31–40 of 327 posts
identity as a core layer. having been in the wrong end of a large service that was relentlessly attacked and spam. i understand the value of anonymity but it probably should not have been the default.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mecha…
Incorporating a time dimension to domains, such that it's explicitly recognised, and greatly restricting transfers, would be one element.
Ownership of domains should sit with the registrant, not the registrar.
Characterspace should be explicitly restricted to 7-byte ASCII to avoid homoglyph attacks. It's not a shrine to cultural affirmation, it's a globally-utilised indexing system, and as such is inherently a pidgen.
Other obvious pain points:
- BGP / routing
- Identity, authentication, integrity, and trust. This includes anonymity and repudiation. Either pole of singular authentication or total anonymity seems quite problematic.
- Security. It shouldn't have been permitted to be baked on.
- Protocol extensibility. Standards are good, but they can be stifling, and a tool for control. Much of the worst of the current Internet reflects both these problems.
- Lack of true public advocacy. It's deeply ironic that the most extensive and universal communications platform ever devised is controlled by a small handful of interests, none answerable to the public.
- More address space. IPv6 is a problematic answer.
- Better support for small-player participation. Servers are still highly dependent on persistence and major infrastructure. A much more robust peered / mesh / distributed protocol set that could be utilised without deep expertise ... well, it might not make things better, but we'd have a different problem-set than we face presently.
- Explicit public funding model for content, and a ban or very heavy tax on most advertising.
- A much keener, skeptical, and pessimistic early analysis of the interactions of media and society.
I would have tried to arrange it so that whatever method comes to the mind of the average person for publishing a document on the internet publishes a static document. The situation today of course is that the method that usually comes to mind when a person decides that something he or she has written should be put on the internet publishes what is essentially an executable for a very complex execution environment, a…
Make it easier and more equitable to obtain addresses and ASNs.
Build protocol to make edge/cloud computing more fungible. Similar to folding@home but more flexible and taking into account networj connectivity rather than just CPU cycles. Probably looks a lot like Cloudflare Workers/Sandstorm but no vendor lockin.
DNSSEC only. TLS only for HTTP/consumer facing web.
Actually on the topic of that probably something simpler than TLS to replace TLS. It has too many features. x509 can stay but the protocol needs reworking for simplicity.
Get 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.
Be careful what you wish for. JS and HTML5 is why we don't have Adobe Flash anymore. There was a whole period in the noughties when web interactivity sucked and so external plugins like Flash, Silverlight and Java applets took up the slack. The alternative to JS is not "no scripting", it's websites that only function with proprietary plugins installed.
Yes and those were websites that for the most part nobody gave a crap about. The important sites weren't willing to dump so many of their viewers. Heck, even post-JS, the web didn't suck so badly until the option of shutting off JS was removed from browser UI's. Before that, enough users shut off JS that sites wanting wide audiences had to be able to function without it.
IPv6 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…
I mean why not dream bigger. IPv6 is a mess, the absolute definition of second system syndrome. If I could fix anything, it would be IPv6 itself. The biggest thing preventing it's widespread adoption is it's complicated nature. An IPv4 with an extra octet or two would have seen complete adoption years ago.
No new/subsummed functionality. Stick with ARP and DHCP, etc.
A better / more actionable upgrade path and plan to get things working so most devices could go v4.1 only quicker, etc.
Would redesign BGP with more resistance to Byzantine actors. Not so much because many folks announce routes maliciously (though that definitely) happens but because people always manage to screw it up accidentally. Make it easier and more equitable to obtain addresses and ASNs. Build protocol to make edge/cloud computing more fungible. Similar to folding@home but more flexible and taking into account networj connecti…
DNS is a horrid mess that should have been designed with ease of reading in mind. And I know that DNS was designed way before it, but I think a data transit format similar to JSON would have made the system a bit more extendable, and given people a chance to make it a more dynamic system.
E-Mail was brilliant in it's time, but for the love of all things explosive and holy is it bad. Just the fact that in it's base design there is no E2E encryption going on is a problem.
My biggest beef with the current internet is HTTP. Everything is built on it, and it isn't the greatest system. There have been so many systems and protocols implemented that did so many things, FTP/gopher/irc/etc, and most of them have gone the way of the dodo. A few hold-outs in the dedicated tech world will still use irc, but we could have done so much with cloud-based systems with FTP. And if we had a new spec for irc, would we need Slack/Discord/MS Teams/etc? They could then all talk to each other. We shouldn't be trying to reinvent the wheel, we should be using these older services in our platforms.
And don't get me thinking about cloud. The worst term that a marketing team got a hold of. At it's core, it's just somebody else's computer. And again, so much of it is build on HTTP protocols. Not many people know or remember that xWindows and X for *nix systems had a distributed system built in. Log into a server, set one environment variable to your IP address as long as you were running one of these systems yourself, and you could runs programs on the server with the GUI on your computer.