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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?

#51

Post by bruce343434 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #24
lurker137 wrote: post #7

I 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…

You're conflating authenticity with authority. It would be nice to quickly and reliably tell whether something is a government source, or a educational institution, or what have you. Whether the information is then correct, that's another matter.

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

#52

Post by uniqueuid »

YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #19

What a great question. One of two things: A) Establish the expectation that websites "close" in the middle of the night for ~5-6 hours, local time / for each timezone. I don't know if would best be done via cultural influence -- giving talks, writing essays, personal communication, testifying / making inroads with politicians -- or via creating some sort of protocol. The idea is to prevent the unhealthier aspects of…

Fun fact, closing websites do exist among ultra-orthodox (esp. haredi) jewish communities in Israel.

You can read a bit about how it works in practice on the web.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ultraorthodox-jews-are-co_b_1...

http://www.hareidi.org/en/index.php/Hareidi.org%27s_Kosher_I...

Background: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau7....

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

#53

Post by Jtsummers »

dbingham wrote: post #38

Find a way to better decentralize it, so that it doesn't rely on single hosts(and later sites) as the source of truth for any particular function. The original idea was that protocols would allow any one to participate by simply making their own webpage. But dynamic IP addresses, the DNS system, and even just HTML design were out of reach for most people so that got lost and monsterous websites under centralized cont…

You seem to be talking about WWW and not the Internet. The Internet itself was designed to be decentralized, in fact that was a major motivator (distributed command & control in the case of a major war cutting off large chunks of the C&C groups from each other or eliminating them entirely).

Now, it could've been done in a better fashion, more deliberately, or more broadly, but there are at least two notable early protocols with decentralization/distribution in mind: email (consisting of several protocols) and nntp. Now an individual may still access a, to them, centralized authority for sending/receiving content, but the protocols themselves were meant to support a distributed architecture.

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

#54

Post by iptrans »

_huayra_ wrote: post #25

Honestly 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…

There are only about 100k ASNs. It would be fairly easy to solve the bootstrapping problem by just preloading all the keys.

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

#55

Post by uniqueuid »

There is only one protocol, for file transfer.

Consequences:

* There is no live user tracking.

* Access control can be user/password or ssh keys

* You always have an archive of what you read

* You always have an archive of chats

* Everything is in principle decentralized (whether it is in practice depends on whether people keep files.

* Clients are in control.

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

#56

Post by polygotdomain »

geocrasher wrote: post #11

I'd advocate to build DARPANET for an untrusted environment with the expectation that DARPANET would be unleashed on the masses at some later point.

This. I think there are so many changes that I'd like to make, but a lot of them stem from switching from everything being public and out there to being private and with restricted access. I would only hope that assuming things would be untrusted from the beginning would lead to a more securely designed web from day one. I'm sure that's wishful thinking, but still.

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

#57

Post by YossarianFrPrez »

bruce343434 wrote: post #46
YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #19

What a great question. One of two things: A) Establish the expectation that websites "close" in the middle of the night for ~5-6 hours, local time / for each timezone. I don't know if would best be done via cultural influence -- giving talks, writing essays, personal communication, testifying / making inroads with politicians -- or via creating some sort of protocol. The idea is to prevent the unhealthier aspects of…

Regarding the second point, it would probably just make people say things like "you sound fat". It's still anonymous enough. In fact, people say mean things in public all the time. It seems some people are just inherently mean.

I don't disagree. The main problem I'm attempting to solve is the non-anonymous case. Even discussions on social media, where people are either "friends" or have the same shared interest, still devolve into discourse where few come away satisfied. Instead, many people feel either negatively critiqued or that other posters "just don't get it." Every time this happens, the sense of group cohesion frays a little.

I see this is as a problem of the medium of discussion more than anything else.

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

#58

Post by TheSpiciestDev »

renewiltord wrote: post #8

Oh, something minor. I’d make both domains and paths go from least significant to most significant, so com.google.mail/u/0/html

One of my only two attempts of an Ask HN was this specifically [0] and I've wondered this still. With subdomains, top level domains being at the top and being able to drill down into subdomains and then folders feels a lot more intuitive. Could a browser add-on be made to experiment this?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24438978

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

#59

Post by YossarianFrPrez »

bmcooley wrote: post #45
YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Ideally, each user's timezone would be required information. The server would check to see if the requesting user's local time meant that the website should be "open" for them.

Honestly this would probably just make VPN services more widely used to workaround shutdowns.

True, unless the timezone was tied to each user's accounts. The website doesn't have to "not work" it just has to return a page that says something to the effect of "we are closed for business."

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

#60

Post by bena »

bruce343434 wrote: post #34
jedberg wrote: post #23

TL;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…

I really don't understand what stopped ipv4 from being extended like this: w.x.y.z == 0.0.0.0.w.x.y.z In fact, you can even ping any 32 bit unsigned integer and it will turn it into an ipv4. Try it: `ping 134744072` will ping `8.8.8.8` So why not 64 bit? 32 bits fit in 64. Instead we now have 2 concurrent protocols. ps. 8*256^3 + 8*256^2 + 8*256 + 8 = 134744072

An IPv4 address isn't A.B.C.D though. That's just a shorthand way for us write it down because those chunks are easier for us to deal with. An IPv4 address is an unsigned 32 bit integer.

The address is not the real issue. An IPv4 header contains 32 bits for the source address and 32 bits for the destination address. That's what needed to be extended. IPv4 implementations expect the destination address to be 32 bits after the source address.

Any fix you can think of to extend the address fields in the header will fall into the situation of having an additional protocol. Because changing the v4 header and calling it a v4 header would probably get your packet dropped as bad. Or have it being sent to somewhere else. Or some other undefined behavior.

So your best option is to have it identify as a new version. Yes, v4 implementations will reject your packet, but that's what you want in this case.

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