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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?

#81

Post by djbusby »

josh_today wrote: post #59
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…

“ But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address.” This sounds interesting. Can you ELI5?

That campus had loads of public IPs that students could run services like thefacebook.com from. Public IPs to boxen in your dorm-room.

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

#83

Post by edgyquant »

bryans wrote: post #41

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 pla…

>the owner of the refused IP being required to filter that traffic at THEIR routing layer

What's to stop a malicious actor from just ignoring the refusal?

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

#84

Post by p1mrx »

londgine wrote: post #72
p1mrx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink raises the speed from 2/3*c to 1*c, but IP addresses are still anchored to a location... otherwise the latency would suck. You can geolocate any fast internet connection by measuring its latency to various points on Earth.

> You can geolocate any fast internet connection by measuring its latency to various points on Earth. How would you be able to differentiate 20 degrees east of the server with 20 degrees west of the server?

Use multiple servers.

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

#86

Post by Ologn »

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…

> IPv6 dates back to 1997 and it really should have been adopted more urgently.

I went to the NANOG meeting in October 1997. Many (most?) of the people who were responsible for administering the core routers using Internet Protocol at the time were there. During one talk they were talking about IPv4 running out, and mitigations for this - NAT, dynamic IPs, reclaiming allocated IP space, web servers that could serve multiple domains from the same IP address etc. One questioner went to the microphone and asked in a serious manner, "can't we solve all of these problems by rolling out IPv6?" The entire room broke into laughter.

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

#87

Post by cm2187 »

Nevermark wrote: post #14

End 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.

Though the lower you go, the harder it is to upgrade. SSL/TLS has been evolving regularly. In fact if you connect an old machine to the internet, it is the one thing that is likely to make it incompatible with the current internet.

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

#88

Post by fy20 »

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…

> the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address

VPS providers such as Linode were around at the time, and they weren't that expensive. $20/mo would have got you enough to get started. Or you just get shared PHP hosting which would have been cheaper or even free (with ads injected). And much simpler to deploy than today, just FTP the files and boom it's live. If you were lucky, your host had cPanel.

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

#89

Post by zdw »

More client side retry built into protocols, and the ability to easily failover from the client-side.

Protocols like DNS and SMTP are designed so that multiple servers that can handle traffic, and one going down isn't a big deal - the clients will just retry using and the entire system just keeps working.

Compare to HTTP which don't have retry mechanisms which results in needing significant engineering to deal with single points of failure, fancy load balancers and other similar hard engineering challenges. Synchronization of state across HTTP requests would still be an issue, but that's already a problem in the load balancer case, pushed usually to a common backing database.

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

#90

Post by graiz »

I've thought about this a lot. I'd throw away HTML/CSS and start over with a client centric rendering protocol that is based on presentation first and semantics second. The language would be run-time compiled to describe exactly what needs to be rendered on the page and would be streamable to prevent rendering locks.

Typical page size would go from 1M typical to 64K-128K being typical. Images would stream in after initial page renders but since most pages would fit in 1-3 packets, you'd see pages pop-in very quickly. This would also be very helpful for poor connection, mobile and the developing world.

I'd fund a team to do this if I could figure out who would buy it.

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