Domain 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.
I have several domain names that I am not using but you're right
i have like 10 but i agree as well
Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
151–160 of 327 posts
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#152Earlier 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…
There's a huge difference alright.
It was never a good idea to host a public site on one's personal computer with all the sensitive personal data on it where it could be hacked or DDOSed. Even when IPv4 addresses were easy to get it was a very bad idea.
When you factor buying a separate server, 20$ a month doesn't sound too bad.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#153Security.
I recall a possibly apocryphal story about TCP - namely that it was originally meant to be encrypted. Supposedly it was the NSA who had gentle words with implementors which led to the spec not including any mechanisms for encrypted connections.
So, encrypted by default TCP, for a start.
DNS should have a much simpler, possibly TOFU model to help with the usability elements. DNSSEC is just a nightmare and confidentiality is nonexistent.
Somewhat controversially, I'd ditch IPv6 in favour of a 64bit IPv4.1 - blasphemy, I know, but the ROI and rate of adoption for IPv6 don't justify its existence, IMO.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#154Domain 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.
You want to replace highest bidder wins with first in first served? Is that really better? How? This sounds like naive market manipulation, which ends up being whack-a-mole or just a disastrous mess.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#155The "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…
Unblockable ads and popups, uncopyable text, yay!
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#156IPv6 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.
how is ipv6 more complicated then ipv4? the friction comes from having to manage two different network stacks at once, not the so called complexity of ipv6.
ipv4 is a mess in many ways, ARP for instance, is a disaster once you reach a certain scale and many of the ipv4 header fields are unneeded leading to inefficiencies. multicast on ipv4 is a mess, rfc1918 is a neat idea but ipv6 fixes it in a far better way and gets rid of NAT in the process. (and no, NAT does not increase security, ipv6 still has firewalls !)
in my opinion, ipv6 is the far simpler protocol, it is the migration from ipv4 to ipv6 which is resulting in all this complexity, but it is not the fault of ipv4.
and before people ask why not just extend the address space... that only solves half of the problems ipv4 has and not to mention, results in having the same dual stack situation as we have right now. extending address space is simply not possible in a backwards compatible way. and if we have to break compatibility, we might aswell fix all the other issues with ipv4.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#157Some way to make spoofing harder. Complete cryptographic authentication and filtering of every packet is probably technically unfeasible even now. But certainly we can think of other "soft" measures.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $20/mo would have got you enough to get started. What? Have you forgotten what your first time was like? There is a huge difference between thinking: > "I build my first shitty website, if i leave my PC on everybody in the world can use it. Who knows what will happen?" And instead being required to go: > "I'll spend 20$ a month to maybe entertain a couple of people for a couple of minutes by using someone else's ha…
There's a huge difference alright. It was never a good idea to host a public site on one's personal computer with all the sensitive personal data on it where it could be hacked or DDOSed. Even when IPv4 addresses were easy to get it was a very bad idea. When you factor buying a separate server, 20$ a month doesn't sound too bad.
I’d argue that it’s a huge barrier to innovation.
Most people getting started are not going to understand systems administration enough to set up a server like that. But they can run software locally.
One of the first projects I was ever a part of was a “WAMP” machine (Windows Apache MySQL & PHP) running Nuke Evolution forum software. I learned a lot from that and would never do it again but it was a useful project for some people and I learned a lot by patching around the source files and learning about MySQL enough to make backups and improvements and so on.
Being able to put up a simple service is but only one of the reasons to be publicly addressable, P2P is also important (things like games, VoIP) but $20 for a VPS is no small barrier.
Not for someone getting started.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#159Can we fix email so that it provides authentication, integrity, and confidentiality protections by default? And also while we're at it make it support binary attachments so that we're not stuck wasting bandwidth and disk doing base64 for everything?
why not just extend the email protocol to really support open calendars, open social networks (decentralized) and open p2p chat? email is a nice way of addressing, but we underuse that address compared to all the balkanized post-email systems.
There are efforts in those directions:
https://delta.chat/en/ implements encrypted IM over email.
https://jmap.io/spec-calendars.html is the calendaring spec for IMAP's likely successor
https://webfinger.net/ is the (appallingly named) http protocol for finding named people such that social connections can be made and managed. Some extensions exist for services that commonly run with email that provide webfinger services.
Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> IPv6 reintroduces equity to the internet that facebook benefited from in it's inception Except for the fact nobody can type, much less remember any IPv6 address.
and how many people remember public ipv4 addresses besides a couple of easy to remember ipv4 addresses like 1.1.1.1 for instance?
rfc1918 address space is easily remembered because people use mostly 192.168.xx.xx. but ipv6 has the same idea and when writing it shorthand isnt significantly larger.