DNS is far from perfect, TLDs are stupid and always have been, the arbitrary rules for records are stupid, MX records are ridiculous, UDP size constraints on answers.. nevermind I could keep going. DNS sucks.
Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
11–20 of 327 posts
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#12IPv6 dates back to 1997 and it really should have been adopted more urgently. IPv4 isn’t a huge issue but it sucks that so much of the internet is dependent on cloud providers because it’s the simplest way to get a public IP address. The decentralized web didn’t happen, in part, because of this. Facebook was famously started and hosted in a dorm room. But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within th…
ipv6 easily could have been the extended ipv4 but drank second-system syndrome in full and now pays the price
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#13Cryptographic identity verification and trusted clocks. As in, cryptography would be built-in and everyone would have a set of keys that they could use to verify ownership of digital content by using cryptographic signatures and timestamps.
how would you get those trusted clocks to agree with each other?
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#14End to end encryption and tracking-resistance at a low enough protocol level that most developers or users would never know the pain of even thinking about either.
Imagine how many times security and privacy have been reimplemented in different contexts.
And that patchwork approach will incentivize security breaches and manipulation through dark surveillance until ... no end in sight.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#15Get rid of most of JS to prevent 'appification' and keep the focus document centered.
Edit: I think this would result in protocols over walled gardens. The problem is JS makes HTTP/HTML everything to everyone.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#16I would prefer if the internet architecture was a mesh network and that sites/pages were content addressable.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#17I have this experience where I come into new orgs or projects and I think if we could just start fresh with the old lessons, we could build it so much cleaner. It’s partially true. But mostly we end up building a really clean base, then as the business requirements come up, we need to add back in all the things I thought were kruft. I think lots of tech is this way. Try to build a new DNS, you’ll just end up reinvent…
even before new requirements come up, some of the idiosyncrasies or edge cases would be overlooked in the new version and the project would take much longer than anticipated.
if the current tech is so messed up to warrant a re-build, why would one expect that all the requirements are properly captured?
having said that, stepping back and articulating the existing problems could be a viable first step. Identify and scope the problems before dreaming of solutions. /product engineer and party pooper hat off
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#18Cryptographic identity verification and trusted clocks. As in, cryptography would be built-in and everyone would have a set of keys that they could use to verify ownership of digital content by using cryptographic signatures and timestamps.
how would you get those trusted clocks to agree with each other?
Through a synchronization protocol but it's obviously impossible to have perfectly synchronized clocks so the safest thing to do would be to use several timestamps from several clocks.
Blockchains in a way are such clocks where the ordering of the blocks on the chain provide an implicit counter. But blockchains have too much overhead so by assuming some trust it would be possible to get rid of the proof of work mechanism and just use a signed timestamp from a trusted source.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#19The number one change I'd make is not to trust users to behave.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#20No ads at all