No ads at all
Ads don't have anything to do with the design of the internet, and if you want free expression to be possible, so are ads. Otherwise you'd need every scrap of content anyone makes to go through a censor before being made available.
Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
141–150 of 327 posts
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#142HTTP 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.
Yes but how would you implement this on a low level? How would a system know something had happened without some kind of polling lurking below?
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#143The "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…
We already have that. It’s called Java
Java might have been that, if HTML and all the other web tech had never happened and Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, etc. had started out as Java sandboxes.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure the likes of YouTube and Netflix need further privileges compared to the rest of the web.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ha…
if your PC only consumes 50w (somewhat low for a desktop). and your power is 20c a KWH (a little high on average, but not crazy high, though perhaps 0 in a dorm room). you'll be spending $7-$8 a month just on electricity. So it's not "free" to run it on your PC. now, if you view that your PC runs 24/7 anyways, perhaps (much like the dorm room case) the marginal cost is 0. I'm simply making the case that it might not be, and it could very well be a significant %age of the linode cost.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#146DNS is far from perfect, TLDs are stupid and always have been, the arbitrary rules for records are stupid, MX records are ridiculous, UDP size constraints on answers.. nevermind I could keep going. DNS sucks.
Also: DNS resolvers and ISPs are the reason for amplification attacks. ISPs should simply check where the UDP traffic is coming from, and filter out packets that have a different UDP source address inside them. This would literally make the internet DDoS free.
There are DDoSes that are based on botnets without specifically relying on amplification or reflection. There have even been DDoSes relying on user-contributed resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Orbit_Ion_Cannon
Amplification makes a DDoS bigger, but isn't what makes it a DDoS.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#147Here is an academic discussion [0]. It was published in 2005. It may not cover more recent problems, but the proposed design principles are still valid.
[0] Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet https://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/Tussle...
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#148The "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…
A nightmare for screen readers and other accessibility tools, and anyone who needs to rely on them.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#149HTTP 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.
Yes but how would you implement this on a low level? How would a system know something had happened without some kind of polling lurking below?
Whether the web server in question polls files in a posix filesystem for mtimes/ENOENT, employs inotify, or has a higher-level CMS type deal to trigger events when the CMS modifies/adds/deletes resources kept in an RDBMS is an irrelevant server implementation detail.
I think the real challenge to implementing this kind of thing is preventing abuse.
If servers were to accept subscriptions on resources under their purview in the form of an arbitrary URL to poke when there's an event, it's ripe for abuse without some additional steps. But I think something along the lines of what letsencrypt does would be sufficient; make the subscriber prove control over the domain to be poked by asking it to reply with some gibberish at a specific url under its purview before accepting the subscription at that domain, and you'd throttle/limit those operations, just like letsencrypt does. At least that way you're not turning subscriptions into DDoS attacks via notification events sent to unsuspecting domains...
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#150Earlier 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…
USC would disable any residential port trying to host a real server like that (i.e. not a game server or something). It's a research and education network, not your free ISP. If you have legitimate reasons, get a teacher's note and we'll let you. We watched the connection counts, we'll investigate the weird and probably disable your port and account and send you to Student Conduct. You have to fly under the radar, too many connections to other machines on inside (you're up to something), or too much traffic (you're up to something else). Then again, we were better at network than most other universities.