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Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

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Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#101

Post by jhgorrell »

aspyct wrote: post #83
abecedarius wrote: post #4

The most basic problems seem to be: 1. Everything being 'free' by default drives us to ad-supported centralized services. Economics aren't a separable concern. 2. Too few IP addresses. (At least one of the pioneers, I forget which, said he pushed for longer addresses but was overruled. So the technical constraints probably did not force this.) I'm not sure how to fix #1, but here's an approach from the 90s: https://c…

IPv4 adresses fit in a standard 4byte integer, that might be a reason. Quite frankly, if they didn't allocate full /24 to single entities (including localhost...), we might still have enough addresses left.

Isnt it "127.0.0.1/8" which is allocated, not "127.0.0.1/24"?

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#102

Post by asciimov »

onion2k wrote: post #90

I'd make payments a prominent, application-native, easy to use feature from Day 1, right down in the network protocol level. 100% of the transaction would be transferred from the user to the service owner without a middle-man service taking a cut (payment gateway fees not withstanding). That way there wouldn't be any need to rely on advertising, app stores, or external subscriptions to run something on the internet.

That would have just made the internet in accessible to the poor.

I remember my dad scraping enough money to buy us a computer in '97 with unlimited internet (aol was still selling the internet by the minute back then). As a kid who hardly ever had enough money to buy a comic let alone magazine, and who's local library was lacking, it was life changing being able to just lookup and read about anything for free.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#103

Post by breck »

neolog wrote: post #89
breck wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1D syntax assumes a linear pass from beginning to end across the bytes of a program to build the AST. You have concepts like brackets and parens and quotation marks and colons. 2D languages have none of those. They imagine all programs as laid out on a grid. Think of a spreadsheet. For trees, you use indentation. There is not a single computer language in all the world that cannot have it's semantics represented with…

Are you related to https://www.tree-annotation.org/ ?

No, but this is really interesting! Thank you so much for sharing!

I obviously have quite a passion for the idea that there's a universality to Tree Structures and some fundamental simple notation we are stumbling towards, so interesting to see others with that!

This page (https://www.tree-annotation.org/blog/no-escape.html) is close to one of the benefits, but it turns out you don't need any escape characters at all! Simply indentation let's you have blocks that cut and paste naturally with no escaping.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#104

Post by handrous »

NewNetNow wrote: post #36
an_opabinia wrote: post #18

The most toxic part of the Internet today is identity. Some of the IP address space should have worked like mobile phone numbers - paid for by subscribers and representing single identities. Even better, after the invention of RSA, the government should have backed ISPs or states issuing signing identities for a protocol level identity standard - sort of like SIM cards that would “represent” you on a single, authorit…

My guess is that most people who use the internet by 2050 will be strongly authenticated, whereas the current anonymous internet will remain as a relic of barbaric times for most, but still in use.

I expect we'll have one or more protocols enforcing end-to-end route verification at the packet level on most Internet routers by 2050, so I'm not sure how anonymous any Internet served over that infrastructure will be. I expect bans will be much more effective, international traffic will have much more advanced filtering and blocking, and that proxying will basically be illegal without some kind of business arrangement and being subject to surveillance & ban-supporting laws (and anyway, proxying weird traffic will get you banninated by the entire "legitimate" Internet, much faster than it does now).

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#106

Post by jjav »

Honestly, just one thing, and I only need to go back to the early 90s.

Just before the Internet was opened to commercial use in the mid 90s, would've made a perpetual prohibition of advertising over the Internet. Ads are what have ruined everything.

Take just about anything unpleasant about the Internet today and it is either directly a consequence of ads, or an indirect consequence of someone trying hard to make you see ads.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#108

Post by janci »

1. Prevent protocols to cross layer boundaries. FTP, SIP, etc. are application protocols, yet they use ports and IP addresses for identification of endpoints. They break if the transport layer does something they did not anticipate (e.g. NAT). NAT is not evil, nor broken. Protocols not respecting layer boundaries are broken.

2. Make use of DNS SRV records for all services. Why HTTP must be on port 80? Why not consult DNS to resolve the port too? Pretty much related to my first point.

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