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Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#71

Post by 0xCMP »

teddyh wrote: post #58
ng55QPSK wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provable identity: you get an email, hi i'm a hiring manager from company X, can we get in touch about job Y, could you please send me your (secret) phone number? It should be possible for you, the receiver of the email, to check if the email originated at company X. Digital Notary: this came up in several data privacy discussions. You (A) are in contact with B, but you don't want to send B something like a scan of y…

> It should be possible for you, the receiver of the email, to check if the email originated at company X. You could check the DKIM signature of the email.

The point is "proving" something without showing them the proof. E.g. someone Company X trusts looks at the documents or etc and sends a signed confirmation that they confirm X, Y, and Z about Person A.

The point being that Company X does not have a copy of the sensitive information (and neither the liability of losing it) and the Digital Notary would (in theory) have better procedures for properly deleting or storing the data as needed.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#72

Post by SuoDuanDao »

tbrownaw wrote: post #44
iamstupidsimple wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that problem space is so large (every new line of fibre has how many stakeholders?) that a single individual or organisation might not be able to have any impact here. Which I think is the root of this question.

If there's above-ground electricity, there should be rules about getting pole access. And from what I understand those poles, and anything underground, work by getting easements rather than negotiating separately with every individual property owner.

Fibre op engineer (Canadain) here - there are rules, but those are a double edged sword; the proper paperwork to get on a pole is a large part of the total cost to attach. Ever see the mess of cables in a developing country? The laxer rules that lead to those tangles substantially reduces the cost of building out internet.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#73

Post by jokoon »

ng55QPSK wrote: post #49
jokoon wrote: post #38

Low carbon footprint datacenters, but it requires better software performance. Law of Wirth explains that. Ability to do SDR for wireless networks with smarphones. 5G is not a good solution. Better security for routers, and generally better software security regulations, which are almost non existent right now. If cars have security regulations, software should, too.

"Ability to do SDR for wireless networks with smarphones" - you want to have SDR on the smartphone?

Yes, I don't see why not.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#74

Post by the_biot »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #52

I'm pretty sure that BGP is still horribly insecure at its core, which means that all it takes for BGP hijacking to occur is for someone to forget to configure their filters properly. (See: that time that a bunch of Google traffic started getting routed through Russia. Or the time that YouTube became inaccessible to the entire world)

BGP by itself is insecure, but an (RPKI) infrastructure has grown up around it so that it can, and should be by now, secure.

Yet BGP injection attacks (ASN or prefix theft) happen regularly. The reason is that not everybody follows the best practice here. It may well take a massively disruptive attack before this gets any better.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#76

Post by talove »

Preface: Gonna do my best to not add any commentary for or against the social aspect of decentralization / blockchains. Also gonna be high-level.

I can't help but feel distributed computation is a really really fascinating problem and if the socioeconomic wave we're going through now sustains even a fraction of this current moment it'll be a longterm engineering focus.

It's impossible for me to not recognize that the diff blockchains mirror that of different database designs as the web scaled from nineties. First read capacity was needed to support e-commerce. Followed by social platforms where read/write needed to scale and adopt distributed models and eventual consistency.

Now we're scaling distributed computation and all sorts of interesting problems emerge. If things are gonna turn out to be even remotely what an idealist might lead you to believe we're at the cusp of rearchitecting every single layer of computation. Networking. Machine code compilation and execution. File storage.

PS I did a couple of cmd+f for keywords to find someone answering with this context and didn't find any. That seems crazy.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#77

Post by fsckboy »

next internet infra problems

not tryna be "that guy", but, isn't the internet concerned with interstructure? When you get to a LAN behind a firewall or code inside a walled garden, ok, that's infrastructure.

e.g. Akamai

that's interstructure, though it might require support from your infrastructure

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#78

Post by KoftaBob »

jgrahamc wrote: post #30
teddyh wrote: post #14

Those companies were not created to solve those problems, but to profit by them. Do you think that, say, Cloudflare would like a better web protocol which would be impossible to DDoS?

If such a thing was possible we'd be the first to roll it out. DDoS is a scourge which is why we made DDoS mitigation unmetered on all plans including free: https://blog.cloudflare.com/unmetered-mitigation/

I wonder if DDoS could be solved (for static websites at least) by using P2P as a supplementary load balancer.

This could be set to only be enabled if load is approaching a certain percent of capacity that the servers/CDN are able to handle.

Once reaching that threshold, P2P would kick in, and existing visitors could serve static content to newer visitors using something like the WebRTC + Service Worker + IndexedDB combo that www.arc.io uses for their P2P CDN.

Thoughts?

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#79

Post by lesam »

tbrownaw wrote: post #45
cube00 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with denial of service attacks in a way that doesn't involve needing to own more bandwidth then the attacker can saturate would be something to look into.

Well, that would have to be either not having a link for them to try to saturate (ie, edge-distribute your stuff as CDNs do), or preventing them from sending packets to you (which means telling other people's routers to run your packet-filtering code, which I'd think might be a bit of a hard sell).

That sounds like a business opportunity for a service provider specializing in packet filtering.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#80

Post by 0xCMP »

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #17
emteycz wrote: post #2

Inter-planetary internet... How do you play a game when few of the players are on Mars?

Even with high ping, application layer is probably the wrong place to solve this problem. We'll likely get email working as one of the first problems and be back to correspondence chess and the like. Even Civilization 5/6 works over email.

TIL that Civ IV has "Play by Cloud" which automates all of this + supports webhooks to notify you when it's your turn.
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