David Clark: Rebuild the Internet 323
boarder8925 writes "David Clark, who led the development of the internet in the 1970s, is working with the National Science Foundation on a plan for a whole new infrastructure to replace today's global network. The NSF aims to put out a request for proposals in the fall for plans and designs that could lead to what Clark called a 'clean slate' internet architecture. Those designs, Clark said, could be tested on the National LambdaRail, the nationwide optical network that researchers are using to experiment with new networking technologies and applications."
Wont happend (Score:5, Interesting)
We cant even start using the new ipv6 protocol. I dont think we are there yet. Try in 10 or so years.
Re:Wont happend (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wont happend (Score:5, Interesting)
Once people were forced to NAT, it suddently dawned on the great mass of people that workstations shouldn't be getting public IPs for security and management reasons.
Nor for that matter should these up and coming embedded devices be placed on the public internet either. It just isn't appropriate.
Remember: The Internet was supposed to be a network of networks NOT _THE NETWORK_.
Most of the remaining IP allocation problems result from certain lingering gross misallocations such as the Class A block assigned to MIT.
Re:Wont happend (Score:2, Informative)
You're misusing terms here. "Network of networks" means "routable ip networks". From an IP point of view, boxes behind a NAT are irrelevant. Nobody ever claimed that every machine should be connected to the Internet, but hosts on the Internet *were* intended to be routable.
The management and security benefits you alluded to are separate issues and can be achieved with less drastic measures than NAT.
Re:Wont happend (Score:3, Insightful)
It does not in fact merely mean routable ip networks. The internet was meant to bridge many networks that did not use IP by means of a gateway hosts that did speak IP.
I agree that no one specifically was thinking of NAT as we know it when network of networks was coined, but it is a simple extension of the principle.
NAT isn't a permanent solution (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I know they're a vendor, but this is a really reasonable report. They counter a lot of the hype, but they say we're going to need IPv6 eventually, so let's start now, before the Japanese and Koreans have built all the infrastructure and Americans are left to buy from them.
Re:NAT isn't a permanent solution (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know what you mean by buying infrastrcture. We're not losing out on any technology or experience really. If any important services become IPv6 only... well then we'd have a little catch-up--but that is precisely what will deliver the consumer demand.
CISCO is right in their problem prediction but they want to accelera
Re:NAT isn't a permanent solution (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree. I work for Canada's largest IT consulting company and in my experience the transition will begin when people become forced to transition, cost effective or not.
Re:NAT isn't a permanent solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now the US has dominance in these markets. If we let the Koreans and Japanese get their first, we'll be letting competitors get there first.
At least, those are the concerns I've heard. I'm not su
Yeah, thanks a lot NAT (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for retarding IPv6 development.
Thanks for necessitating the invention of UPnP.
Thanks for screwing up peer to peer connections for legitimate things like videoconferencing and file transfers.
Thanks for continuing to allow ISPs to treat IP addresses like some sort of rare element.
Thanks for mangling things like FTP.
Re:Yeah, thanks a lot NAT (Score:3, Insightful)
Couple of more thanks from me too...
Thanks for making business to business integration so difficult.
Thanks for making any server installation so difficult, if designing to give access to authentic users
Re:Yeah, thanks a lot NAT (Score:3, Insightful)
FTP is a fucked up protocol to start with. If NAT causes its demise, I know I personally will be nothing but smiles.
Re:Yeah, thanks a lot NAT (Score:3, Funny)
fascinating.
Does that scare you? Since FTP is nearly dead as it is, are you partially smiles now? Does it work like that, or do you turn into smiles all at once? Does it hurt/tickle?
Re:Yeah, thanks a lot NAT (Score:3, Informative)
Re: FTP overhead versus HTTP (Score:3, Informative)
"The only time FTP has less overhead than TCP is when you're retrieving several files."
I'm going to make a guess here and assume you mean HTTP, not TCP.
First, take a look at the FTP RFC.
http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/959/index.htm [freesoft.org]
Then, take a look at the HTTP 1.1 RFC:
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2616.txt [isi.edu]
You tell me which has more overhead? A notable part of the difference is the encoding; FTP can transfer data straight binary
Re:Yeah, thanks a lot NAT (Score:2)
This is often called Quality of Service.
IPv4 has no clue about packet priority.
But let's get cynical; whenever we need to keep the economy going, someone will sneak into law the requirement to make new US government projects implement IPv6, which will drive hardware/software sales, which will create an installed base, which will take us to a tipping point.
And that, amigos, is how the sausag
Re:Wont happend (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to run a webserver behind NAT? Forward the port through NAT. Want to run *two* webservers behind NAT? Say goodbye to half of your visitors behind stupid proxies that only relay requests to port 80.
NAT is bad because it is a complex layer of translation software, NOT a firewall. Its job is to try to fit packets through places where they shouldn't be going, not the other way around. A stateful firewall is a much better solution. Even Windows XP SP2 gets it right in that regard.
Unless you *like* translation gateways everywhere, the idea of a network of networks is a silly idea. MITM attacks and the general waste of resources are the two biggest problems with that concept.
Embedded devices like, say, a PDA shouldn't be on the Internet to receive phone calls or send email? What do you have against the Internet that a stateful firewall and a well written network stack wouldn't fix?
There is nothing evil in NAT itself (Score:2)
Re:Wont happend (Score:3, Insightful)
What the AC is describing is not, in fact, Network Address Translation, but Port Address Translation, which is only a subset of NAT. I have absolutely no problems running multiple hosts behind NAT using the one-to-one address translation, which generally reduces the need for publicly-valid IP addresses to the number of hosts that need to be publicly-available, plus one for a P
Re:Wont happend (Score:3, Informative)
NAT meant translating an IP address to another IP address.
PAT means translating a TCP (or I suppose UDP) port to another TCP (or UDP) port.
You can do one, the other, or both, depending on the capabilities of the software doing the translating. Obviously the cababilities of a sub $100 home router may not be the same as a custom configured Linux/BSD/Windows firewall/routing stack or a dedica
Re:Wont happend (Score:4, Insightful)
And yes, cell phones and PDAs *will be* exposed to the Internet. This is what conversion is about. Especially cell phones need to be reached independently of each other. Currently you do it with the phone number, and the difference to an IP address is the limitation of services that work with phone numbers as targets.
Mobile Phone (GSM) providers allow sending of SMS and MMS via SMTP to the target phones. This is (from a protocol stack point of view) an extension of the address space within a high level protocol: The phone number is just the user name in the email. There is no reason why this couldn't or shouldn't be done on the IP level itself. Malicously malformed MMS and SMS can corrupt a buggy phone operating system independently of the address space used to get them there. Look at the phreaks and their ways to hack into telephone equiment.
Any addressable system with an incorretly implemented service is attackable from remote. That is completely independent from the method of addressing. And phones have to be addressable to make sense to most people. (The limitation to 'most people' is necessary to block the uebercorrect who might be pointing out that there are people who never get a phone call anyway...)
Re:Wont happend (Score:5, Interesting)
6.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
7.0.0.0/8 Defense Information Systems Agency
8.0.0.0/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc
9.0.0.0/8 IBM Corporation
11.0.0.0/8 DoD Intel Information Systems
12.0.0.0/8 AT&T WorldNet Services
13.0.0.0/8 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
15, 16.0.0.0/8 Hewlett-Packard Company
17.0.0.0/8 Apple Computer, Inc.
18.0.0.0/8 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
19.0.0.0/8 Ford Motor Company
20.0.0.0/8 Computer Sciences Corporation
21, 22.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
25.0.0.0/8 Royal Signals and Radar Establishment
26, 28, 29, 30.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
32.0.0.0/8 AT&T Global Network Services
33.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
34.0.0.0/8 Halliburton Company
35.0.0.0/8 Merit Network Inc.
38.0.0.0/8 Performance Systems International Inc.
40.0.0.0/8 Eli Lilly and Company
41.0.0.0/8 African Network Information Center
44.0.0.0/8 Amateur Radio Digital Communications
45.0.0.0/8 Interop Show Network
47.0.0.0/8 Bell-Northern Research
48.0.0.0/8 Prudential Securities Inc.
51.0.0.0/8 Department of Social Security of UK
52.0.0.0/8 E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., Inc.
53.0.0.0/8 cap debis ccs (c/o Mercedes Benz AG
54.0.0.0/8 Merck and Co., Inc.
55.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
56.0.0.0/8 U.S. Postal Service
57.0.0.0/8 SITA-Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques
1,2,3,4,5,14, 23, 27, 31, 36, 37, 39, 42, 46, 49, 50 are reserved to IANA
It would be tempting to say: Nothing to see here people... please move along..., but amongst all the squatters is one new allocation, a single class A net allocated this year for the entire African continent. It works too, I've already had two 419s from it
Re:Wont happend (Score:3, Insightful)
Of all of the ones you point out, this is the only one I would argue that the allocation might be deserved. Ham Radio is bloody useful under emergency conditions, and it's operators should be encouraged even outside emergencies.
Re:Wont happend (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is a Peer-to-Peer network. Yesterday's big application, the "web app" didn't need this feature, but tomorrows potential big applications almost all do. If you disable them by using NAT, you're back where businesses were in 1996 when they started to realise that they should be on the web but had no clue how. Oops.
Seen all those annoying worms that choose random IPv4 Internet addresses and attack them? If a hundred of those worms hit one address per second they'll hit most machines in a year. With a thousand infected machines they'll take a month, But with IPv6 they don't stand a chance. A million worms, trying 10 IPv6 addresses per second, won't find more than a tiny fraction of vulnerable machines in a year. Even inside your much smaller corporate network "guessing" IPv6 addresses isn't feasible.
Elsewhere in this thread someone has observed that ordinary customers don't switch at the point of least pain. They wait, and wait, until they can't tolerate any more pain and then switch. Then they say "Oh, that was better than I expected" and maybe write an article for their trade magazine, "Why switching was actually a pretty good idea".
The point of least pain came when more than one network hardware vendor had IPv6 native. That was several years ago. Anyone buying new kit after that point should have been negotiating for IPv6 and either getting it, or getting a discount to "do without" it for a few more years. Otherwise you're a sucker.
Re:Wont happend (Score:3, Interesting)
You're confusing addressability with reachability. It's right that workstations should not in general be directly reachable from random other points on the internet, but that doesn't mean that this should be done only via NAT. Normal firewalling is the right way to
IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been to IPv6 summits. I've also served as the senior technology officer for several telecom companies (one of which was a very first CIX-W router connected ISP and frustration to Paul Vixie in our rather unique connection to the early Santa Clara peer point).
Through my experience, I've advocated IPv6, yet I've found significant resistance from nearly all sectors of business (except from South Korean and South American investors - go figure). Some of the problems IPv6 plans (and this "new infrastructure" pipe dream) face include:
Don't think I'm not wild about IPv6. I geek out and run it over AX.25 amateur networks for fun (what better way to learn a protocol). Yet the days of getting capital markets worked up in a frenzy, ready to throw hundreds of millions at network replacement are gone. Unless this latest dream is based on new tax revenues from all of us (which only creates messes like the original unaccountable NSFNET regionals), it won't go anywhere.
*scoove*
Innovator's Nightmare? (Score:2)
My customers would tell me they expect me to do these things already at no additional cost to them. Ab
Re:Innovator's Nightmare? (Score:2)
So I might extrapolate from your post that the ideal situation for grey-haired veterans is to corral the young'ns, wait for the leader to emerge, and have a lemming-thwacker ready before they get out of hand?
I could go for that.
Re:Innovator's Nightmare? (Score:2)
1) high reliability / built in disaster recovery
2) much better security
3) ease of administration
4) better middle ware between programs
Which is to say an updated version of VMS. There is no reason DEC should have lost the server wars to the AS/400s. There is no reason that DEC (which had the best microoprocessor) couldn't have won the workstation
Re:Wont happend (Score:2)
Re:Wont happend (Score:2)
Of course, we won't see that. This is Microsoft's opportunity to own the Internet. Watch them patent everything they can that has anything to do with network architecture, no matter how far out.
Re:Wont happend (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have money, flout disputed patents right, left and centre. Your legal defence, should you require one, is
Re:Wont happend (Score:2)
You might know MSN in today's guise but back in 1994 it wasn't delivered via HTTP. MS didn't even have a web browser until late 1995.
The Top Ten digital media events of 1994
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/intere s ting-people/199412/msg00070.html [interesting-people.org]
THE MICROSOFT NETWORK IS NO MARVEL
The crux of Microsoft's aspirations is its online network, once
code-named Marvel, now known as the Microsoft Network (for legal
reasons). Gates
And the important question is (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And the important question is (Score:2)
There was a strong message in there that the problem with the current design is lack of identification of who is who. At least that's what I read into the business about phishing and spam.
The business about zombies seems like a potential code for the need to block "normal" users from connecting with each other.
Re:And the important question is (Score:2)
But if you are kidding, excellent work.
Re:And the important question is (Score:2)
Re:And the important question is (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And the important question is (Score:4, Insightful)
The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize that it's quite tempting for computer developers to want to clean up a system after it's done, but such work only ever works if you have a clear understanding of the problems faced under the current codebase as well as an absolute need to fix the issues with the current system. Simply saying, "it'll be better/cooler/faster" just doesn't cut it. Those things can be obtained from evolutionary development. Revolutionary means that you are uprooting all the existing users. The payoff MUST be tremendous or they ignore it!
the NSF (Score:2)
University -> military -> porn -> mainstream corporate america -> home users
The NSF can get the first 2 steps.
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, that's not true. Putting aside your confusion of the Web vs. The Internet, JavaScript Applications fullfill a design that was started nearly 20 years ago by James Gosling. The design I'm referring to is NeWS [wikipedia.org]. The concept behind NeWS was that a Postscript renderer would be modified to allow for true Object Oriented Programming, and client/server communication. This half-document/half-pro
Re:The real question is... (Score:2)
Actually, it's really not so bad if you follow the WC3 standards. DOM Level 2 covers everything from HTML components to a JavaScript Event Model. The latter support is still lacking in IE (the LAST straggler), but it can be added by patching the document event listeners. (Does anyone know if the IE7 JS package does this already?)
HTML doesn't have enough and rich enough widgets.
HTML is not a widget factory. HTML/CSS is a document layout language that
Re:The real question is... (Score:2)
Why? Is X-Windows a Widget Factory? Is the Windows GDI a widget factory? Is Display Postscript a widget factory? Of course not! That's the domain of code written on top of these things.
As for being the level of drawing the graphics...that laughable...it horrible for that.
That's one opinion, anyway. Having spent a lot of time actually creating the types of tools I'm talking about, I have to say that it's anything *but* laughable. CSS/HT
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Informative)
More correctly, this is a document drawing level. No one ever expected HTML/CSS to go beyond simply displaying textual data to users. As a result, it still needs some beefing up. But for regular use, the lack of things like curved objects is not a show-stopper. The fact that the document elements are solid objects is actually kind of nice, because you're *not* redrawing the screen every time. You just shift y
Re:The real question is... (Score:2)
http://simplythebest.net/scripts/DHTML_scripts/dh t ml_script_34.html [simplythebest.net]
http://simplythebest.net/scripts/DHTML_scripts/dht ml_script_48.html [simplythebest.net]
http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/dhtmlc ombo.shtml [javascriptkit.com]
Re:The real question is... (Score:2)
I'm afraid you missed the point of the conversation yourself. The AC was referring to JavaScipt applications as the patch, not dynamically generated content.
Dynamically generated pages is not a bad concept. It is, however, on p
Re:The real question is...(addendum) (Score:2)
The only showstopper is if users are saying "Why should I use Internet 3 over Internet 1?" There's a lot of people in the loop that have to be convinced even to capture a subset. As a result, the technology *must* be a tremendous step up from what we have today.
Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I read this as users having no anonymity and paying through the nose for it.
Can I just keep the old internet?
Re:Summary (Score:2)
A television in every home and two cars in every garage. Opps wait wrong guy..
Re:Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
No independence, as you're then a tame pawn for a corrupt Haliburton lookalike.
Re:Summary (Score:2)
Paying through the nose is close, if you assume current high bandwidth usage behavior. Clark understands the economics of a time-share network that has become less time-share and more reserved capacity in its model.
Consider for a second the direction your broadband service is going. Factor in MPLS or whatever quality of service protocol you like. Imagine a broadband connection that gives you reserved bandwidth to anywhere for voi
Re:Summary (Score:2)
That is a crap idea. The Internet is out competing Telcos precisely because billing (and the consequent control) is not built in, allowing innovation. Insert "economic infrastructure" (a.k.a billing) and the culture of the Internet (as geeks know it) dies.
Re:Summary (Score:2)
What about a anonymous, free one [fshell.org]?
Wasn't IPv6 supposed to replace the current? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wasn't IPv6 supposed to replace the current? (Score:2)
Second of all, if IP can be carried over carrier pigions then I think IP can be carried over whatever new network they design.
In addition, IPX and IP can run on the same LAN, who's to say that this new infrastructure can't be used in parallel with IP or in the worst case computers that need to be on both networks can have 2 NICs.
Re:Wasn't IPv6 supposed to replace the current? (Score:2)
windows 9x ipx/netbeui drivers loaded by default, TCP/IP was not loaded automatically, now we have windows xp with tcp/ip loaded by default.
When it sank into the minds of the gnomes at redmond that the internet based IP protocol was so widespread, they made the effort to make that the default method of communication.
I can compile and install the IP
Let's rebuild it with (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let's rebuild it with (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Let's rebuild it with (Score:2)
Wouldn't it just start all over (Score:2)
Sooo.. internet2? (Score:2)
Reminds me of old habits (Score:5, Funny)
That approach is always more fun
Re:Reminds me of old habits (Score:3, Insightful)
"Anything you can do all at once, you could do with incremental changes," said Robert Kahn, who helped design the architecture for Arpanet, the precursor to the internet.
Kahn agrees with you, you both are against a clean sheet redesign, right?.
The thing is, although incremental improvements are easier to stomach, the question is always this: just where do we want to be? A clean sheet redesign gives us a target for successive inremental improvements, and allows a very direct
Re:Reminds me of old habits (Score:2)
Will the new network actually be a distributed network, or will it be a massive, bottlenecked POS like we have now?
I refer, of course, to the 12 major DNS servers which control our access: Internet health report [keynote.com]. One of these goes down and those of us still up see a super-slow internet. Two go down and pages fail to load as often as not. I've yet to see three go down completely, but it is bound to happen.
The abov
Re:Reminds me of old habits (Score:2)
good question. The answers will be known after they have a testable prototype.
Re: (Score:2)
Not gonna happen (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe the technical term for this is MMORPG. It appears to work pretty well with our current internet.
All joking aside, I don't think anything will change any time in the near future. IPv6 is probably the most radical change the internet will see for possibly decades to come, and that can't even catch on. People are simply not going to pay to have the internet re-architected when it is working well enough as it is; why reinvent the wheel while its still rolling. Things along these lines have been proposed before, and I'm sure will be proposed again, and I'm sure that one day, the internet will eventually be rewired. However, this is still far ahead of its time.
Cars still ride on wheels, power still goes out with storms, and cell phones still lose service underground. What makes anyone think the internet is going to be any different.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:2)
Probably because the Internet as we know it has only been around for about eleven years.
Not a bad idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I don't agree that the current internet is in-need of replacement. Creating TCP/IP packets requires significant processing power, and a simpler protocol would mean more devices being online, but by the time anything new becomes accepted, a $1 chip will be able to do it all.
If you want to improve the internet, put explicit congestion notification back into all TCP stacks, as it was before the BSD stack left it out... Goodbye massive packet loss due to minor congestion. Require all vendors to support jumbo frames... And many more small changes (to the existing internet).
Re:Not a bad idea... (Score:2)
Hello!! Multicasting!?!?!
Re:Not a bad idea... (Score:3, Informative)
As one of the other replies noted, DEFINITELY DEFINITELY have multicast. Anycasting (multicast from user, unicast from server) would be good, too, for informa
I2 (Score:3, Informative)
What the...? Are you confused by the name? I2 is just another semi-private backbone. That's all. It's occasionally a testbed, but mostly it's just a bunch of fast routers, nothing magical. It serves much the same purpose as the early Internet: connecting universities and a few large organizations.
Like Admiral Ackbar says... (Score:2, Funny)
Hashes of public keys as ip addresses? (Score:2, Interesting)
The age old wisdom.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, there's almost always better ways to do things that are only illuminated by hindsight, but that doesn't mean that the old way should just be tossed out and replaced.
Besides, the Internet is one of those amazing flukes of history. It's a very open, public, and free world unlike anything before it. Does anyone really think that something designed now in the age of terrorism, by committee, using government money (NSF) would be carefully designed to protect those initial design elements that make the Internet what it is today?
Re:The age old wisdom.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was going to carp and complain ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The premise of the existing Internet was benign cooperation. The previous /. story on the 12 minute Windows heist clearly demonstrates that that model is no longer valid.
I think it is a good time to take a look at all of the layers and see if something better is possible. I am not suggesting that Clark et. al. be given Carte Blanche to build a new Internet. The naysayers may well be right that any significant change would be practically impossible. But I do think it is a very good idea to investigate what changes are possible and what benefits those changes could provide. I'd hope that practical concerns of getting from here to there would also be explored.
Re:I was going to carp and complain ... (Score:2)
Actually, it is. What is the average time that a non-Windows computer can last hooked up to the internet before it is compromised?
The problem isn't the Internet per se, it's Windows (and naive computer neousers). Frankly, if more of those people got fed up with AOL, or whatever, and just gave up on it, things would probably be oh so slig
I don't know what this new Internet will look like (Score:4, Insightful)
If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this new Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.
Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as difficult as factoring a 2048-bit public key.
Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the physical location of the offending server. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Homeland Security Department. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives recipes or the formulas for nerve gases.) The supercomputers that constantly monitor the cameras mounted on every lampost in the United States of (God Bless It!) America will be ordered to recognize the criminals' faces, and when they are spotted trying to flee to the Amazon jungle, orbiting lasers will vaporize their bodies, leaving nary but a whisp of smoke.
When a close family friend tries to comfort one of the grieving mothers for the loss of her son, she will desperately proclaim "No, I have no children! You must have mistaken me for someone else. Please leave me alone!" before she scurries rapidly away.
National firewalls such as those employed by The People's Republic of China are expensive and difficult to maintain. They are notoriously leaky, and easy to circumvent by anyone determined enough to find out how. But worse, they impede the economic potential of emerging economies such as China, which necessarily bottleneck technical data and eCommerce in order to have a single chokepoint for the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and Pornography).
Imagine, if you will, the potential of our New Internet: not only by technical design, but by international treaty (enforced by the threat of military intervention on the part of the UN Security Council), each nation will have a national firewall which is as transparent to the air to fully-licensed Windows Media Video files of Barney the Dinosaur and paid-up Wal-Mart orders, yet absolutely impenetrable to content not sanctioned by Homeland Security, the Republican Party, the 700 Club and the Boy Scouts.
I, for one, am weary of our present Internet, cesspool that it is of moral depravity and copyright infringement. I long for the days of yore, when men were men, women wore hoopskirts, and racial minorities were separate but equal. And so, I raise my right hand and shout with an enthusiastic "Heil!":
Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/ [creativecommons.org] or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
Who? Me? (Score:5, Funny)
Uhh... Mister...? (Score:5, Funny)
When you're done with the old Internet, can we have it?
Hugs,
The Developing World.
Ok. some proposals for you. (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, absolutely mandate IPSec. Don't just "mandate" it and then ignore it, as happened with IPv6, but make it a pre-requisite for all users. That gives e-commerce a lot more assurance on secure transactions and authentication, which seems to meet one of their requirements.
Third, mnandate QoS. QoS not only guarantees network quality, which would interest a LOT of corporate users, but also provides a mechanism for increasing profit. Simply offer different levels of guaranteed quality at different prices. This meets another requirement.
Fourth, the biggest new market is in mobile devices and wireless networking. So support them! What is the point of the IETF churning out megabytes of specs on mobile IP and mobile networks, or of software developers supporting all these new protocols, if none of the ISPs or network engineers give a damn? It would also provide an additional service, therefore an additional revenue stream, therefore also meeting the profit requirement.
(Mobile networks are where all the wireless users are going to stay using the same router, but the router itself is moving through the network. If you were to have WAPs on aircraft or trains, where you are static relative to the vehicle, but the vehicle is moving between ground stations, this is probably the way you'd want to implement it.)
Fifth, it is possible to balance anonymity with accountability. Accountability merely requires that machines are who they claim they are and (where user identification is relevent) users are who they claim they are. It does NOT require that anyone actually posesses enough information to actually identify those machines or users, only that when a claim is made, it is verifiable in some way.
We already have Kerberos for authentication, so it would seem a fairly trivial extension to use that as your authentication mechanism. The token does not reveal your identity, but it can be verified with a Kerberos server in the heirarchy used for authentication by that user, to prove that the user did identify themselves correctly.
If that isn't good enough, use X.509 certificates at both host and user levels. Lots more money to be made there. It doesn't kill anonymity, as you can perfectly well have a certificate that doesn't say anything useful or self-incriminating. It would still be useful for accountability, though, as no two entities, no two machines and no two users should have identical certificates. At the very least, the key used to examine the certificate would be different, even if the content itself was identical.
This would be more than good enough to ensure that Joe Bank Manager's personal checking account could not be logged into by Sammy Script-Kiddy - there's your accountability - but would not require people in politically dangerous countries (such as the US) to reveal anything that would compromise their safety, meeting a lot of the anonymity requirement.
As for the "upgrades" cost - that's just because most providers (backbone or ISP) are too cheap to do it right the first time. Optic Fibre has been around a LONG time, and to upgrade an optic link just requires upgrading the transceivers at each end - so long as the fibre is of good enough quality. At present speeds, a single fibre can carry about 4-5 terabits per second, and typical bundles have about 20 or so fibres, giving you 100 terabits per second.
Lets say that, when the US Government was still runnin
Re:Ok. some proposals for you. (Score:2)
One day soon I hope to fsck with it.
-Myren
Re:Ok. some proposals for you. (Score:2)
I could say something vaguely amusing here, but I'll resist the temptation.
However, you're absolutely right on your other point that you need a key exchange system (not necessarily IKE, but something that'll do the same job) with X.509. I'm not certain, but I think Sun's SKIP protocol supported X.509, and that definitely didn't use IKE, as Sun regarded the whole IPSec protocol as inefficient on unreliable networks.
You are also right that Kerberos handles key exch
Re:Ok. some proposals for you. (Score:2)
Was it one of those picture challenges where you have to copy a code from a picture? I have not seen any such stuff when posting to Slashdot, and I haven't posted anonymously, so maybe it has something to do with your posting anonymously.
I have seen a different weird thing lately: Whenever I post, Slashdot scans several ports on my co
baby steps don't always cut it. (Score:2)
Don't let legacy linger forever (Score:4, Insightful)
This should apply to essential infrastructure like routers, DNS servers, SMTP servers, and so on. If a server does not understand a protocol that has been around for five years, that's reason enough to refuse connection.
If this becomes part of the standards, we won't have to support ancient legacy forever. When countries with languages other than English want readable domain names, we won't have to live forever with kludges like punycode, such kludges will stay just for five years, after that real solutions can be used instead. If/when solutions to serious problems like spam and DDoS are found and standardised, we can count on the infrastructure to support the solutions within five years. Stuff like IPv6 could spread quickly and smoothly.
Of course, having to upgrade introduces some inconvenience and expenses. But having to support ancient legacy is also inconvenient and expensive. In spite of the upgrade inconvenience, in the long run this kind of limit should save lots of money for everyone.
Now, with billing! (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy must be getting support from a telco.
Telecommunications providers hate the Internet. Not only is the Internet too cheap, it's not set up for detailed billing. The US Internet backbone cost about $1bn to build, and costs about $100 million per year to run. For something that handles over 100 million users, that's nothing. All the intelligence is in the end nodes, so telcos don't get to add "value added services" for which they can overcharge.
What telcos want is an environment they control, like cell phones. With charges for everything from ring tones to SMS messages. That's what Clark is talking about here.
The telcos tried this idea back in the 1980s, and it was called TP4, or "ISO 8073 COTP Connection-Oriented Transport Protocol - X.224" [univ-angers.fr] X.224 is very much like TCP, but without the adaptive retransmit machinery to work well over unreliable links. You're supposed to run X.224 over a reasonably reliable virtual circuit provided by a telco. For which you pay by the packet, like X.25 or ISDN. Bad idea. Windows NT4 actually had support for X.224, and some older Cisco routers understand it, but it's dead.
This is not a place we, as users, want to go.
Re:Now, with billing! (Score:2)
And what about the CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy and (ugh)AOL days. These companies weren't owned by the telcos, but you DID have to pay for everything including hourly connect charges (USD $6.30/hr), charges for using email (you had a set monthly limit that was free), etc. Then everything suddenly got much cheaper with the internet, albeit MUCH less efficient... High fees is something we have moved away from, however. I doubt very much that
What to consider (Score:2, Funny)
Instead of a new internet architecture ... (Score:2)
... how about a new Windows architecture (something that maintains the same 0wn35h1p).
... how about a new brain architecture for the masses (something that won't give out banking and PayPal passwords to every phishing email).
We have many, many fundamental problems in our society. Most of the problems of the internet are not really caused by the internet itself, but are instead reflections of ourselves, our society, and the morons that surround us.
But I wouldn't mind having an internet the way it was bac
But, that's not how it works, folks! (Score:5, Insightful)
I see many posts here about how we need to "mandate" this and "require" that and blah blah blah...
But the Internet, by design, is lasse faire! There is no "mandating" ANYTHING! Anybody can hook up to their neighbor, who hooks up to some guy across town, who is hooked up to a couple other folks...
The Internet is DECENTRALIZED and OPEN. The closest it gets to mandating anything is the much-disputed RBLs. I, for example, block all email from most Asian countries - nothing personal, but it sure drops the SPAM load with virtually no complaints. But, I can't mandate what the Chinese or Koreans do with their network - I can only mandate what they do with respect to MY networks.
The Internet is merely a commonly agreed upon set of standards for communications across disparate networks, and it's performing the task of connecting networks the world over with grace and flair.
Don't tell me that just because Windows systems get infected in 12 minutes, that the Internet is broken. Sorry. The Internet is working fantastically. It's Windows that's broken. It's not up to the task of functioning on a globally accessable network.
So far, every significant "problem" I've heard with the Internet hasn't been with the Internet, but with the systems at its fringes. SPAM. zombies. Worms. Viruses. Exploits. All are simply side effects of a "zero friction network" as espoused by the all-knowing Bill Gates in his 90's book, "The Road Ahead", combined with systems not able to cope with the ramifications.
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, Linus Torvalds, and all the others are learning now what that truly means, and over the next decade or so, we'll see major advances in developing the kind of security needed to handle this frictionless network.
In short: the Internet is doing just fine, people! It's the systems hooked up to it that have problems!
I know what I'd like embedded.... (Score:2)
The next item of news (Score:2)
Gentlemen, we can rebuilt it ... (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory. (Score:4, Informative)
Fixing it (Score:2, Interesting)
#1 Change: User side one time only credit charges. The only way to do a transaction would be to use an encrypted transaction that would prevent fishing from being any good at all. This would be more of a banking change, and most people would hate it, but the whole CC# and Bank info phishing has to end, the transaction mechanism needs to change.
#2 Change:
Re:NSF? (Score:2)
Good game, seems to include the best aspects from both RPGs and FPSs.
Please (Score:4, Funny)
pr0n and Sci-Fi are the backbone of the Internet. Name an advance in Internet technology that didn't come from the pr0n community first. I mean, what else do you use 'tabbed browsing' for? Business?