Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 322 posts

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

#141

Post by JohnBooty »

I pick the year 1995, right as the web starts to hit the mainstream.

I'd add some kind of built-in, frictionless, privacy-respecting, user-friendly, transparent payment/micropayment system. Built on open standards so we could have multiple competing UX's and the best one(s) would win.

Basically, think about how Patreon and Kickstarter (which are not without their flaws) have allowed people to support creators more or less directly. Now, imagine if we'd somehow baked something like that in to the internet itself.

The web is 99.9999% garbage and one of the biggest reasons is because we spent nearly two decades training people that everything on the interwebs was free which meant that it had to be ad-supported which means that nearly everything has been forced to pander to the absolute lowest common mass-market denominator.

Even with some kind of "good" micropayment system, sure, most stuff would still be free/ad-supported lowest common denominator crap. I have no illusions. Just look at every other form of media that has ever existed.

However, just imagine how books or movies or whatever would look they were de facto forced to be free for the earliest part of their existence.

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

#142

Post by selfsimilar »

Wider IP address space at the beginning could have led to static IP deployment to the home, allowing for self-hosted websites and email service that would have obviated the need for ad-supported websites and web services. We still would have had the issue of asymmetrical home connections but that’s a separate issue.

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

#144

Post by ryall »

D13Fd wrote: post #121
notamy wrote: post #120

Javascript. Not to remove it, but to make it better from the start. Current JS feels painful to me because it feels like piling hacks on top of a poorly-designed language to make it palatable. Doing it better from the start sounds amazing.

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

But it's such a great litmus test to instantly identify the people that don't know what the hell they're talking about ;)

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

#145

Post by rawgabbit »

Encourage the App store paradigm and discourage the browser paradigm. Users download apps that they trust instead of using a browser to directly go to a URL that (a) could be fake e.g. "whitehouse.com" (b) installs malware on the client computer. The theory here is that app developers know how to wade the shark infested waters of the internet better than grandpa or grandma and can code basic protections in the app. e.g. just because a website says click here, you don't really have to click there. Especially if a dialog pops up asking do want to give elevated permissions to XYZ?

Encourage the development of browsers for kids. Parents can configure their kids' computer to only run "KidFox" browser which has all the security features turned on. Only allows white listed sites that has been vetted by various agencies, denies escalated privileges, turns off all webcams, prevents remote hackers taking over their kids computer etc.

Lastly, it is more of mindset. Developers should take the attitude that every client computer, server, and database has been compromised to some degree. That is we should have defense in depth and not rely solely on one mechanism to protect us from the bad guys.

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

#146

Post by woodruffw »

DNS is a bit later, but: the domain-name specificity notation.

As a coworker of mine pointed out, it's a little bit ridiculous that URLs on the web look like this: `more.and.more.general/more/and/more/specific`. They should really be `more.and.more/specific`, just like bang paths[1] were.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path

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

#147

Post by pteraspidomorph »

Animats wrote: post #122

Changes I would have made in the early days: - 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128 bits was overkill. - Nodes, not interfaces, have IP addresses, so you can use multiple paths. - IPSEC available but initially optional. - Explicit congestion notification, so packet loss and congestion loss can be distinguished. - Everything on the wire is little-endian, byte oriented, and twos complement. - Y…

> Nodes, not interfaces, have IP addresses, so you can use multiple paths.

Isn't this difference academic/software? What is the crucial point here that can no longer be implemented as an abstraction? (Not a networking specialist so this might just be my ignorance speaking.)

> You can validate a source IP address by pinging it with a random number.

Good idea, but I suspect this is the type of feature that might quickly fall prey to implementation laziness/incompetence, or in other words, enough implementers would both ignore it and not use it until it became unreliable.

> Routers will accept a "shut up" request

I like this idea but couldn't this system be abused by a malicious man in the middle to much more easily hinder connectivity to a targeted system? The man in the middle can fake the validation too...

> Mail is not forwarded

I don't think this is a good idea. People would quickly invent a forwarding protocol if one didn't exist. I mean, I see what you're trying to do here, but I don't think you would succeed on this one.

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

#148

Post by JohnBooty »

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…

    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.
I largely agree but would solve it a slightly different way.

The ad-supported model became the overwhelming default because payments/micropayments were hard and scary so we spent a whole bunch of years conditioning users to believe everything on the internet had to be free.

Payments/micropayments still are hard/scary to a large extent. Large swathes of internet users literally would not dream of paying for content or community membership. Thus, nearly everything online remains riddled with ads or the consequences thereof.

So rather than banning ads I wish we'd made somehow payments/micropayments easy, safe, and transparent and baked that right into the internet somehow.

Think about how Patreon and Kickstarter (which are not without their flaws) have allowed people to support creators more or less directly. Now, imagine if we'd somehow baked something like that in to the internet itself.

Post reply on HN