Civility.
Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
211–220 of 322 posts
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#212I would make packets over the MTU truncate (with a flag indicating the truncation), adjusting the IP checksum (the same way it's currently adjusted for changes in other fields like the TTL) to match, instead of fragmenting or dropping. That would avoid all the issues with PMTU blackholes or non-initial fragments.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#213At least one domain where NO commercial activity is allowed. No buying, selling, advertising, trading. Companies who are convicted of mens rea transgression (along with whichever employees are guilty) lose ALL access to the internet in perpetuity.
> advertising
This one would be hard to enforce. Still a good idea.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#214Earlier 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…
It's not about number of addresses available, it's about reflection of organization hierarchy in the octets. The 10.0.0.0/8 range is useful for breaking a distributed company's network up so each major office gets a 10.x.0.0/16, and each department a 10.x.y.0/24.
This is why 192.168.0.0/16 is often used for services like libvirtd, kubernetes and docker. And the use of the range by those services makes it even more unwieldy to try and put some other LAN in there.
You can work around these considerations if you want, but many people won't. When you're the network engineer responsible for designing a company's networks, you'll be wanting to keep things simple and robust. When you're called in at 3am on a Sunday because the network is down, you better hope your ability to recover doesn't require making a bunch of subnet calculations because you decided to try and use the pool of available IP addresses efficiently.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting, I wonder if the internet would have been successful at all without something to monetize? Yeah, e-commerce probably would have been doable, but it would have been like the dotcom era - generic domain names running ads to try to get you to walk over to a desktop computer and type in the domain name. Digital communities would have been really hard - a lot of online forums, I know, depend(ed) on advert…
There were thriving communities like MUDs and IRC and Usenet before e-commerce and corporations moved in.
E-commerce existed before MUDs and IRC and was contemporaneous with Usenet. Online Services like Compuserve, Prodigy, and Qlink (which became AOL) allowed people to buy and trade products like you do on E-bay.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#216The 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…
> 1. Everything being 'free' by default drives us to ad-supported centralized services. Economics aren't a separable concern.
I hate this argument. I've been online for a long time and the internet existed just fine without, for example, facebook. We don't have to accept ads but we do have to be willing to not use certain things out there.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#217Put AJAX back in the bottle.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#218Replace HTML with something closer to hypercard - it would give simple interactions, database management and user interface that you need. Failing that, Flash should have become open source and part of the W3 web standards, but opened up such that we could observe the code that's running.
Actually, this became a thing very early on, compare Viola Net.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#219Changes 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…
> Routers will accept a "shut up" request
This shifts the DoS threat from servers to clients. How does the router know that the request from A to block B is legit? Just because the router can ping A? Behold, a system where you can shut down your enemies for good by paying botnets to send requests to block B.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#220Javascript. Not to remove it, but to make it better from the start. Current JS feels painful to me because it feels like piling hacks on top of a poorly-designed language to make it palatable. Doing it better from the start sounds amazing.
I'd give it a better name, which does not involve the word "java."
The original name was LiveScript…