I would probably have most nodes on some kind of overlay network contained within a jurisdiction/extradition area, with fewer and more structured interconnections across hostile national borders. I don’t think it’s reasonable to make every small business with an email or web server for its local customers and partners, have to defend against large and well funded criminals operating in broad daylight from Russia.
Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
171–180 of 322 posts
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#172Changes 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 quickl…
>> 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...
I think of it more as a "I'm just ignoring these, you mine as well stop sending them" request. After all, a man-in-the-middle can already just drop the packets.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Maybe. I'm just saying that we should teach people in the 60s to design for the future and make things extensible. Maybe we'd still have custom silicon, but they would be designed with an external bus to a second chip that can be easily switched out or upgraded or something as a way of dealing with future growth of address space. Obviously it wouldn't apply to everything, but back in the 60s future growth was clearly…
They could have had a design rule that all network endpoints must work with 32/64/128 bit IPs.
This could perhaps have been implemented in VLSI back in the 80s in such a manner that 32-bit IPs ran at full speed, 64-bit at half speed and 128-bit at quarter speed.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#174…also I’d like to add… It’s a pity @dakami isn’t around to give his response, I’d have liked to hear it.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"?
yes, according to wikipedia[1]
IPv4 is just inefficiently allocated in general. Why does the world need 10.0.0.0/8 in addition to 192.168.0.0/16? Isn't 65k addresses enough? Is there a private organization in need of 16 million addresses?
Not to mention AMPRNet (amateur radio) owned the entire 44.0.0.0/8 up until 2019 (a portion was sold off to Amazon). That may have seemed reasonable in 1980 but now it's just plain crazy.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#176Honestly, 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.
And how do you know this. Also, you are referring to the web, not the internet. I have been using the internet since the web was opened to the public. It was already growing like crazy without ads. You make some very strange assumptions. By all means, find the silver linings, but there is no basis for making a causal connection between computer networks and advertising. Ads are not why we have conveniences. Networking technology, continually decreasing in cost, is the reason. There is no inherent connection between computer networks and advertising. The connection exists in your mind because computer network technology is dirt cheap to produce and people have resorted to sketchy behaviour to try to make money from it.1 It would still be dirt cheap without the sketchy behaviour. The argument that the internet would only be for "the rich" is laughable. It must come out of a Big Tech PR department. Sounds like what Facebook likes to say to the press in response to criticism. Yeah, the internet is for the rich: the people who started a small number of oversized, overtrafficked websites and will use whatever means necessary to stay on top. There is nothing egalitatrian about today's internet.
1 The number of people who became wealthy from this behaviour is relatively small, but news of their "success" is widely disseminated.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#177We already have IPv6. The only things broken on the internet are smartphones and closed IoT firmware.
>We already have IPv6 I feel like starting with IPv6 would make a dramatic difference in adoption rates today... I.e. IPv4 never gets created. Imagine a world without a single NAT device or port translation algorithm.
Why am I the only one who likes all my devices in my house having one IP address. It's no one's business if I have 10 computers in here or 1.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#178IPv6 from the beginning.
I have a theory that NAT killed the open web. There was this idea at the beginning that everyone could host their own website, email, etc. But when you're behind a router, you suddenly have to be quite technical in order to set all that up on the computer in your room. So only (bored) technical people bother. It's possible this is the reason platforms came to dominate.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#179Add requirement for every user to have to solve
mathematical equation before being allowed to post
anything. Make it hard requirement and enforce at
all times.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#180The 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.
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