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Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#201

Post by radicalriddler »

ng55QPSK wrote: post #37

Provable identity. Yes, you can do Oauth via the google or the facebook but sooner or later we need something that isn't tied to getting all your user interaction data ... Digital notary. So a third person (digitally) signing a transaction or other document exchange.

Haha, my father actually presented me with the idea of a digital notary. He was wondering why we send everything electronically, where one party has to trust the other hasn't faked it, and the other party has to trust that the first party won't misuse it.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#202

Post by imiric »

dijit wrote: post #200
adventured wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and forward the ports on your router And you just lost 97%+ of the Internet userbase. They have no idea what you just said.

Then we should really be focusing on getting IPv6 everywhere so that the firewall can be a single click "expose website from this computer".

It's not just a matter of exposing the service to the internet. That's only part of the solution. The usability difference between consuming web content via browsers and creating/exposing it via web servers is vast. Most web users wouldn't even know where to start with today's tooling, and what's worse: even if such tooling existed, you'd have to convince them why they should use it in the first place. This is partly why adoption of any decentralized platform is an uphill battle.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#203

Post by marginalia_nu »

withinboredom wrote: post #167
marginalia_nu wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't send information with quantum entanglement. This is one of the no-go theorems of quantum information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem >

But you can not send information. Which is information that you didn’t send. Thus, you sent information. This is like saying you can’t send information with electricity. You couldn’t at first (FYI), but then someone invented Morse code and the absence and non-absence of electricity made all the difference in the world.

You can send information by sending additional information through classical means (thus limited to relativity). This is the basis for quantum cryptography, where you can have a shared one-time pad that is impossible to intercept without detection or and impossible to copy (thanks to the no-cloning and no-teleportation theorems).

But you can't send information through quantum entanglement itself without rewriting a significant chunk of physics as we know it. If you're going to do that, all bets are off and you should be consulting with wizards and not physicists.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#204

Post by teddyh »

jgrahamc wrote: post #184
teddyh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow me to paraphrase your comment: “It’s not possible to solve this problem, except by centralizing all the web through us. Aren’t we generous to not punish our customers when they get hit by this problem?”

I said nothing of the sort.

Perhaps not, but it is how I interpreted it. Cloudflare is a force for centralization, and has every incentive to remain that way. I don’t see how that could change.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#205

Post by jokoon »

dehrmann wrote: post #174
jokoon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you should not listen to your gut all the time

> Data centres contribute around 0.3% to overall carbon emissions https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y Compare that to https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

0.3% is a lot for what it is, in my view.

I don't know if it takes the lifecycle of hardware into account.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#206

Post by jgrahamc »

teddyh wrote: post #204
jgrahamc wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said nothing of the sort.

Perhaps not, but it is how I interpreted it. Cloudflare is a force for centralization, and has every incentive to remain that way. I don’t see how that could change.

Just like how we "centralized" everything by helping with the testing and rolling out of such Internet standards as TLS 1.3, HTTP/3, QUIC, MASQUE, ...

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#207

Post by teddyh »

jgrahamc wrote: post #206
teddyh wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps not, but it is how I interpreted it. Cloudflare is a force for centralization, and has every incentive to remain that way. I don’t see how that could change.

Just like how we "centralized" everything by helping with the testing and rolling out of such Internet standards as TLS 1.3, HTTP/3, QUIC, MASQUE, ...

I don’t see how that’s relevant. New versions of TLS, etc. neither help nor hurt centralization, which was the topic at hand.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#208

Post by teddyh »

jgrahamc wrote: post #196
kortilla wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By making it free though you’ve disincentivized fixing it. It’s awfully coincidental that the current leading solution to DDoS for people running websites is “use cloudflare”. Cloudflare has absolutely no reason to invest in solving DDoS because the existence of them is one of your best sales leads. DDoSes are cancer and you run a cancer treatment center. Gotta make sure you can treat cancer well but you wouldn’t wan…

What short term thinking that would be! That's how companies die. They get captured by their customers and markets and they can't see change coming. Imagine if Cloudflare stubbornly stuck to providing DDoS services and never considered the idea that there might be a solution to DDoS at the protocol level. We'd die if someone else came up with the technical solution to DDoS. So, it would both be better for the Interne…

> We'd die if someone else came up with the technical solution

This reasoning does not prevent Google from slowly making itself irrelevant by changing the web to such an extent as to make its search algorithm impossible to get any useful results from.

> For example, on the network level we've pushed for BCP-38 over and over again to deal with spoofing.

That is a point in your favor, I will concede.

> Give me a fucking break.

Cloudflare is a huge company with more and more power over the entire internet, and it is constantly urging people to only use the internet through Cloudflare, in numerous ways. You do not get a “fucking break”.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#209

Post by notreallyserio »

hsn915 wrote: post #177
notreallyserio wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the problem they are a part of, and what makes them part of that problem? They don't seem problematic to me.

You can't solve problems of complexity by piling on more and more layers. Layers need to be collapsed

Terraform is roughly the equivalent to a Makefile. If anything it reduces complexity by encouraging operations to be run in a reproducible and testable fashion. Is it a layer? Sure, but little more than a shell script is a layer.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#210

Post by KoftaBob »

jgrahamc wrote: post #185
KoftaBob wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if DDoS could be solved (for static websites at least) by using P2P as a supplementary load balancer. This could be set to only be enabled if load is approaching a certain percent of capacity that the servers/CDN are able to handle. Once reaching that threshold, P2P would kick in, and existing visitors could serve static content to newer visitors using something like the WebRTC + Service Worker + IndexedDB c…

I’ve looked at P2P CDNs over the years and they seem to be solving the wrong problem. At scale bandwidth isn’t a problem it’s recognizing the DDoS and filtering it while letting through legitimate traffic to a dynamic website or API. That’s complex. Not saying it can’t be done in a P2P manner but it’s hard.

Interesting, you make a good point there. Out of curiosity, do you see other areas where P2P on the client side can have a significant benefit?
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