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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?

#91

Post by cm2187 »

zarzavat wrote: post #25
ohCh6zos wrote: post #15

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.

There is a lot of stuff that html should do straight out of the box and that should never have required javascript, like form validation, autocomplete, date pickers, video streaming, etc. Javascript would have been limited to actual SPA instead of being required today even to render static content.

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

#92

Post by a1371 »

A slightly different answer: I would change the domain name ownership model. Right now to buy Kayaks you go to amazon.com, to travel to the amazons you go to kayak.com, it's confusing for end users . It's also empowering squatters and not the innovators. Also the whole .org debacle showed that community representation is not at the center of things.

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

#93

Post by gfody »

anonu wrote: post #30

Just a thought experiment: but could we have designed better protocols to not need companies like Google (search) and Facebook (social network)... For example: a public index service (akin to DNS) where all pages upload all hyperlinks they were using. The end result is a massive graph that you can do PageRank on. You'd have to add some protections to avoid it getting gamed... Email was the first decentralized social…

the first search engines worked this way - you'd submit your site to their index in a certain category with some keywords, and anyone could explore the index. they all seemed to realize around the same time that they ought to keep their indexes secret from one another and they vanished just like that.

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

#94

Post by hoten »

graiz wrote: post #90

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 in…

Could you explain how this is different from SVG?

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

#95

Post by dsukhin »

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?

I can speak using MIT as an example and I assume Harvard is the same way for the same reasons.

Big research institutions that were present when IP addresses were being allocated got A LOT of IPs by simply asking for them. Apple has the entire 17.0.0.0/8 range. Ford Motor Company has one, the US Gov has a lot [0]. Up until recently MIT had all of 18. (they sold something like half to AWS for a hefty sum not too long ago).

As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC 18.something that was in the global address space because they had so many IPs available. This meant you could literally host something on the public internet from your dorm room because every device on the network was publicly routable by a unique public IP address.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_add... (see the last section on the original allocation)

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

#96

Post by bryans »

edgyquant wrote: post #83
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?

Namely that an IP "owner" in this scenario could and should also be the participating upstream provider(s) between the requesting IP and malicious actor. If a particular provider isn't participating in the system, the traffic can still be blocked by one that is -- if not blocking the entire range.

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

#97

Post by Thorentis »

donatj wrote: post #23
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…

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.

So glad I'm not the only one that has thought this. Every time an IPv6 discussion comes up I think to myself "why couldn't we just make IPv4 addresses longer".

IPv6 tried to solve too many problems at once. We should've just focused on solving the address exhaustion issue. Instead, we have a very slow roll out of IPv6, and awful stuff like CG-NAT taking permanent hold.

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

#99

Post by DarknessFalls »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #7

The biggest mistake was making it trivial to forge email headers. While the spam problem is much better than it used to be, that's because there's a whole lot of behind-the-scenes (and expensive) infrastructure devoted to combating it. That infrastructure has also made it considerably more difficult to run your own mail server. While you can still do it, there are many hoops to jump through if you want to keep your m…

>> The biggest mistake was making it trivial to forge email headers.

Thanks to VoIP, we've seen a surge in phone numbers being spoofed with robocalling. I'd like to see some form of authentication applied to this and to email.

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

#100

Post by franciscop »

a1371 wrote: post #92

A slightly different answer: I would change the domain name ownership model. Right now to buy Kayaks you go to amazon.com, to travel to the amazons you go to kayak.com, it's confusing for end users . It's also empowering squatters and not the innovators. Also the whole .org debacle showed that community representation is not at the center of things.

If you go to, say, apple.com can you buy apples or Apple computers? Would each page be like an index with subpages disambiguating things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_(disambiguation)? Or it would show about the fruit with a note for Apple Inc like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple?
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