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O'Reilly Media Asks: Is It Time To Build A New Internet? (oreilly.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article from O'Reilly Media's VP of content strategy:
It's high time to build the internet that we wanted all along: a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior. And a network with few barriers to entry -- in particular, the certainty of ISP extortion as new services pay to get into the "fast lane." Is it time to start over from scratch, with new protocols that were designed with security, privacy, and maybe even accountability in mind? Is it time to pull the plug on the abusive old internet, with its entrenched monopolistic carriers, its pervasive advertising, and its spam? Could we start over again?
That would be painful, but not impossible... In his deliciously weird novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow writes about an alternative network built from open WiFi access points. It sounds similar to Google's Project Fi, but built and maintained by a hacker underground. Could Doctorow's vision be our future backboneless backbone? A network of completely distributed municipal networks, with long haul segments over some public network, but with low-level protocols designed for security? We'd have to invent some new technology to build that new network, but that's already started.
The article cites the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer functionality everywhere from Bitcoin and Blockchain to the Beaker browser, the Federated Wiki, and even proposals for new file-sharing protocols like IPFS and Upspin. "Can we build a network that can't be monopolized by monopolists? Yes, we can..."
"It's time to build the network we want, and not just curse the network we have."
That would be painful, but not impossible... In his deliciously weird novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow writes about an alternative network built from open WiFi access points. It sounds similar to Google's Project Fi, but built and maintained by a hacker underground. Could Doctorow's vision be our future backboneless backbone? A network of completely distributed municipal networks, with long haul segments over some public network, but with low-level protocols designed for security? We'd have to invent some new technology to build that new network, but that's already started.
The article cites the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer functionality everywhere from Bitcoin and Blockchain to the Beaker browser, the Federated Wiki, and even proposals for new file-sharing protocols like IPFS and Upspin. "Can we build a network that can't be monopolized by monopolists? Yes, we can..."
"It's time to build the network we want, and not just curse the network we have."
With blackjack and hookers!
"a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior."
Privacy, secure and... "controls on behavior"?
"designed with security, privacy, and maybe even accountability in mind?"
Again, it speaks of security, privacy and... accountability?
I'm not arguing against this as I don't understand what is meant. I simply want to understand how privacy can work together with that last thing they keep bringing up.
and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior.
Who gets to decide what controls are "reasonable"? What kind of "behavior" is to be controlled, and how?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The current internet has almost become worthless.
Festering with ads and malware.
Tracking everything you search for and selling that data to the highest bidder.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sure we can build a new Internet. Where are the long-haul links that connect cities going to come from, though? Let alone the intercontinental links. Or local distribution when you want aggregate bandwidth greater than WiFi provides? The logistical problems with those things are what the current control issues stem from.
And do we really need a new Internet? IPv6 itself seems pretty sane, and it's possible to build new protocols on top of it (in fact if you look for a file named "protocols" (even Windows machines have it) you'll find tons of them listed). Or even just start building application protocols that require the use of IPSec encryption/authentication.
Building new infrastructure doesn't fix the trolling/abuse issues: those are governance and I'm not sure how you fix that kind of issue without adding MORE oversight instead of reducing it as the article suggests.
The other issue is that infrastructure costs big bucks.
- Think interstate haulage, inter-country haulage.
- Wifi uses shared spectrum and just won't scale to the size we need for the most common applications these days. You see this in local free nets now & even in over-subscribed public networks.
- Additionally security requires additional bandwidth and compute. The compute is inexpensive these days, but the article is suggesting lower bandwidth infrastructure: there's going to be a collision of requirements.
The last line of the article shows the depth of ignorance: 56K modems require serious telco infrastructure to terminate the calls: a 56K modem essentially can't be used by hackers unless they terminate to a telco. the best non-telco analogue speed you can expect is 33K.
DECnet lost out to IP. It should be reconsidered. The network was fairly easily expanded indefinitely where addresses were only bounded by specific specs for the implementation phases. The routing as to first of 1024 addresses where the next 1024 addresses under one of the first 1024, etc. Each node learned some basic weights to give its interfaces based on dynamic results of traffic passing. Could be improved over the last Phase V DECnet spec, based on modern knowledge. The architecture was not limited to address space. Any node could have 1024 sub-nodes to extend it. So no dynamic IP allocation issues. Then redo all the protocols used considering modern processors are very very fast and that human readable traffic is not required. So encrypt everything with very strong encryption. Make everything traceable to its source. If you have the keys. Lots of ways to revamp the Internet with an eye to the future. And instead of tunneling DECnet under IP, have an IP tunnel under DECnet. Or UNnet if you want to be politically correct. Done correctly I can have worldwide satellite offices and netboot a machine in Sweden from a server in Switzerland and do it in a secure encrypted manner. Can't spoof email if it is always signed and can be verified ... Can't spoof domain resolution if everything is verified and secure. Redoing the Internet? Make it secure from the start.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I have instant access to the world's people and knowledge. But there are ads and Netflix might have to write a check to Comcast (or something equally dire).
So yeah, let's scrap it in favor of a bunch of stuff that's barely more than an idea.
Internet is too big to fail...
ATT, Comcast, etc. will all say they won't be able to deliver excellent customer service when they lose the ability to bully people
NSA will say real Internet privacy is a threat to national security
Haters will say this hurts their ability to loudly and obnoxiously express their first amendment rights to people who want to be left alone
Religious fanatics will say God created the Internet the way it was supposed to be and we are sinners for messing with it
Ok let's do this. Whose stock should I buy? What? Don't tell me it was just academic
ISP's will want to change per device like cable boxes
.
Unless the on-ramp problem is solved, everything else is little more than mental masturbation.
... that if we do the MPAA, telecoms, ISPs, and media companies will be sending out their lobbyists to make sure they own 100% of before the bill is even finished. Also the NSA and CIA will want backdoors and own all the private keys.
Russia and China will make their own internet where they will be owned by their own special dirty interest groups and government agency.
Yeah great job. As crappy as what we have now at least DNS with ICAAN and much of what we have is somewhat decentralized even if the it reaks of American rule for many international readers.
The problem is not evil ISPs. It is EVIL LOBBYING by ALL governments and special interests that is the root of the problem. The USA is a bad 1st world country where it's citizens vote on evolution, abortition, in over representated districts in rural areas to help Republican votes count more and feels giving money == free speech. Go try that with a judge folks and say your honor here is free speech and hand him $100 and see how long you get before being thrown in prison!
Yet when a company does it it is their GOD GIVEN right.
Still compared to Russia, China, and India the US is still a God send but even the EU is a little dirty.
http://saveie6.com/
The first building blocks on today's internet were put in place by very few in academia who built the equipment and setup an initial fairly simple point to point connection.
;)
Over time more very basic protocols and capabilities and academic users were added.
And then it was let loose, to the creativity, innovation of many and the chaotic growth happened which led to today's Internet and the Web.
There is no chance the powers that be and the corporations could ever design a replacement. The complexity and demands from stake holders could never lead to a successful project.
Just my 2 cents
the two are fundamentally incompatible. Privacy only matters when powerful organizations (basically government & mega corps) are abusing it. Accountability requires consequences that are enforced. Meaning no anonymity since if you're anonymous punishment can't be enforced.
Sorry O'Reilly, but there are no simple answers to the complex problems caused by global telecom network open to all commers. It's either going to be a hodge podge of solutions tailored to solve specific problems, a broken chaotic mess or locked down by the ruling class. I'm for the first option.
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Instead of your imaginary "packets too fast" message let's consider the "packets too big" message which actually exists in both IPv4 and IPv6.
Now http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_ICMPv6PacketTooBigMessages.htm that has a few fundamental flaws in IPv4 of which one was fixed by IPv6 and one was not. The flaw which was not fixed in IPv6 is the same flaw your proposal would have -- too damn many routers out there block ALL network discovery-related traffic including all ICMP messages because organizations are scared that outsiders may learn about internal network structure.
You cannot propose a defense against attackers which depends on people being well behaved.
There are definitely smart people out there who are thinking about it. I know about some efforts to do it within some very limited but highly critical domains. (Think critical infrastructure, like electric power transmission and similar.)
Of course you'll never replace the incumbent commercial Internet. You won't boil the ocean either. But in the limited domains I'm talking about, the total number of really essential endpoints can be like 1e4 or even less. Compare to the Internet at whatever it is, probably nearly 1e10 by now. It's not crazy to think about replacing the networking.
Why do it? Simple: security. What aspect of security is most critical? Accountability. Until you can receive highly trustworthy remote control signals and telemetry data from, say, grid partners, you really can't say anything with high confidence about how the grid is being managed, or even about the integrity of your assets and processes.
So what's needed? Here's a few things: 1) A new networking stack. The IP suite, as astoundingly successful as it has been, is hopeless broken for industrial security. Too many holes, too much surface. 2) A new OS (!). The networking stack is too deeply interwoven with existing kernels. The new OS will be some flavor of Linux, but with the networking broken out somehow. 3) New protocols for establishing accountability. This one is pretty fuzzy at the moment, but a core requirement. 4) New apps, or at least rewritten ones. Remember, we're not talking about a billion endpoints. This will take years but it's at least conceivably possible. 5) Fighting the brutal, determined, and hyper-funded attacks of incumbent tech and automation vendors. This is the tough one, but remember the old saying: "First they laugh..."
Yes I know that critical infrastructure is shot through with automation systems built on way-back, unpatched Windows versions. That's not changing within the capital replacement cycle, which can be 40-60 years! But that doesn't mean that gateway networking devices can't be replaced in front of the automation networking.
I'm wearing my asbestos underwear, so flame away. All I can say is: keep an open mind and stay tuned.
How could you stand against something that would have provided more fairness?
proposing building a replacement for the Internet from wifi devices shows that they don't understand networking, or radios, or how bandwidth works (for both wired and wireless devices)
you are not going to replace wired devices with wireless devices, it's a nice dream, but wires will always support more users and more reliable access.
And then there's the problem that building a new network without having access to the existing Internet is going to mean that you aren't going to be able to reach the things that you want to reach. If such a network had enough backing, you may get facebook, youtube, netflix, and a few other big names on it. But they are the ones who most want to control you. You will not get the millions of tiny websites that have the most useful content to go to the hassle of setting up connections to another network.
Look how poorly the "IPv6 transition" is going, (once you get away from the big names), that's trivial compared to what would be needed for a replacement Internet.
This isn't going to stop people from trying though. There is the "Internet2" project connecting schools, and there are no end of projects trying to create mesh networks that automatically connect and adapt to devices appearing and disappearing. None of them can handle any noticeable load before they start collapsing. There are solid physics reasons for this. It's not just a lack of software or the evil vendors preventing this from working.
David Lang
I've considered this problem and the baggage it entails and come to the conclusion that stationary terrestrial networks are entirely too easy for an entity (e.g. government) to simply shut down or fundamentally break. Therefore, the remaining solution is to use a large number of LEO satellites. In order to satisfy the bandwidth and power requirements, I think a network of tiny satellites with superconductive ICs doing routing are the solution. Instead of IP addresses, you would have a UUID and geographic coordinates. It's not 100% anonymous and you would want to encrypt your connection to prevent hijacking and spying. It would be exceedingly difficult to be (legally) coerced into modifying the network, especially if you don't physically operate within the nation making the demands.
In order to fund such a network, you could charge money for special transponders that exceed an arbitrary upload rate limit but doing so exposes a company to legal manipulation. If you're just wicked rich, you could just not bother with making money off it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...to complex social problems will never work. The internet it the way it is because nobody's applying reasonable restraints on the big IT companies. Political solutions are more likely to be effective but that's where the big IT companies are spending their money to make sure that never happens.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Privacy and accountability are mutually exclusive ideals. Finding a happy medium between them can only be done through patterns of use. You can't build one into the network without destroying the other.
No.
Check out Guifie . It's a free, open and neutral network where the nodes are contributed by individuals, and companies. It's been running since 2004 and has over 33,000 nodes with another 16,000 planned. It's still mostly a local regional project. But still a damn cool socio-economic experiment.
The Internet is almost perfect. Restoring the Internet to a network of PEERS would make it perfect. Currently most credible path forward is continued deployment of IPv6.
Remainder of authors concerns can be fully addressed by a robust implementation of RFC3514.
Half of the trouble we face today with the internet doesn't require a new *physical* network. We need instead to prefer standard protocols, and stop centralizing information with big companies. That means run your email address from your own domain instead of using gmail for everything. Don't use Facebook to login to everything. Share pictures with friends over email. Put your public thoughts on your own blog instead of tweeting them. If people are interested in following you, they will use your RSS or Atom feed.
Everything these big companies are doing to mine your data and overwhelm you with useless information are inferior (but more convenient!) replacements for the standard decentralized protocols we already had.
Unfortunately, having a few monopolies control the wires is the cheapest most efficient way to build a network. Mesh networks are just not enough to span planet earth. We are only going to address the neutrality issue with appropriate regulation. As-is, the regulation stifles competition rather than promoting it.
& ransomware. That's where most of it's non-trivial value comes from. It's difficult to trace (impossible if you are careful not to link your name to your wallet) hence the popularity. Take away that anonymity and the value crashes.
Also if censorship could solve the problem we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's very difficult to censor people when you don't know who they are, where they're coming from, etc. They can just throw bots at you until you break. And that's before we talk about plain 'ole hackers breaking into systems and doing nefarious things.
Finally I think you're getting at viruses at the end of your post (Microsoft makes OS software, not networking hardware, so I can't imagine you mean anything else). Most viruses are people double clicking on things carelessly.
Again, the problems we're trying to solve are complex. They'll require complex solutions. Making your own internet with ( Blackjack and Hookers ) isn't the answer. It's too simplistic.
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They won't be able to block it. Look at how much effort China has to put into their great firewall. It's a huge energy and time cost and newer protocols can make that process even harder. We don't need a new physical internet. That's not what this is about.
"If you want a perfect society, you need perfect people."
- Shirow Masamune, Appleseed
I don't think the internet's design should have to be unnecessarily complicated just because an amoral minority will use it to get what they want while stomping on everyone else's usage. But I'm a SubGenius, so by any reasonable standards I'm considered insane.
We already know that we need something different. And we've learned a lot from IPv4, but we IPv6 is *not* a new *architecture*, it's fundamentally the same with tweaks to things like the size of addresses. The National Science Foundation made some large grants some years back to encourage the exploration of new architectures -- one of the promising ones was Content Centric Networking, an idea promoted by Van Jacobson (a name that should be familiar to anyone who knows anything about networking). It's continuing under the auspices of the Named Data Networking project, and CICN on fd.io. The original papers on CCNx make interesting reading... check them out.
Do. Not. Want.
That reminds me of the underground Internet in Cuba called "StreetNet".
Vox: Castro hates the internet, so Cubans created their own.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
because such local internet schemes have been tried and maybe some are still running.
people prefer the real internet though.
ALL "MESH" NETWORK TRIALS, DREAMS AND HOPES have failed though. I mean such a scheme kind of works to a limited size to distribute warez within a city but that;s about it.
furthermore.. uhh.. that would be moving back like 15 years in many areas where net neutrality has improved. russia for example had for a long time schemes where transfer within the city were free but outside internet access cost more. our university had such a system too(transfer limits on outside access, so we ran an extremely WASTEful inner sharing network. they busted the dc one so eh, the result was just 90% of inside bandwidth being used by a decentralized system..).
and were the internet to cease function for whatever reason, such local networks would pop in mere weeks because the hardware is there. why would you want though if you have the choice to use the real internet?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hush, the psych majors are getting excellent data from this.
Break up the last mile monopolies and oligopolies into transmission and routing companies. Comcast Coax and AT&T twisted pair only carry layer 2 traffic terminated at a CO or somewhere. Transmission Comcast and AT&T charge ISPs to co-locate or they could build out those facilities to go somewhere else. Layer 3 Comcast and AT&T companies would have to compete with all the startups. Where is Judge Greene when you need him?
You were on the right track with "privacy" and "security".
Then you lost it at "reasonable controls on behavior".
Why? Because "reasonable" is an entirely arbitrary value that's different for everyone. See "reasonable gun control laws".
So what YOU might find "reasonable", others might find oppressive.
And who's to say that abuse of the "reasonable behavior" systems couldn't be used to deprive someone of innocent of equal access/footing?
And I'm sorry, but trying to rely on something "built by hackers" on top of "open wifi access points" is idiotic.
This is TOR, and it's already a shitty alternative that's totally compromised.
The type of network being talked about pretty much needs to be a ground-up implementation.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You been in a coma for a decade?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Could also move to Europe. Ok, not ALL utilities are nationalized, but it's usually enough to make sure it's affordable to live there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This applies.
https://xkcd.com/927/
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior.
That would give too much of an opening for SOCJUS purges due to redefining "reasonable".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
But both have pitfalls surrounding hop count, neither allows 'authenticated' node routing (basically source based routing hints so at least one hop a packet takes will be through a 'trusted' node , hopefully reducing the effect a sybil attack would have on deanonymizing your traffic (since the trusted node could delay/rewrap traffic being sent through it.)
HOWEVER, none of this matters if the processors in the majority of nodes are compromised, like they should be assumed to be today. If adversaries potentially have backdoors into the memory of your system, like Intel ME and the TrustZone/PSP implementations, then encryption is irrevelant since someone could come in and steal the keys. And to anyone who says that 'hardware memory page encryption' takes care of that: Not if the management engine is considered more privileged than the CPU and is considered 'trusted/supervisor' access level to the per-cpu or per-process keyring. That memory stuff might help in other circumstances, but it does NOT provide the sort of trustworthy security that it is being marketed as, just like DRM never provided user-beneficial security features like IT was marketed as.
Before you can 'take back' the network, you need to 'take back' the hardware, otherwise you are building your transportation network on wet silt, and when the next rain comes through (political unrest or government overreach) you will find the basis of your security and anonymity washed away by it!
The existing internet is more than perfect enough. The problem lies with surveillance from major corporations which I don't consider as a problem, considering the fact that there are so many idiotic people in this world looking to harm the innocent people. Its the need to stop such idiotic acts from taking place again like the 9/11 and recent isis attacks.
It's not the Internet that's the problem, but people who have no idea what it is and how it works.
TL;DR: Take a moment to understand what it is, and realise we already have what we want.
I'm very interested in a potential new internet.
But these things are contradictory:
- respect privacy
- impose reasonable controls on behavior
- few barriers to entry (net neutrality)
'resonable' is in the eye of the beholder, so you need a central authority to make that happen.
I think we'd be better of if people grow up and learn to take or ignore criticism.
Bullies always find a way to manipulate the central authority.
I don't know about net neutrality, the biggest problem with it is if you get a government to step in.
So far the internet has been run on profit pretty well and there's no real net neutrality.
Companies like Google place servers in ISP data centers to speed up their websites.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
We are ready had an Internet we wanted, until money grabbing companies started the spam business, the Ads business, Viral writers, Script Kiddies and the general uneducated public who things it's ok to be spiteful and nasty via the anonymity of a keyboard all arrived
Have you been sleeping under a log?
The entire brilliant new thing about deep learning is that you can build an entire machine translation system from fucking randomized matrices, all the way up, where no-one got to decide anything.
Hand-crafted rule-based systems present thousands of opportunities for power-mad silverbacks to dicker to their own advantage (see Swamp, The).
But with deep learning, you bootstrap the system with massive artefacts extracted from the real world (the training corpus) and even if you wanted to dicker with the artefact, we've got barely the first clue about how to tilt the artefact—bear in mind that it's very, very big, with a low center of gravity—so that the machine learning algorithms respond in a desired, predictable, stable way (that isn't entirely upended by the next trivial dicker).
Wake up and smell the bacon. Gradient is out there, and mankind no longer sits at the top of a micro-manageable food chain.
This has always been true in small corners of human affairs. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter who invented the calculus. For the most part, the calculus is a Platonic good.
Networks can lie across a fairly wide swath of the Platonic–political spectrum.
We kind of lucked out with the Internet. ARPANET desired a certain form of resistant against politics (i.e. the backbone coup) that aligned with the individual's preference against being controlled (they didn't foresee, I don't think, how soon social media would become a larger stakeholder than the Pentagon, or more of the ribbon-breasted control freaks would have popped out of the ARPA-oversight woodwork).
If our explicit goal is to tilt way over to the Platonic side, it's not like we have a huge number of dials to bicker about, anyway.
Resource management requires some kind of accounting system which identifies endpoints (bandwidth is neither infinite nor free when push comes to shove). I don't know whether our anonymous micro-currencies are up to the job yet, at such enormous scale.
How does one respond to a DOS attack on a fully onion-routed fabric? Sounds like a tough problem. If it's not onion-routed, there's clearly a small privacy leak that could be exploited by nation-state agencies.
Real problems.
If this ends up becoming a voluntary network (you can join your node if you want to), then like all good libertarian systems, the primary vote is conducted by the pitter-patter of many feet.
In such a world, when the technical committee gathers together, they are going to look around the table to see whether the assembled group has the competence and credibility to prevail in a vote of the feet—because otherwise they're just squandering their time and reputation to get involved in the first place.
So there's you final answer. At the outside boundary condition, we all decide.
Internal to this, Newton will either decide to work alongside Leibniz (good idea if he wishes to succeed) or not. So, yeah, if your amygdala is so inclined, there will likely be a spot of Alpha Geek Mean Girls during the voyage, that you can happily point to forever after as responsible for any lingering imperfections of Internet 2.0.
That's the ultimate in couch-compatible issue trackers: 999 valuable reforms all blocking on "solve human nature". Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a labyrinthine saddle point that stretches as far as the eye can see in 200 fucking dimensions.
If it weren't for the giant "who decides" monolith erected at consensus centroid of Saddleplane Peak Perplexity, no two people wandering alone in that vast undulating outback would ever meet up to exchange bile.
Well, sure nice to see a human face every so often. Best of luck to you. Me, I'm heading thataway ...
"It's high time to build the internet that we wanted all along: a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior."
There's nothing wrong with the Internet that needs fixing. And if you want privacy then use end-to-end encryption instead of relying on Facebook/Google/Microsoft to keep all your data safe in the cloud. And just who exactly is going to impose controls on behavior?
A new internet, without data mining and advertising.
Human systems are intriguing. Every group system ever devised by man has always been made to work in ways it wasn't intended to be used by the actors in the system. Every creator of such a system always starts out with a vision. They put constraints and controls in place to attempt to force the system to work the way they envisioned and do these systems ever ultimately look like what the creator envisioned? NEVER. NOT ONCE. NOT EVEN CLOSE!
Humans have a very odd desire to want to feel in control of things that they are not in control of and never will be in control of. There are those of us that got over this years ago and there are those of us still attempting to control that which cannot be controlled. To quote Wesley Snipes in Blade: "Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate up hill."
We'll make great pets
I think we can all agree that most of what we use today is historically grown and more than just a little messy/haphazard. I don't know if we need to rebuild the entire internet - TCP/IP seems to be doing fine AFAICT - but a larger portion of its key services need a redo IMHO.
- DNS needs a redo, that's for sure. Whom am I paying 2 Euros a month just for an entry anyway? Namecoin uses the blockchain for naming, and that is the way to go. A state-of-the-art DNS replacement would use that and some central registration authority where you can get a batch of tokens to register/claim the domains of your choosing and be done with it once and for all.
- E-Mail. Well, being just about the oldest service ever and still in existance. It shows at every corner. Replacement desperately needed. Default built-in hard crypto signing, enveloping, all on top of a new DNS (see above). That would make spam go away in an instant and finally make E-Mail private. Add in referer prohibition, proper threading, echo-pooling and standardized non-prorpietary attachments and rendering standards and add everything else that Usenet offers that might be useful and Facebook would finally be obsolete. Facebook only exists because E-Mail is shite and FB actually is a better version of E-Mail for most people. I can't really blame them.
- Web needs a redo. True thing. The Web has outgrown HTML roughly 20 years ago. HTML / CSS today are just about unmanagable and have grown into humongous monsters and still fall short in building a neat current-day Web experience. Well-built Flash apps from 1999 still outpace and outperform websites from today - this is a problem, as it causes significant bloat in the HTML/CSS/JS department with no real performance gains. To the contrary, sites continue to bloat and ever increase in demand with no real improvement for the user. Not good.
- Offline. We need a net that takes offline into account more. This is IMHO the internets biggest downfall alltogether. Fidonet and the likes had and still have the advantage here. It would have to be something on top of TCP/IP but below the application protocols and services, AFAICT. But it's desperately needed. Especially with todays webpages clocking in at above 2MB in size on average. Insane. This allways-online thing was crazy back then and it still is today. Bandwidth is scarce and nobody needs to be online all the time. Why don't we have services that take this into account? Ok, we have (had) Usenet and E-Mail, but Web? Not really. A web replacement should take offline into account right from the get-go.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Does this moron not understand true backbone internet connectivity? Or will wifi somehow handle the problem?
Mod the AC's insight up, folks.
I've been dealing with a bit of this lately, with people who have discovered just enough about networking to make fools out of themselves. Had a self appointed expert pull one of these mesh network idiocies at a meeting, and pronounce it as the replacement for everything on the intertoobz. Got pretty belligerent about it as well, when presented with the truth.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Privacy.
Security.
Behavior control.
Pick two.
Pick one, I lean toward the first myself. An accountable internet would be useful to a few thousand governments and corporations which pretend to represent the interests of billions. An anonymous internet would actually be in the interest of billions of people, including the idiots foolish enough to drink the koolaid of those governments and corporations.
OK...
/. posts and attribute mine to me would be the equivalent of a massively extended brute force crack... This works for individual web sites, but maybe not for access sessions.
I think this is a topic that we can deconstruct and conclude that the answer is "it depends". Suppose that I want the ability to write posts to slashdot anonymously. However, slashdot need to have the ability to call me out if I post something that is defamatory or illegal [in the UK certain statements can be construed to incite religious hatred, which is now illegal, for example].
So what this needs is a mechanism by which I can post to slashdot, but that when I do, my "identity" is different every single time. If we can design a mechanism by which it is impossible for slashdot [or any other site] to aggregate all of my actions over time and attribute them to me, but can take a single action of mine and attribute it] then we are close to our goals.
If we define the problem in this way, then perhaps we are moving towards something that works a bit like a cryptographic one-time-pad. For any single instance [of me posting something to slashdot] you have the ability to perform a computationally complex action that can be used to determine that I was the originator, but the only way to aggregate all
To safely anonymise access sessions, we would need some form of abstraction integrated directly with the routing protocol, again such that it might be possible to deconstruct a single "session" [or maybe even trace a single given packet would be better] but not have the ability to do more than that because the protocol itself imposes a degree of abstraction and chaos.
The more I tihnk aobut it, the more I tihnk we could do it [basically scale TOR to work for the entire net, with refinements. Unfortunately, I think that legislation would be passed that would outlaw it before it could be finished...
I've been doing networking for 29 years, and it is not unusual to experience people without a clue talking about how to do this or that in a manner that exposed their cluelessness to knowledgeable individuals, but sounded insightful to others. I've noticed that this behavior is more general; people seem to assume that what they only know from the outside must be easy, while what they know in more detail (especially if it's their vocation) is hard. As a consultant, I learned to listen to their ideas, pull out the nuggets of their needs, and (if necessary) educate them on aspects that were not as easy as they thought. I did not act in as disciplined a manner all the time.
Assuming that the technical challenges could be overcome, this isn't a technical problem. It's a social one. And that social issue will simply carry over to the new network. For those old enough to remember, the internet wasn't always like this. It was pretty darn good.
But then it became commercialized, and an expoitable resource.
And then everyone and their goldfish could access the internet, resulting in every douche-nozzle having an easy and low cost venue to causing mischief.
What we have right now is an internet where the commercial interests control the pipes, and the network itself is more or less anarchy. Net neutrality laws can help with the former, until the gov't becomes a toady to those same commercial interests (like exactly what has happened in the US), but there is nothing that we can do about the latter because people will *always* come up with a way to get around anything the 'good guys' come up with. The only way to fix it would be to impose a draconian sense of order that would make China rubs their hands with glee.
Look, I realize some of you aren't on Internet 3, and don't have access to basic 40 Gbps ports campus-wide, or 100 Gbps ports at specific locations, but we left you behind.
You were too annoying, to be quite frank.
And no matter how much you knock, we're not at home, and you're not coming in.
To those of you in the First World, you know how good it is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not to sound too much like a grammar geek; but if the new Internet connects and bidirectionally inter-operates with the old Internet, then it becomes part of the old Internet. I understand that they are perhaps simply referring to an new protocol stack, but calling that a "new Internet" is kind of misleading. Unless, of course, then don't plan on inter-operating with the old one. In that case, the project is probably doomed as they are many decades behind of collecting content and function.
What happened to, or what is the status of, Internet2? That high speed network available to just universities & research institutions?
About the long hauls, can't the physical infrasturcture simply be reused, w/ the control logic at the various termination points being modified as needed? IPv6 seems to be a good starting point, although I'd change it to make the internet more hierarchic, so that routing becomes more logical rather than a lookup of routing tables. To achieve that, I'd make the global prefix completely routable on 64 bits, and have the lower half of the address split b/w the subnet address and the host address. Autoconfiguration would still be around, but there would be no need to keep it at 64-bits, since uniqueness is in any case not guaranteed. No subnet of any imaginable type will have anything even close to 4 billion, so having subnet sizes of >32 bits are meaningless. It also allows for more structure in subnet addressing, rather than have to buy /16 or /24 or /32 from the RIRs.
It's time for an internet that has security and auto optimization built-in. Human interaction in packet flow and traffic prioritization should be eliminated shifting our priority to actual content and hardware.
Did this guy just watch the last season of Silicon Valley?
Whatever happen to Internet v2 that was announced like 20 years ago?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've been doing networking for 29 years, and it is not unusual to experience people without a clue talking about how to do this or that in a manner that exposed their cluelessness to knowledgeable individuals, but sounded insightful to others. I've noticed that this behavior is more general; people seem to assume that what they only know from the outside must be easy, while what they know in more detail (especially if it's their vocation) is hard. As a consultant, I learned to listen to their ideas, pull out the nuggets of their needs, and (if necessary) educate them on aspects that were not as easy as they thought. I did not act in as disciplined a manner all the time.
Imagine if you would, mountainous terrain - think the Ridge and valley geology in Pennsylvania. Now imagine an emergency system consisting of a mesh network of consumer part 15 devices in an ad-hoc network to provide communications between widely separated stations. I serve as a technical advisor because I have experience in digital, networking, and RF matters. The latest tool that came in to speak to us got more and more frustrated by my questions, and eventually started yelling and calling me an idiot and that I wasn't paying attention.
I think he was dumbfounded when I asked how his system was going to connect to the internet when the internet was down...... "It's a network, stupid - that's the internet." And he seemed a little shocked when I asked about how any appreciable distance would be covered.
I let him rant for a few minutes, thanked him for his time, and afterward circulated the word to those attending....... "No".
This system he was proposing wouldn't work for so many reasons that it was difficult not to laugh.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"When the internet was down" ?
Pardon me if I ask for some clarification on what that means?
This is for communications when the wheels fall off. Widespread power outages, no cellular comms, and other parts of the infrastructure going down. Doesn't happen often, but every so often, yes, people are without internet access. Hope I didn't upset the kids too much! 8^)
But my overall point which is probably lost on people because it is hard to believe, was that this guy thought that simply setting up an ad-hoc mesh network, that the users were going to have the world wide web. No backbone connection, just a bunch of computers sitting all alone were going to have "the internet" Like they could communicate around the world on the internet at the same time they were disconnected from it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Bitcoin is not supposed to be anonymous, only decentralized. All of the data is public data. Just make a graph, connect the dots, and find out who move how much to whom.
I have a sincere question. Could WiMAX or some other radio solution carry the final mile of traffic? the reason I ask is because Level3 and other backbone carriers aren't the problem. The cable and phone companies are the problem and getting easements to use the existing terrestrial infrastructure to compete with them isn't really feasible.
Some DOES have to be done. There shouldn't be ANY discussion of competitive throttling and other nastiness at this stage in history and there is.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
Okay, but your question is poorly phrased then. "The Internet is down" implies there's no Internet to connect to, rather than your uplink connection being down.
So essentially you were asking, "how is it going to connect to the Internet without a connection to the Internet?"
Whenever and however that is. The Internet can go down. The power liines can be out, and your trusty server will not be reachable. At that point, or in any other scenario where you have no connection, where no signal gets to you, no packets, No Wifi because it has no connectino - where the cell phone system's emergency batteries have crapped out after a few hours.
The internet is not functioning for you or anyone in your area, you have no connection nor do they, you cannot connect to the internet because it is not up and running, it is no longer sending packets of data
It is not up then, the internet is for any definition of words or combinations of words, well and truly....
Down.
This is not that difficult of a concept.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I don't think that there is a silver bullet RF-based last mile solution that would remove the need to deal with the issue of cable/phone providers and whether they are classified as a utility or otherwise need government regulation to keep the "free market" from steamrolling the general population.
Whether or not RF is suitable as the last mile depends on the number of subscribers and their bandwidth expectations. Guided solutions (wire/cable/optical fiber) have far greater capacity and better reliability than RF solutions in general. Today's wireless could probably easily handle the bandwidth expectations of 15 years ago, but now we want high bandwidth streaming audio/video, low latency game playing, and other applications that go way beyond surfing the web, sending e-mail, etc.
You sir are technically correct, the best kind. But this usage of "anonymous" is about as anonymous as using private mode browsing. Everything you do is still public, which is many times all you need to figure out who is who. There is all kinds of cool graph theory and statistically analysis that can be done. An alumni did a presentation on his team's work using this kind of information to detect money laundering and to find out who was doing it. How you act can say more about who you are than who you claim to be.
This usage of anonymous also assume you don't do anything like non-private money exchanges to convert between bitcoin and "real" money or purchase goods or services in your name. Bitcoin could be anonymous but rarely is in practice. I also question how strong it is against a focused deanonymization attacks like what Freenet attempts to protect against. It's a very hard problem.
I kinda figured it was like that.... I wonder what it would cost to have Level3 piped straight to my house. ;)
Every rule has more than one consequence.
No, you seem a bit confused.
The Internet is still up and running even while you aren't connected to it...traffic is still flowing between servers and clients. Routers and switches are still humming along.
It's not the Internet that's down, it's your uplink connection that's down.
A difference with no distinction, a distinction with no difference. Way beck before you decided to take me on this pointless wordsmithing exercise, a fellow came in to speak to an emergency communications group I act as a technical advisor with about a mesh network of part 15 devices. He thought that all you had to do was create this network and you had access to the entire internet.
And eventually we got here. The nature of disasters is that they tend to come in and destroy infrastructure. Telephone lines go down, Power goes down. It doesn't go down in a neat pre-planned way either. The fact that there is internet access in the rest of the world means nothing to a person in a place with no more access for any reason. It's down.
Now if you want to argue that the internet isn't down for that person, by all means do, have your say. But at this point, you are in the same boat as the dunce who argued that putting up an ad-hoc network automatically had the world wide web as far as I'm concerned, and I'm going to respond to you as I did to him.
Thank you for your input, I'l take that under advisement. Buh-bye!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.