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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?

#151

Post by tpmx »

jedberg wrote: post #23

TL;DR: Constants shouldn't be hard coded in the software, they should always be in a separate config The problem is that it's the 60s. My first thought was "security", but unless you an also teach them about elliptic curves, they're going to use the security of the 1960s, which as we now know isn't very secure. Maybe at least having security baked in would help make it easier to switch to better security later, like…

So you're essentially pushing against specialized IP-oriented VLSI chips in everything from NICs to switches to routers... instead they should all have been reconfigurable general computing devices?

Don't you think that would have slowed down the growth quite a bit?

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

#152

Post by philwelch »

asciimov wrote: post #111
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…

Ad's got us here to begin with. Without ads the internet would have been only for the rich. There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no kindles. I'd still be ordering everything from the Sears Catalogue, waiting 6-8 weeks for it to arrive.

No Amazon, really? Amazon ships physical goods to your house in exchange for money--they aren't dependent on advertising.

Even Google landed on advertising as a monetization technique but existed before it and easily could have been a sustainable business without it (though not the behemoth it has become).

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

#153

Post by karaterobot »

Not sure how to accomplish it, but advertisements should be captured in a semantically distinct way in markup. I hate ads, but I'm not saying you can't have them if you want, you just have to wrap them in the equivalent ../ tags, so that there is no question about what content contains an advertisement and what doesn't. That way, it's trivial for me to block them. The flip side of the coin is that my browser will tell you if I'm blocking ads, and you can decide if you want me as a viewer or not.

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

#155

Post by pteraspidomorph »

kzrdude wrote: post #140
creativeembassy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ECMAscript still sounds like a disease.

let's just pick a letter and it's fine. escript cscript mscript ascript

Let's face it, it would end up as "JScript". What we now know as "JScript" would probably become "MScript" or something.

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

#156

Post by dane-pgp »

dijit wrote: post #14
philipswood wrote: post #10

Require emails to be signed by the sender cryptographically.

We have DKIM and you can safely drop non-DKIM mail. This tells you the MTA is actually sending the mail. The problem is that these MTAs get hacked or people just hijack domains. Heck, the barrier to buying a domain is so low that this is a legit way of spamming too.

> the barrier to buying a domain is so low

This suggests that one way of making spam unprofitable would be to require any domain which sends email to put up a bond of $100 which is forfeited if any of the big four email providers decide that the domain is sending spam.

To make this acceptable to public opinion, the forfeited bonds would to go directly to popular charities, and all existing domains would be automatically grandfathered in, so there would be no extra cost for any current business or user.

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

#157

Post by darkr »

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…

> 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128 bits was overkill

The least significant 64 bits in IPv6 are used for link-layer addressing, which is how IPv6 supplants older L2 protocols (ARP etc) with NDP etc, thereby fixing (or at least improving) some significant issues with larger IPv4 subnet scalability/reliability

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

#158

Post by pmontra »

asciimov wrote: post #111
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…

Ad's got us here to begin with. Without ads the internet would have been only for the rich. There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no kindles. I'd still be ordering everything from the Sears Catalogue, waiting 6-8 weeks for it to arrive.

I don't think so. Everybody pays for their internet connection and always had. News on paper have always been supported by ads so it's fair if news on the internet have ads too. Amazon sells things, they would still sell them. Phone makers sells phones and we had Symbian before Android. Wikipedia has no ads.

But I don't see how we could actually forbid ads on the internet and the legal basis for it.

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

#160

Post by PicassoCTs »

Add a fallback protocol, that allows for onion-protected mesh-net-routing. All that is ever revealed for routing a package, is the next human-supra-organism you want that package to be handed over. Imagine you write a reply: "This is not a good idea" and hit send, but some benevolent leader decides this message is not a good idea. So it fails on the centralized infrastructure.

Now you wrap the adress of me: Individual > Household> Street > City> Airport into encrypted shells, that only reveal the next destination upon arrival within the data-organism.

These of course are valid only, if a public ledger certifies their longterm existence.

Your reply will take time, it will travel on land, air, water and, by all means possible. But it will reach me, i promise you that. To add plausible deniability, all you need is hostile apps, who participate within the meshnet, without the users consent. To add motivation to participate, just allow the transfer of crypto-currency - a currency backed up by the promise of data-transfer, no matter were, no matter what.

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