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

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

#271

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

hansel_der wrote: post #230
liamdiprose wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

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

Windows boxes with public IPs were amazing (eg: CodeRed/NIMDA) until XP's firewall came along.

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

#273

Post by native_samples »

bawolff wrote: post #175
Nevermark wrote: post #14

End to end encryption and tracking-resistance at a low enough protocol level that most developers or users would never know the pain of even thinking about either. Imagine how many times security and privacy have been reimplemented in different contexts. And that patchwork approach will incentivize security breaches and manipulation through dark surveillance until ... no end in sight.

Distributing keys gets harder the lower you go. Although even non authenticated encryption is nice to prevent passive eavesdropping.

Technically there's no reason that there couldn't be an automatic PKI over the entire IP space, in which routers and ISPs are CAs. It never happened because the IP world sees crypto as an app-layer problem, but it doesn't have to be that way.

The protocols could be encrypted by default - all that's needed are protocols to let a device communicate to the router what its chosen public key is, and for that to communicate it back to the owner of the IP block, which has to operate an OCSP-like query service to vend certs.

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

#274

Post by native_samples »

IX-103 wrote: post #6

Can 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?

Well, email is already kinda 'fixed'. You can't do much about laggards but they drop out with time.

Authentication? DKIM, check.

Integrity and confidentiality? SMTP-TLS, check.

Oh, you meant against the provider? S/MIME, check.

Base64 - irrelevant given the size limits most vendors apply to attachments. Email isn't a great file sharing system and trying to optimize it for that might be a bad idea. People use Google Drive etc links these days instead, which works better.

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

#275

Post by native_samples »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #256
neilalexander wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have very closely described Yggdrasil, which is a proof-of-concept for these sorts of ideas: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

As far as I can tell, though, it sounds like Yggdrasil is still an overlay network, designed to bridge nodes running Yggdrasil across a network that isn't. I'd want to see that as part of the base network rather than as an overlay.

Try looking at cjdns, it provides what you want but also at a base layer.

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

#276

Post by bawolff »

native_samples wrote: post #273
bawolff wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing keys gets harder the lower you go. Although even non authenticated encryption is nice to prevent passive eavesdropping.

Technically there's no reason that there couldn't be an automatic PKI over the entire IP space, in which routers and ISPs are CAs. It never happened because the IP world sees crypto as an app-layer problem, but it doesn't have to be that way. The protocols could be encrypted by default - all that's needed are protocols to let a device communicate to the router what its chosen public key is, and for that to communicat…

That's sort of how Resource Public Key Infrastructure works for bgp.

The big question is - do you trust your isp for that. Of potential attackers who can eavesdrop on my connection, isp (or someone at isp or gov giving isp a warrant) seems pretty high on the list.

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

#277

Post by poetaster »

donatj wrote: post #23
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…

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.

I just wish slaac was slaac.

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

#278

Post by poetaster »

magicalhippo wrote: post #239
jeroenhd wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 implemente…

> 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. My ISP isn't handing out static IPv4 nor IPv6. However IPv4 works just fine while for IPv6 it's a giant pain. The world isn't static though, so maybe IPv6 is the problem here? Or do you seriously suggest I should manually change all my dev…

Sadly, the price on the cable network i'm on with ipv6 is performance, AND recently, no ipv4. Kid you not. I did tunnel myself for a while, but gave up. Static ipv4 to the outside. dual stack internal for testing network stuff. How bizzare is that. I live in germany.

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

#279

Post by poetaster »

southerntofu wrote: post #205
DeathArrow wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can host more than one domain per ip. And most hosting providers, not just cloud providers do also offer packages with a static IP address. Yes, we do not have enough IP address for all IoT devices, for all refrigerators and smart bulbs.

> You can host more than one domain per ip. Yes, but some things become tricky: - SMTP reputation is related with reverse DNS of your public IP - reverse-proxying TLS-encrypted trafic relies on SNI headers, which not all protocols implement - some protocols entirely don't have a virtualhost (domain) notion, like gopher or SSH Overall, it's not so easy and simple. Sure i don't care that IoT devices don't have public a…

I was doing public, student radio in the 1980s. Cost nothing but time and effort to do the work. We had a huge audience without advertising or gov't interference. The yearly fund raiser and student union sufficed. Community.

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

#280

Post by poetaster »

dredmorbius wrote: post #33

DNS itself is certainly problematic. Incorporating a time dimension to domains, such that it's explicitly recognised, and greatly restricting transfers, would be one element. Ownership of domains should sit with the registrant, not the registrar. Characterspace should be explicitly restricted to 7-byte ASCII to avoid homoglyph attacks. It's not a shrine to cultural affirmation, it's a globally-utilised indexing syste…

OLpC kind of dream?
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