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Email could have been X.400 times better

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Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#161

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #134
jcranmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP No, LDAP was a student project from UMich that somehow gained mindshare because (a) it wasn't ISO, and (b) it cleverly had an 'L' in front of it. It's now more complex and heavyweight than the original DAP, but people think it isn't because of that original clever bit of marketing.

It's still lightweight. I implemented a working implementation on a literal weekend.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#162

Post by petcat »

addaon wrote: post #120
halJordan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physical usps works because, the usps controls every inbox and every outbox; everyone has to have an inbox/outbox with the single carrier, and no one can actually reject or refuse mail. All the downsides of iMessage but the government reading your email bc it's not an encrypted protocol. Spam exists in the real world, this wouldn't have worked either

> Spam exists in the real world, this wouldn't have worked either. A two-or-more order-of-magnitude reduction in a problem seems like a good start and a worthwhile step, not something to disregard because it's not 100%…

The USPS is paid by spammers to ensure delivery of their physical spam. You doing think they wouldn't have also accepted payment from spammers to ensure delivery of their internet spam?

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#164

Post by bombcar »

chuckadams wrote: post #75
jcranmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

There's an entire book devoted to ripping up the OSI model: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iL0fYmMmariFoSvLd9U5nPVH...

The OSI model and its consequences have been a disaster for the networking race.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#165

Post by bostik »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

> Did any of the ITU standards win?

Maybe X.500 - also known as LDAP, and widely deployed across enterprises in the form of Active Directory.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#166

Post by gzread »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

Everyone likes Wireguard over OpenVPN for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that OpenVPN requires a certificate pair while Wireguard uses a 40-character private and public key you can generate by running "wg genkey" with no parameters and copy/pasting.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#168

Post by gzread »

kstrauser wrote: post #92
convolvatron wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

note that it was 'tolerable latency without echo cancellation in France', most other places had long enough latency anyways that they needed to have it anyways. and of course now everything needs echo cancellation. I think standards are important, and I'm sad that no one bothers anymore, but stuff like this and the inclusion of interlace in digital video for that little 3 year window when it might have mattered does…

I'd forgotten about the French connection here. BTW, I searched Kagi for "tolerable latency without echo cancellation in France" and saw your comment. Wow. I didn't realize web crawlers were that current these days.

Kagi is a Google frontend, and Google appears to index Hacker News in real time. I bet they have written site-specific code to scrape /comments continuously.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#169

Post by mixdup »

silvestrov wrote: post #153
pjc50 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs Without being able to get too into the telco detail, I think the lesson was that hard realtime is both much harder to achieve and not actually needed . People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord. It's both psychological and slightly paradoxical. Once you let go of saying "the system MUST GUARANTEE this property", you get a much cheaper, bet…

> not actually needed What you need is more that enough bandwidth . Think of the difference between a highway with few cars versus a highway filled to the brim with cars. In the latter case traffic slows to a crawl even for ambulances. It seems like it was just cheaper and easier to build more bandwidth than it was to add traffic priority handling to internet connectivity.

And that cheaper bit I think just came from reduced complexity. With things like ATM circuits and other similar highly reliable and predictable methods, they needed a lot of hand holding. You needed to provision an ATM circuit, you needed to make sure across the network that the path was there, capable, maintained, and configured, and you had visibility end to end

That was a selling point, because "hey we guarantee this circuit" but it was also very expensive and labor intensive

Where just dumping your bits into the internet and letting the network figure it out outsourced a lot of that complexity to every hop along the network you didn't own. But, because they care about their networks everyone would (in theory) make sure each hop was healthy, so you didn't need to hand hold your circuit or route completely end to end

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#170

Post by gzread »

petcat wrote: post #162
addaon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spam exists in the real world, this wouldn't have worked either. A two-or-more order-of-magnitude reduction in a problem seems like a good start and a worthwhile step, not something to disregard because it's not 100%…

The USPS is paid by spammers to ensure delivery of their physical spam. You doing think they wouldn't have also accepted payment from spammers to ensure delivery of their internet spam?

That was the point of the proposal, wasn't it? The receiver is also paid for receiving the spam.
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