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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?

#181

Post by btgeekboy »

brundolf wrote: post #178

IPv6 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.

I'm not sure I'd subscribe to that theory. The port forwarding issue is a few clicks; actually getting a site to host is another issue entirely. Even if it was some application you ran on your desktop 24/7 that holds your hand through the process, NAT + DHCP aren't insurmountable.

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

#182

Post by twobitshifter »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #147
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 quickl…

Re: mail - I believe what gp is saying is that mail will be sent directly - made possible by the larger IP address space. Once it’s on your device you can copy and move it wherever. This would actually match the original design of email before it became the case where everything was via pop and imap. Of course the biggest flaw with email was not expecting spam. My change would be accepting messages only from known senders or those who have done the needed “work” https://www.w3.org/2003/10/acquaintance-protocol/

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

#183

Post by profmonocle »

aspyct wrote: post #83
abecedarius wrote: post #4

The 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.

Nah, if you sort by date here you can see how quickly IANA was doling out /8's to the RIRs up until they ran out: https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-add...

Even if we hadn't wasted /8s on huge allocations to single companies, and things like 240.0.0.0/4, we'd still be basically where we are today, with v4 address space being scarce and traded as a commodity.

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

#184

Post by brundolf »

btgeekboy wrote: post #181
brundolf wrote: post #178

IPv6 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.

I'm not sure I'd subscribe to that theory. The port forwarding issue is a few clicks; actually getting a site to host is another issue entirely. Even if it was some application you ran on your desktop 24/7 that holds your hand through the process, NAT + DHCP aren't insurmountable.

Port forwarding + static IP. And don't be so sure that it's trivial; despite having taken a course on the network stack I'd have to do some research to figure out port-forwarding and get it set up correctly. Normal people's response would be, "What's a port? Like the holes on the back of the computer?"

In an IPv6 world you could have a free program you download that gives you an interface like Squarespace except you can host it for free on the very computer you're using to make your site. Could be totally accessible to nontechnical people. Same goes (much more powerfully) for distributed protocols like Matrix. You could have encrypted messaging platforms like Signal that don't even need a handshake server; devices talk exclusively to each other. Etc. It would be a radically different internet.

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

#185

Post by LeonB »

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.

Ted Nelson envisaged micro-payments as part of the underlying platform (he invented … waves vaguely … all of this)

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

#186

Post by Marsymars »

brewtide wrote: post #169
whatshisface wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Completely not that important, but I did this a year or so ago, committed 'the number' to google voice, and handed out my new one to close contacts. It took a bit for people to filter their calls correctly, and I could always answer the 'business line' regardless, but I have zero regrets about it now.

Unfortunately, using Google Voice in that manner is USA-only, and much (most?) of the rest of the world has no comparable alternative.

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

#187

Post by jedberg »

tpmx wrote: post #173
jedberg wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, perfect. If the standard had said IPs could have any bit length they would have designed accordingly.

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

#188

Post by profmonocle »

deckard1 wrote: post #175
jhgorrell wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Is there a private organization in need of 16 million addresses?

Plenty of mobile phone networks have well over 16 million subscribers, and they typically don't have enough public IPv4 addresses for everyone. This has led to really hacky stuff, like using DOD IP ranges as psuedo-private space, or re-using private IP addresses in different regions (which can't be fun to maintain.)

Some networks have fixed the problem by using NAT64 - forgoing IPv4 altogether internally, and translating to public v4 at the edge. (Works surprisingly well, T-Mobile US has been doing it for the better part of a decade.)

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

#189

Post by PeterWhittaker »

Stretch goal: No password authentication whatsoever.

Target goal: No cleartext password authentication. (No telnet as it was, no ftp as it was, no smtp as it was, etc., yada, and so on....)

Fallback goal: Get HTTPS right far sooner, with cryptographers working on SSL 1.0 from the beginning, with funding, and eliminate HTTP as soon as possible.

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

#190

Post by jjav »

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.

Of course there would be amazon (widespread e-commerce, if not literally amazon.com), android, kindle. None of these are ad-driven products.

google as it exists today, an advertising company hoovering up private data while masquerading as various services, all in the name of pushing more ads, is not a net positive to the Internet. Having it not exist would be wonderful in this alternate universe.

Of course there would be search engines though. There were plenty search engines before google, before ads, and those would've evolved along a different path from where they were in the mid 90s.

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