conversation comes up again, and we're talking about Internet3.0a.

Who, is the correct questions.

[pablo_max]

Who's Going To Invent a New One? That's the rub.

I have to wonder. If the Americans came out today with a super-duper new internet, would the rest of the world use it? I do not think so. More and more companies and governments are trying to get their data out of the US for obvious reasons. Many years ago Europeans trusted American tech by default, but now the reverse it true.
Before you flame, I am not saying they do not use it, I am saying they do not trust it. And, they shouldn't. Just as the US does not trust Chinese tech.

Suspicious

[pipatron]

Everyone talking about how today's internet is broken sounds like they have an agenda.I'd be very suspicious of anyone wanting to change it.

Re:Already done.

[Baldrson]

See, the funny thing is that this already exists. It's called cjdns, and it's a protocol for a decentralized internet where individual nodes connect with other nodes via public keys. We're* already building a not-yet-global network of wifi and lasers, it's called Hyperboria. You can read the cjdns white paper here: https://github.com/cjdelisle/c...

Cool!