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Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
121–130 of 327 posts
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#122I'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?
SVG is still a markup language, not one that is compiled or streamable. It's also not relational. While you can design a page with SVG it's not parametric in that you can't modify the content or the page and have it re-flow, resize or act responsivly.
I would also describe SVG as a very verbose instruction set rather than a reduced instruction set.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#123HTTP should have had some kind of URI event pub/sub mechanism from the start, including notifications for URIs pending removal to facilitate archival without polling or whatever crazy ad-hoc madness you want to call archive.org's priceless efforts.
Still an unresolved issue to this day AFAIK.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#124I 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…
And that would also be used in rate-limiting and integrated to apps so no need to implement it manually.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#125IPv6 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?
This is an example of how the internet was originally intended: Every user of the internet has a public address that any other user can send and receive messages from.
The design works just like postal addressing. Your postal address contains the directions to your building from any location on earth. Even if you live in a dormitory building with many other residents, I can still send you a letter directly by adding "door number: 42" to your dorm's postal address.
IP addressing use numbers instead of English terms like "door" and "street". So I can't simply add "door number" to your building's IP address, your building has to be given enough addresses so each resident's computer can have their own. When your computer has a public IP address, I can send Internet packets directly to you.
Harvard was early to the slicing of the IPv4-address pie, so they had enough addresses each of their residents, including Zuck. Anyone with internet could put Zuck's IPv4 address on an Internet packet and it would end up on his computer. Most of these packets would be HTTP requests to facebook.com, to which his computer would reply with a page from the facebook website.
This is the internet working as intended.
But we ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2012, which has forced internet service providers to adopt an address-sharing scheme called network-address-translation (NAT) that makes it impossible to send letters directly to other people's computers. Imagine I wasn't allowed to put any room number or name on my letters. If I sent a letter to your dormitory, the staff there wouldn't know what to do with the letter and would be forced to return-to-sender or discard it. This is what NAT does, and it has turned the glory of the Internet into a centralized monster of control and censorship.
If you want to host a website with a public IPv4, only established cloud providers that obtained enough IPv4 addresses before it was too late can help you (primarily Amazon, Google and Microsoft).
The successor of IPv4, IPv6, brings enough address space for every person, their dog, their dog's fleas, and their dog's flea's microbes. We can go back to hosting websites from our dormitories, sending chat messages directly to our friends (not via Google, Facebook and Microsoft), and start new ISPs that missed out on the IPv4 pie that actually have a chance at competing with the likes of Comcast.
IPv6 reintroduces equity to the internet that facebook benefited from in it's inception.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#126IPv6 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 wer…
> $20/mo would have got you enough to get started.
What? Have you forgotten what your first time was like?
There is a huge difference between thinking:
> "I build my first shitty website, if i leave my PC on everybody in the world can use it. Who knows what will happen?"
And instead being required to go:
> "I'll spend 20$ a month to maybe entertain a couple of people for a couple of minutes by using someone else's hardware"
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#127IPv6 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…
It all makes sense until the "IPv6" part. I want a dedicated IPv4 address. Maybe the solution is not technical, but political. Even if the solution is technical rather than political, maybe IPv6 is not the best choice.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#128The "browser" is a blank execution sandbox with a rendering context. The remote server sends programs (using something like WASM) with a standardized ABI. The program can use the rendering context to put stuff on the screen or receive user input.
Indexing and page interoperability is done by exposing standard functions which yield the necessary metadata. For example, if you want your site to be indexable by a search engine, you expose a function "contentText()" which crawlers will call (and which the client browser might also call and display using the user's own reader app). In the simplest case, the function simply returns a literal.
Core resources like libraries would be uniquely identified, cryptographically signed, versioned, and shared.
If someone wanted to make use of a browser pipeline like the standard one we have today, they might send code which does something like "DOMLibrary.renderHTML(generateDocument())". But someone else could write a competing library for rendering and laying out content, and it might take hold if it's better, and it wouldn't have to be built on top of the first one.
Also, the browser wouldn't necessarily be a separate app (though someone could make one); it would be a standard built-in feature of operating systems, i.e. the sandboxing would be done at the kernel level. With security properly handled, there'd be no difference between a native app and a web app, except whether you load it from your own filesystem or a remote one.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#129Domain parking/squatting is disallowed. You’d have to make the rules in some imperfect way, but it’d be better than what we have today.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#130Everything can always be improved. But there are some things that would make life for a lot of people easier.
For one thing, operating systems' tcp/ip stacks. They should have come with TLS as a layer that any app could use just by making the same syscall they use to open a socket. For another, service discovery should not be based on hardcoded numbers, but querying for a given service on a given node and getting routed to the right host and port, so that protocols don't care what ports they use.
Domain registration and validation of records should be a simple public key system where a domain owner has a private key, and can sign sub-keys for any host or subdomain under the domain. When you buy the domain you register your key, and all a registrar does is tell other people what your public key is. To prove you are supposed to control a DNS record, you just sign a message with your key; no more fucking about with what the domain owners email is, or who controls at this minute the IP space that a DNS record at this minute is pointing to. This solves a handful of different problems, from registrars to CAs to nameservers and more.
The security of the whole web shouldn't depend on the security of 350+ organizations that can all independently decide to issue a secure cert for your domain. The public key thing above would be a step in the right direction.
BGP is still ridiculous, but I won't pretend to know it well enough to propose solutions.
Give IPv4 two more octets. It's stupid but sometimes stupid works better than smart.
Give the HTTP protocol the ability to have integrity without privacy (basically, signed checksums on plaintext content). This way we can solve most of the deficiencies of HTTPS (no caching, for one) but we don't get MitM attacks for boring content like a JavaScript library CDN.
And I would make it easier to roll out new internet protocols so we don't have to force ourselves to only use the popular ones. No immediate suggestion here, other than (just like port number limitations) it's stupid that we can't roll out replacements for TCP or UDP.
And I would add an extension that encapsulates protocol-specific metadata along each hop of a network. Right now if a network connection has issues, you don't actually know where along the path the issue is, because no intermediate information is recorded at all except the TTL. Record the actions taken at each route and pass it along both ways. Apps can then actively work around various issues, like "the load balancer can't reach the target host" versus "the target host threw an error" versus "the security group of the load balancer didn't allow your connection" versus "level3 is rejecting all traffic to Amazon for some reason". If we just recorded when and where and what happened at each hop, most of these questions would have immediate answers.