Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make? • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by jiggunjer » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

jjav wrote: post #112

dsukhin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acces…

so the modem was just connected to a switch?

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

#222

Post by yardstick » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:09 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #217

effie wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAT without port forwarding done by router facing the ISP, the default kind of NAT which the subscriber does not have to worry about configuring, has very great security aspect. Connect your home network devices to the router doing that kind of NAT,and this automatically protects all devices in your local network from incoming connections.

It does protect all devices in your home network, until someone uses one of the various NAT slipstreaming attacks from a malicious ad and open up the web interface to your IP cameras without you noticing. NAT has become too complex and most consumer versions of it are developed for ease of use over security. Don't trust NAT to protect your network, because the device doing NAT in your home network most likely wasn't…

Isn’t that attack still possible on IPv6? It’s an attack on the stateful firewall connection tracking, not NAT.

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

#223

Post by CodeGlitch » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:10 AM UTC

perryizgr8 wrote: post #208

No remote code execution is allowed on the web. You can download binaries and run them, but not in the browser's context.

So instead of running code in the browser's sandbox, you have to run it at user level? Sounds terrible and this is what things where like in the 90s. Say you wanted to do some banking, you would have to download and install the bank's application, which usually only ran on Windows.

No thanks.

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

#224

Post by cm2187 » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:11 AM UTC

cookie_monsta wrote: post #216

cm2187 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> form validation, autocomplete, date pickers, video streaming I'm confused by this comment - HTML5 does do all that out of the box. Are you saying it should have done it from the start? I don't get the bit about JS being required to render static content either...

Yes, people started using javascript for basic things that should always have been part of the html syntax (when the web became dynamic which was the late 90s), to make up for what wasn’t in html.

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

#225

Post by capableweb » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:12 AM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #189

zarzavat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not about proprietary vs open, it's about not mixing document rendering with code execution. Should MS Word and Adobe PDF also execute code? Should I only be able to run an application only by executing it in MS Word and Adobe PDF reader?

> Should MS Word and Adobe PDF also execute code?

Oh boy do I have news for you! https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scrip...

Not sure about Word as I barely know it, but I'm sure you can execute some sort of code. If not JS, probably VBA or other Microsoft language.

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

#226

Post by jeroenhd » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:15 AM UTC

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…

God, IPv6 got the shaft hard. People complain that it's too complex and that it solves too many problems at once, but that's because they've become used to the ancient stack of random protocols that make IPv4 work. There are also a lot of people who have it out for IPv6 because their ISPs aren't handing out static addresses, somehow equating IPv6's problems with the shittiness of their ISP.

It's not widely implemented because hardware support is lagging behind (Ubiquity being a notorious example in the prosumer space), hardware support isn't being developed because it's not rolled out widely, software support is lacking because of a lack of rollout which is then used as an excuse not to roll out IPv6.

I bet that if people learned IPv6 before they learned about IPv4 the conclusion would be that IPv4 is a mess. In my opinion, DHCP is a stupid protocol for assigning addresses that shouldn't have been necessary, but we've managed to staple some kind of management ideals on top of it (as if someone couldn't just set a static IP on their device) and using SLAAC feels like giving up control for some. Imagine trying to convince people that they have to set up a USBCP server on either their computer or their flash drive to make USB work without address conflicts, or to make Bluetooth work, they'll laugh at you and ask why that stuff isn't done automatically by the underlying protocols instead. DHCP is useful for many other settings, but address negotiation should've never been a problem it needed to solve in the first place.

We've accepted NAT as a fact of life because of ISPs being stingy to hand out addresses years ago when multiple devices started appearing in home networks and now people treat it like some kind of firewall (which it usually isn't!) or absolute necessity because they can't imagine something else.

Ask any console player about what type of NAT they have (NAT type 0? Type 1? Type 2? open? moderate? strict? I've never been able to figute out what these classifications even mean on a technical level!) and they'll shudder with flashbacks of getting basic connections to work with their crappy ISP router. This should never have been a problem, but everyone kept dragging their feet and eventually we decided to accept this mess.

I think part of the reason is that many schools still only teach IPv4 in their networking classes, so when people encounter IPv6 in the real world they're scared and confused by concepts, protocols and mechanisms they were never prepared or trained for.

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

#227

Post by CuriousSkeptic » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:16 AM UTC

mojuba wrote: post #174

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #129

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.

Domain squatting is like a disease, but how would you regulate it? Where is the line between just a parked domain that a lot of tech (and non-tech) people reserve for their future projects, and a domain acquired for re-sale? Given a good offer you would probably sell one of the domains you own just as well, wouldn't you?

A fairly simple approach for all is to up the price based on contention. Regularly auction out the lease f.ex

Allowing “ownership” of such resources just leads to rent-seeking.

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

#228

Post by pjerem » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:27 AM UTC

biztos wrote: post #168

kazen44 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I worked at a company with about 5-6 servers and a couple fixed remote workstations, all the programmers knew all the IP addresses by heart, if there were names for anything but the www host I didn’t know them. Obviously doesn’t scale, but I would assume this was normal back when you only interacted with say <10 servers.

That’s a false issue nowadays. Basically any cheap router supports Avahi/Zeroconf/Bonjour … and allows you to reach any other machine of the network directly by its host name instead of its IP. There is not any reason to learn the IP address of your first MySQL server when you can reach it through « mysql-1 » or « mysql-1.local ».

You basically just need a router and an OS from the last two decades and your machines to have a defined host name (which your OS installer takes care of).

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

#229

Post by yyyk » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:30 AM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #203

yyyk wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It was never a good idea to host a public site on one's personal computer You could run it in a VM, which is equivalent to what your 20$ host is doing. Or you could run it on a separate machine. Or you can run it on the same machine which was common back in the day... if you use a reputable distro and apply updates regularly then it's really not a concern (i can't remember myself or anyone i know hacked through vul…

>Doesn't it? I guess it's a matter of age and class and nationality. If you're too young to earn money, it's a barrier. If you're in the lower classes of your country, 20$/month can be a lot

I was comparing the payment to buying or operating a server (even a free old server has costs, e.g. for electricity). In truth, a proper modern comparison should be to a free plan from one of the cloud providers which is likely to be 0/month.

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

#230

Post by hansel_der » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 11:30 AM UTC

liamdiprose wrote: post #125

josh_today wrote: post #59

Earlier 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?

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…

NAT was a thing much before ip addresses became scarse, is a key enabler in the "internets" ease of use as well as the principal ability to connect nearly double-digit billions of devices with about 200mio live addresses.

the end-to-end principle is mostly undermined by stateful firewalls and a total lack of secure-by-design in software developement, this will not change with ipv6