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Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

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Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#41

Post by bryans »

I think the most crucial functionality missing from a security standpoint, is the ability for one IP address owner to tell another that they're refusing service, and the owner of the refused IP being required to filter that traffic at THEIR routing layer. This would effectively eliminate nearly every type of DDoS, and it would also shift the responsibility to handle the attack away from the target's provider, and place it squarely on the providers of the compromised systems -- which is how it should be.

Imagine a world without DDoS or Cloudflare's 3+ second redirect.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#42

Post by teaearlgraycold »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #37
zarzavat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 tha…

No one cared about YouTube? No one cared about Netflix?

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#43

Post by xeromal »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #37
zarzavat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 tha…

I think you're underestimating the amount of sites that had flash.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#44

Post by londgine »

I'm not sure how this can be done, but remove location association from IP. It annoys me to no end that google changes the language based on my location rather than my preference (sometimes with no obvious way to fix it). It would also stop the annoying country restrictions on websites.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#45

Post by holomorphically »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #32
holomorphically wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is that different from the existing ntp infrastructure, which already supports encryption, integrity, and stratum one time servers?

Can I send a hash of some content and then get a signed response from the ntp server with a timestamp?

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#47

Post by [deleted] »

nickysielicki wrote: post #9

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#48

Post by p1mrx »

londgine wrote: post #44

I'm not sure how this can be done, but remove location association from IP. It annoys me to no end that google changes the language based on my location rather than my preference (sometimes with no obvious way to fix it). It would also stop the annoying country restrictions on websites.

There is no inherent location information in an IP address, but those packets have to physically go somewhere at 2/3 light speed. We could design a network like Tor where the routing is geographically oblivious, but then everywhere on Earth would have the same (very slow) ping time.

It is saner to make a fast network, and then layer an anonymous one on top of it.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#49

Post by abakker »

IX-103 wrote: post #6

Can we fix email so that it provides authentication, integrity, and confidentiality protections by default? And also while we're at it make it support binary attachments so that we're not stuck wasting bandwidth and disk doing base64 for everything?

why not just extend the email protocol to really support open calendars, open social networks (decentralized) and open p2p chat?

email is a nice way of addressing, but we underuse that address compared to all the balkanized post-email systems.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#50

Post by mongol »

I first understood the question as "what should have been done different if internet was designed today". I think it is a more interesting question. What mistakes were made that later needed less than optimal workarounds? What comes to my mind are character encodings and i18n. It was solved in many different ways in different protocols.
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