161–170 of 322 posts
The internet actually works really well. Its problems are human.
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?
Obviously it wouldn't apply to everything, but back in the 60s future growth was clearly not thought about the same way as today.
i would remove javascript.
Anything that allows me to send files to a device of a person I know on a direct connection without a service in between and regardless of our locations in the world. Still an unsolved problem AFAIK.
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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).
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.
Yes, but the customer will blame you when e-mail from a misconfigured MTA doesn't arrive (from my experience running one).
If only we'd had DKIM from the start, preventing thousands of broken servers from being set up in the last twenty five years...
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Are cellphone numbers a dystopia?
Yeah, I keep getting solicitors and I can't easily change my number to something only my friends know. I also can't easily separate my business number from my personal number without paying for a second phone subscription, even though it wouldn't cost the phone company anything more.
Honestly I think it couldn’t have gone a lot better... The worst that happened to the internet is Google becoming evil. The internet circa 2000 was mind blowing.