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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?

#131

Post by holidaystarship »

The internet itself is pretty solid: other than a few technical tweaks, I think the infrastructure evolved as well as it could. One thing I'd like to see changed is a re-thought internet protocol that's more privacy focused: an IP address is an absurdly specific identifier, fingerprinting a user down to a single household in most cases. An ephemeral addressing scheme for clients that changes with every new connection would be really quite helpful, perhaps along with some safeguards that allow law enforcement to still track that ephemeral identifier to an internet connection in the case of abuse.

The web is a different story, especially social media. I'd like to make social media, and the web in general, more forgetful. "Digital natives" (second-flight millenials and Gen Z) are going to get screwed with the persistence and easy archiving of social media data. This is partially a result of the natural shift in cultural expectations that occurs over time, as well as a consequence of having their awkward-for-any-generation blunder years recorded forever. This is definitely more a legal change than a technical one, but I would mandate (1) a time span (such as 5 years) where public social media posts must revert to author-only private unless consent is otherwise obtained and (2) a prohibition against public mass archiving of social media posts from people who aren't public figures.

This type of mass archiving for the use of closed-off academic research libraries is acceptable, but merely going and hoovering up every public tweet or Youtube comment or Reddit post and and putting it up with a public search engine shouldn't be permitted. Treat it like many countries treat the census, and only allow publicly opening up these archives far into the future (for example, the raw underlying questionnaires used for the Canadian census are not released to the general public until 92 years after collection). Different story for public figures such as politicians, but we shouldn't archive everything that everyone has said in perpetuity.

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

#132

Post by dane-pgp »

handrous wrote: post #104
NewNetNow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arrangem…

I'd go so far to say that by 2030, at least one OECD country will have a law requiring ISPs to enforce remote-attestation of the Secure Boot of every device accessing the internet.

Such a government could then require app stores to remove "dangerous" technologies like Tor and messaging apps that support end-to-end encryption.

Perhaps ISPs would be allowed to support "legacy" devices and OSes, but with a special "Evil Bit" set on packets, so that websites could (and in some cases would be required to) refuse access.

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

#134

Post by runjake »

mattzito wrote: post #118
jjav wrote: post #106

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…

It's interesting, I wonder if the internet would have been successful at all without something to monetize? Yeah, e-commerce probably would have been doable, but it would have been like the dotcom era - generic domain names running ads to try to get you to walk over to a desktop computer and type in the domain name. Digital communities would have been really hard - a lot of online forums, I know, depend(ed) on advert…

There were thriving communities like MUDs and IRC and Usenet before e-commerce and corporations moved in.

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

#135

Post by bryan_w »

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…

I agree that there needs to be some way for identity to be strongly represented on the internet but there should be a way or places where it isn't required. This could be something that perhaps allows indemnity for user generated content as long as the content is attributed to a person otherwise the site is responsible. This would allow the small time cars forum to (with identity) operate safely as they do today, but would also allow 4chan to (anonymously) operate as long as they ensue the content wont get the website operator in trouble.

The other problem you run into is ease of use. Most users of the internet can't understand PKI based certificates so I don't know how an interface could look that would provide a strong guarantee of identity but also allows my mom to use it and not get phished.

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

#136

Post by onion2k »

asciimov wrote: post #102
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.

The price of giving free access to everyone has been very high though. We continue to pay with our eroded privacy, personal information that's frequently breached, the cost of advertising that's passed on through product pricing, the cost of giving up so much control of the internet to three or four giant companies, the sheer cost of fighting against advertising in our browsers and so on. We're practically held hostage by advertising - a downturn in ad spending leads to content and publishing companies closing down. The cost of free is strangely expensive.

Maybe it would be better to fund more useful things, like sites that give children access to knowledge through direct contributions. Like how Wikipedia is funded.

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

#137

Post by dane-pgp »

asciimov wrote: post #105

I would fix the order of URLs instead of http://news.ycombinator.com/item it would be https:com/ycombninator/news/item

I actually really like this idea (and once created a browser extension to at least make URLs look like that in the address bar), but I still think there is a benefit to having domain names distinguishable from paths, so it would be:

https://com.ycombinator.news/item

Having just checked, I see that ycombinator.news has already been registered, so maybe the lesson is that everyone should register "palindromic" domains, like com.ycombinator.com for example.

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

#138

Post by mattzito »

runjake wrote: post #134
mattzito wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, I wonder if the internet would have been successful at all without something to monetize? Yeah, e-commerce probably would have been doable, but it would have been like the dotcom era - generic domain names running ads to try to get you to walk over to a desktop computer and type in the domain name. Digital communities would have been really hard - a lot of online forums, I know, depend(ed) on advert…

There were thriving communities like MUDs and IRC and Usenet before e-commerce and corporations moved in.

Absolutely true, but I would say that MUDs and IRC and Usenet are the definition of pre-Internet boom culture. It was a big deal when my parents were able to get online and use a browser to engage with other people. My dad could have been playing chess online via IRC and email for years, but it wasn't until he had a browser that it was within his technical comfort level.

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

#139

Post by tpmx »

whatshisface wrote: post #112
tpmx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're suggesting is a dystopia.

I think they were being sarcastic, given that they're writing it under a pseudonym.

Almost all of us are writing under pseudonyms.

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

#140

Post by kzrdude »

creativeembassy wrote: post #127
D13Fd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd give it a better name, which does not involve the word "java."

And ECMAscript still sounds like a disease.

let's just pick a letter and it's fine.

escript cscript mscript ascript

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