I assassinate Osama Bin Laden and therefore prevent the patriot act and the erosion of personal freedoms in the pursuit of “national security”.
Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
221–230 of 322 posts
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#222IPv6 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 think it was a combination of bad actors (spam and malware) and market segmentation. (Soak the businesses)
It’s always been a somewhat niche, difficult thing to run most standard servers. (Web/mail/ftp/gopher/nntp)
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#223Javascript. 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.
The thing I'm most offended with: about every generation has now dumped their favorite interface pattern onto it, mostly reused from the fancy language of the day. It has become a Frankenstein language without internal strictness or attitude (which had been once a major trait.) I guess, it's the language most disrespected by its developers.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#224I would have built in a protocol which could be used for decentralized ad networks in a federated fashion unlike the craziness that we see today with TOS designed to fight all competition and to selectively control the markets.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#225Better child protections. Not sure what the implementation would be though.
Ban children from Internet. Solves even more problems.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#226Honestly I think it couldn’t have gone a lot better... The worst that happened to the internet is Google becoming evil. The internet circa 2000 was mind blowing.
It was mind blowing indeed. It was such an adventure building stuff on the web back then. We didn't have the choice we have today.
I don't think Google became "evil". It just realised (or remembered) it's a business.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#227Verifiable identity. We need to be able to verify the source of all data on the network, even if that's just proving the source IP address, or better yet the physical location it came from. People often argue that anonymity by default is a good thing, but I argue that trust of origin by default is better. You can still strip identification for things like posting in public forums, but for everything else knowing wher…
Facebook verifies identities, yet it's still a cesspool of hate in some corners, so it might help, but it's no panacea.
It could help cut down on bots and spam. Think of a Twitter free from bots and propaganda from marketing agencies and governments.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#228Changes 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.
Operating systems would quickly develop "multi noding"; binding multiple node identities to a host, and then partitioning those among the interfaces.
Separate IPs for different adapters is a good idea, and needed for NAT: e.g. a home router being 192.168.1.1 inward-facing, and having some external IP. I
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#229At 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.
This seems unworkable. Gaining attention is intrinsically commercial activity. Attention has value; you can't stop it bleeding into the rest of the world. Some examples and questions:
- An "influencer" gets her photo on a Wheaties box. After that, the influencer doesn't have to do overt advertising to promote the cereal, their fortunes are bound together.
- In politics, as the former US president so amply demonstrated, attention is a currency.
- What about the exchange of ideas? Can one talk about the contents of a book without selling (or discouraging the sales of) the book?
- Is any mention of brand names to be prohibited? If you can mention a brand, unless all the brand's marketing has been completely ineffective, you are selling the brand. Don't like it? Pass the Kleenex.
Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
#230Verifiable identity. We need to be able to verify the source of all data on the network, even if that's just proving the source IP address, or better yet the physical location it came from. People often argue that anonymity by default is a good thing, but I argue that trust of origin by default is better. You can still strip identification for things like posting in public forums, but for everything else knowing wher…
I have gotten massively downvoted on various social media platforms for suggesting verifiable identity so I think there are some people that are just really resistant to this idea.
I don't think it would solve all problems but it would be useful for cutting down on bots and spam for certain types of websites. Many people don't realize that a large chunk of content on sites like Twitter and Reddit (and probably HN) are propaganda from marketing agencies or hostile foreign governments. That argument that you had with someone on Twitter - you could be trying to chat it up with a Chinese paid internet troll. How would you even know? There is a complete lack of good faith on the internet now and verifiable identity, it would be nice to think of how the internet would have been different with it. Unfortunately, we also have a huge number of people/groups/companies that depend on lack of verifiability so I think this is why the idea has become so controversial.