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Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
111–120 of 327 posts
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ 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 a…
> 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
As an interesting detail, which seems alien today, is that this was also true at my various employers throughout the 90s. My desktops at work all had public IP addresses and were directly on the Internet, no firewall or anything.
I ran mail and web servers, fully internet accessible, on my work desktops (and lab machines). It was a natural thing to do.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#113IPv6 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 have a static ip4 address. It costs $10 per month.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
People were willing to set exceptions for sites they thought were important. Not important AND requires JS => bye.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#115First, you have to secure all the computers. Capability Based Security for everyone. This lets us all run mobile code without danger. (No more virus or worm issues) Next, we use 128 bit IP addresses, 32 bit port and protocol numbers, and absolutely forbid NAT as a way of getting more addresses. (no ip address shortage) Next, all email has to be cryptographically signed by the sending domain using public key encryptio…
>> next, all email has to be cryptographically signed by the sending domain using public key encryption. (No more spam)
How does this work? Would every email address need to get a public/private key? From where? Does someone get to control who can use email? How much does it cost? Do the certs expire? How do we manage the system for billions of email addresses?
I ask this with genuine interest - I'm not sure how a cert-required email system would work - or how it would help with spam...
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ 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 a…
We had this in 1992 at my university
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
DHCP-PD for IPv4 would eat up all the addresses on day one. It only makes sense to automatically delegate prefixes when those prefixes are an abundant resource.
Yes, and then the motivation for IPv6 would have arrived sooner.
So basically, we should have used IPv4 addresses more profligately in the '90s, in order to pull the runout date forward from 2014 to 199x-200x, increasing the urgency of the transition.
That's not the worst idea I've ever heard.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#118Use whatever technology is required to make it decentralized so tyrants and other evil do'ers have no chance of stopping free speech. The future of the world depends on it vs. the future of a relatively few self-annointed, banal, vile, narcissistic, wealth stealers.
I don't think free speech should be an absolute, there are situations such as vaccinations during a pandemic when free speech kills. Freedom vs security trade-off.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#119What inspired you to ask this?
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#120I'd make a content addressable system to have better caching, balancing, backups and history of changes. I'd like the internet to preserve its knowledge into the future.
As for security, I'd enhance the web browsers to do internet hygiene - removing unwanted bits and blocking information leaks. The browser should protect user accounts from being linked together.
Another major issue is payments which today is a high friction backwards process and acts like a gatekeeper. We need an equitable solution for micro-payments without too large processing costs.
The last one is search - users can't customize the algorithmic feeds it generates and startups can't deep crawl to support inventing new applications. Search engine operators are guarding their ranking criteria and APIs too jealously while limiting our options.
So in short, ipfs/bittorrent like storage, nanny browser, easy payments and open search.