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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?

#301

Post by southerntofu »

yyyk wrote: post #229
southerntofu wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> I was comparing the payment to buying or operating a server (even a free old server has costs, e.g. for electricity)

Sure, but if the machine is already running, it's free. Or if you can stick it in a cupboard at work/university, it's free.

> 0/month

is there actually free cloud hosting? don't they ask for your credit card first before they offer you "credits"?

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

#302

Post by Nevermark »

bawolff wrote: post #295
Nevermark wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't end-to-end encryption if you have to trust someone in the middle. Right?

Well usually the term end-end means from you directly to the user you are talking to (if its in a chat context for example). TLS (in its normal usage) isn't end to end, putting encryption in a lower layer makes it even less likely to be end to end. In end to end encryption, preventing mitm attacks is the hardest part and often is glossed over. How many people actually verify the "safety number" when using signal? Pro…

Hmm. I think end-to-end needs to remain end-to-end, and you don't need to trust a plethora of third parties if everyone is using the same library/platform for encryption. Middle parties don't need to know anything about the encryption.

The source for that library will be extremely well vetted. Maybe the most vetted code ever written.

There are practicalities, such as how improved encryption gets added to the protocol, and how clients from previous versions negotiate the best supported encryption between them.

Also, affordances for encrypted delayed transmission, i.e. storage in the middle. For instance, email providers would need to store encrypted messages until your local reader downloads them (either to read or store locally).

In some cases such as backups, and syncing between your own clients, end-to-end would really just mean your end. As only you would ever decrypt anything.

Either way, zero need for any third party to be involved in the encryption, other than the source & binary provider.Go with a highly respected/vetted version, or even a standards committee's reference implementation officially vetted by many entities, and a mechanism for anyone to vet and report.

There is some thought needed for the design, as with any platform. And perfection might never be achieved - but things are much less perfect today.

The return on that careful work would be an insane drop in the number of disparate implementations needed, and a much safer internet without all the cracks in and between disparate implementation.

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

#303

Post by lifeslikethis »

southerntofu wrote: post #301
yyyk wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

> I was comparing the payment to buying or operating a server (even a free old server has costs, e.g. for electricity) Sure, but if the machine is already running, it's free. Or if you can stick it in a cupboard at work/university, it's free. > 0/month is there actually free cloud hosting? don't they ask for your credit card first before they offer you "credits"?

Honestly, I think self-hosted is the way to go. Most cloud hosting services are scams, and with self-hosted you have full control over the system.

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

#304

Post by poetaster »

dredmorbius wrote: post #293
poetaster wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OLpC kind of dream?

Sorry? (One Laptop Per Child I underststand. Not its relationship to my comments.)

In the main, decentralized community (small player?) centered networking. Mesh ++. I admit it's some time since I thought about it but OLPC is what came to mind.

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

#305

Post by networkimprov »

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?

The primary problem for email at this point is that it's a highly effective cyberattack channel, because it allows anyone, claiming any identity, to send you any content, without limits. This cannot be "fixed" as it's the intended function.

No one was working on an alternative that addresses this problem, so I drafted & implemented "TMTP". It also addresses a variety of other common email problems.

https://mnmnotmail.org/

https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail

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

#306

Post by poetaster »

southerntofu wrote: post #299
poetaster wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's cool! How did you get a license to use a specific bandwidth though? Was it easier back then?

The Student's Union. In Canada, all the Universities and many Technical schools have a license. It's a CRTC regulated thing. I don't remember the legal framework in detail, but public broadcasting is deemed a necessity https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/community-...

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

#307

Post by networkimprov »

superasn wrote: post #132

I would wish there was something better for SMTP. I tried to learn it a while ago and got super frustrated with how things are. The whole thing looked upside-down to me. I mean The DKIM, SPF, DMARC, Bayesian filtering, etc sound like band-aids upon band-aids to fix something that's really broken inside.

Have a look at TMTP from the mnm project.

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

#308

Post by dredmorbius »

poetaster wrote: post #304
dredmorbius wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry? (One Laptop Per Child I underststand. Not its relationship to my comments.)

In the main, decentralized community (small player?) centered networking. Mesh ++. I admit it's some time since I thought about it but OLPC is what came to mind.

Maybe in part. I suspect that might get problematic ultimately.

Within the transport network itself, localised dendritic trust relations (and corresponding transport flows) will all but certainly emerge. There might be some ad-hoc leaf-node communications, but standard, equipment, maintenance, etc., all favour some level of centralisation.

Note that "some level" != "complete and total".

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

#309

Post by jjav »

jiggunjer wrote: post #221
jjav wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> so the modem was just connected to a switch?

What EvanAnderson said.

The office ethernet network just contained a router, which would be hooked up to the upstream (via multiple T1 lines, IIRC). So everything on the office network had a public IP and was directly on the internet.

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

#310

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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…

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

It's out there, creeping up on 50% or just over in a significant chunk of the developed world.

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