Brendan Eich gets to actually use Scheme for Netscape. It never takes off, because everyone hates Lisps, instead VBScript becomes standardized through IE, which is then phased out in favor of a C#-based script in the early 2000s, and we have a massively better web development enviroment.
Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
21–30 of 322 posts
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#22Adam Curtis provides some historical context on what went wrong with the internet https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#23TL;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 how ssh can use different protocols as old ones are broken. But you'd have to make sure that you were very clever about how it was implemented so that it could be switched without major changes.
Another thought is "more IP addresses", but again you are in the 60s. The computers don't have enough memory to deal with IPv6 length addresses. So again the best you can do is try to set them up with easy upgrades.
Which makes me think the best suggestion would be to teach them about Moore's Law, which of course would have a different name, and try to push for every protocol being extensible as technology grows -- make sure that more octets can be added to IP addresses without them breaking, that security is baked into everything but everything has a way of negating a protocol so that they can be upgraded, that there are no hard upper limits that are assumed and can always be changed.
Basically, teach them what we now know are software best practices -- constants shouldn't be hard coded in the software, they should always be in a separate config.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#24I don’t know how it would be implemented but I always thought it would have been better if there was more meaningful separation of domains, and that you need a different browser to connect to a different domain. That way the net could be divided. There could be a domain for only verified information. A domain for public use. A domain for only educational content, etc. I have no idea how it would be moderated though
Such a categorisation already existsed in the form of the original top-level domain names, but it was never enforced. .gov for government, .mil for military, .com for commercial, .edu for educational facilities, etc.
For good reason, though. Who says what information is "verified", the government, the news media, the publishers? And what governments, media, and publishers get a say?
Perhaps it'd be nice for browsers to show a little indicator to confirm that a website is hosted by a government (although .gov and .mil are only valid for American governments, government could use a given domain as their government basis). There's a big difference between what's right ("climate change is real") and what the government is saying ("who knows, maybe drinking bleach is a good idea?").
Dividing the net goes straight against the idea of the internet. I don't think using a special browser for special domains is very tempting. We'd probably end up with the alt-net version of onion.to to proxy all different kinds of sites to a single application.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#25Honestly most of it is pretty great. Folks who want to give it better, more reliable performance end up reinventing circuit switching, and anything involving security is difficult to solve at the IP layer.
The last big things to secure are DNS (can be done with DNSSEC), and possibly somehow mandate TLS for connections (although you definitely don't want that all the time).
One big glaring problem is BGP, which we don't really have an answer for. Whereas "just use DNSSEC" pretty much solve the last big security hole above, BGP is still difficult because you have to basically have a system to attest the path for each BGP node. AS1 can't say "I have a path of length 5 through AS2 AS3 AS4 AS5 AS6 to AS6" unless that message can be attested to by each node, but then this comes into a bootstrapping problem (e.g. how do you reach those ASes to get some sort of key without going through AS2 first?) or trusting some authority as we do for ssl certs. God knows the first thing I do on any fresh install is uninstall those root certs from any sketchy government I don't trust.
Having worked on SDN in its heyday for some of the big players in the space, there are definitely good ideas in the space, but getting to adoption is damn difficult, bordering on impossible. I don't know what it will take to oust BGP, so we're kinda stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#26Push for content-addressing over URLs. To be honest, I don’t know if this would hamper the development of the internet or be a good thing at all, but I would love to see what people would come up with and how it would change the web.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#27Require emails to be signed by the sender cryptographically.
PGP with good UX could've been great. Too bad it missed the mark.
S/MIME seems to work pretty well, but the paid certificates pretty much doomed its uptake. I think I still have a Startcom certificate from back in the day that has long since expired.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#28Oh, something minor. I’d make both domains and paths go from least significant to most significant, so com.google.mail/u/0/html
JANET in the UK did this until it adopted the internet standards in the 1990’s. Always seemed more logical to me too.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#29backlinks.
(see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpdDtK5bVKk&feature=youtu.be&... by Jaron Lanier, also see Ted Nelson)
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#30replace https:// with https: (I believe that was TBL's biggest regret too) :).