Researchers Scheming to Rebuild Internet From Scratch 254
BobB writes "Stanford University researchers have launched an initiative called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. The project aims to make the network more secure, have higher throughput, and support better applications, all by essentially rebuilding the Internet from scratch. From the article: 'Among McKeown's cohorts on the effort is electrical engineering Professor Bernd Girod, a pioneer of Internet multimedia delivery. Vendors such as Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and NEC are also involved. The researchers already have projects underway to support their effort: Flow-level models for the future Internet; clean slate approach to wireless spectrum usage; fast dynamic optical light paths for the Internet core; and a clean slate approach to enterprise network security (Ethane).'"
The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:5, Funny)
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1. Robust and available
2. Inherently secure.
3. Support mobile end-hosts
4. Economically viable and profitable.
5. Evolvable.
6. Predictable
7. Support anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary.
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unfortunately, that doesn't help those in governments where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can get you locked up without a trial. Similar things have happened to a couple American citizens (and people unfortunate enough to have been noticed by the American administration, accidentally or otherwise) in America. Your innocence is only a protection if those who would persecute you need to prove your guilt. It does nothing when you
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunatly, I'm afraid they will make it more censorable, more business oriented vs. regular people, less anonymous, more regulated, govt/UN controlled, politically correct...and as someone mentioned, full DRM support forever.
Frankly, for all its faults, I like the internet now as it is...kind of the 'wild west' of information. That just has to 'kill' some of those in power around the world.
I think the last thing we want to do, is recreate it, now that those in power know what free flow of information can do...
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Indeed, the only way to "recreate" it is to make it even more decentralized and unregulated!
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Wild West" exists (and perhaps always has existed) mostly in fiction.
In history it begins with the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and ends in 1876 at the Little Big Horn. The Last Stand for the Plains Indians as well as for Custer.
It's a brief moment in time - and, in some ways, a pattern of settlement unique to the United States.
It shouldn't surprise anyone if the Internet frontier has it's own ending.
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Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't you see the story the other day?
We are [reactos.org].
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A rewrite/new tech doesn't always mean real-life solution. See OGG vs. MP3.
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Of course, the idea of rebuilding the internet is a load of bull. The article lists a bunch of things you supposedly can't do with regular protocols, and takes those as reasons for change. They seem to think we can't do multicast, QOS, or security with current protocols. They also seem to think that, since wireless is so d
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Damnit (Score:5, Funny)
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They're not just working on Internet3. They're working on Internet360, which is 120 times better than plain old Internet3.
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Or, 120 degrees in the wrong direction.
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Don't worry - (Score:2)
Worse than you think (Score:2)
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Re:Damnit (Score:5, Funny)
~ Some Microsoft noob
Hmm.. (Score:2, Funny)
These days ... (Score:2)
These days all he'd be interested in is how much power it consumed.
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Re:Hmm.. (Score:4, Funny)
Pssst... I think you may find this page informative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke [wikipedia.org]
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Flamebait? Maybe.
Offtopic? I beg to differ. Grandparent illustrates the trap that many of us fell into in 1999-2000: It's fun to make fun of Al Gore!
It was fun, it was easy, and it had consequences. You may remember that the 2000 election was rather close.
Sounds great... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Oh, that's simple. Don't put any pr0n, MP3z, movies, or warez on it until it goes live. Then, unleash the .torrents of hell.
What are the odds (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What are the odds (Score:4, Informative)
In my opinion, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed for an "Internet for the future". One of the biggest hurdles of course is the address space shortage of IPv4, but there are a lot of other issues which need to be solved. Just to name a few:
- More flexible routing of unique identifiers (let's call them IP numbers), so I can take my "identifier" with me (think mobile phones)
- A solution to the ever growing "global routing table" (BGP4 as it is used today)
- Better support for quality of service from end-to-end.
- Better "multicasting" support, also end-to-end. (Let's avoid burning down networks during "cataclysmic" events)
- Better redundancy. Although dynamic routing protocols should heal this problems, in practice they often fail to do this. Especially in cases where connections are semi-dead)
- A much better built-in protection against DDoSes and other kind of abuses.
Unfortunately, IPv6 really fixes none of those problems, except the IP number shortage. IPv6 also comes at great costs, since you need to upgrade your whole infrastructure at once, or it isn't really usable.
So, IPv6 might have been a nice lesson for the next generation "IP protocol". IMHO this next generation should take the following things in mind:
- Transition only works if it plays nicely with the legacy stuff during the transition.
- Transition has either to be cheap or must have so many advantages that you simply cannot refuse.
- Vendors need to agree upon a single standard, or somebody with a large impact should "dictate" it in the worst scenario.
Reading TFA, I was quite disapointed, because anything about how this transition to this cleanslate network seems to be absent at this time. But it is still a research project and maybe somebody did learn something from the IPv6 "fiasco".
Re:What are the odds (Score:5, Insightful)
The flip side is that some of your suggestions can have detrimental effects too:
In other words, better support for introducing favoritism between ISPs and content providers, so that (for example) AT&T can extort money from Google and shut down BitTorrent. No thanks; I prefer the "dumb," route-everything-equally, neutral Internet we have now.
And much better protection against free speech, anonymity, etc. Again, no thanks.
Yeah, that "somebody" being AT&T or Microsoft, who would undoubtedly screw it up with Treacherous Computing, built-in "micropayment" toll booths, and assorted other bullshit. Still sound like a great idea?
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Re:What are the odds (Score:4, Insightful)
Not exactly (Score:5, Informative)
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There are several mechanisms for running IPv4 and IPv6 side by side, and that was a major part of the discussion in the IPv6 rollout early on. Medium sized chunks of the net were running IPv6 [6bone.net] for quite a while, and were routed in and out of fairly seamlessly.
transition mechanisms were designed [tascomm.fi], long before IPv6 was adopted by the IETF. (the linked RFC is from 1995).
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IPv6 designers also put in tools designed to provide for mobile endpoints, although better designs have come out since.
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IPv6 provides and uses multicast addresses as part of it's initial design, and its multicast is being used [cisco.com] successfully.
You can claim that the implementations provided weren't good enough (although I'd like to see some actual data to back that up), but in fact the folks that did IPv6 did have all of those goals in mind when they put IPv6 together.Re: (Score:2)
- A solution to the ever growing "global routing table" (BGP4 as it is used today)
I don't think it's possible to have both at the same time. A solution for a portable unique identifier already exists (DNS), and trying to achieve portability down at layer 3 could get real ugly and computationally expensive. DNS can be distributed very easily and allows leaf nodes to do the UR
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Presumably a non-trivial increase in connection speed would be a much bigger draw to people.
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Won't work IMO (Score:2)
Re:Won't work IMO (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to know how they're going to avoid the second system effect with their new internet. One of the big reasons the Internet works is because a lot of effort was spent in keeping everything reasonably simple. Time has shown that anything that start out highly complicated tends to be only very slowly adopted, if at all. IP may have terrible security but at least it doesn't require someone 10 man-years to build a fully compliant router.
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Once that part is done moving to better hardware will be easier.
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Clean Slate Precursor (Score:2)
Kinda flammable, and not shiny enough. I suggest we take it one step further and use ethylene.
anonymity vs. accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the most interesting criteria for a new internet, to me, was criteria #7:
Support anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems true anonymity is becoming more and more important, and less and less available, as governments snoop more on the internet.
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Yeah, I'm not sure how to fix this, but it seems to me that it's the single greatest problem with the internet. If you really know what you're doing, you can stay anonymous when you want to do something nefarious. However, if you're just a standard know-nothing user, all your innocuous activities are recorded all the time.
That's the exact opposite of what you want. It's not an unusual sort of security problem, and like I said, I don't know how to fix it because how do you distinguish between nefarious a
Re:anonymity vs. accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, unless you want this to be a tool only for and by the government, you've got to get businesses comfortable with it. Banks. Retailers. Airlines. Anonymity (of the you-can't-track-my-pr0n-use, or the posting-as-a-troll, or the PRC-can't-ID-the-rebel variety) is antithetical to trustworthy transactions, and without money changing hands, the plumbing is WAY less useful to the huge swaths of the economy that would fund (indirectly) the growth and adoption of such a thing.
"Where prudent" and "as necessary" etc., are completely subjective. People who like to rip off movies have one set of priorities, and people who administer your payroll or need to transmit your cancer meds prescription are looking at it from a very different perspective.
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But that's not to say that they can't happen over the same infrastructure. Even today, you can send an e-mail with a fake address routed through some random SMTP server and it's pretty hard to trace. -or- You can digitally sign and encrypt e-mail traffic. Assuming the infrastructure can support both, it's a question of whether endpoints will accept
WTF is Ethane? (Score:2)
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What's so damned hard about that?
Hasn't this been tried before? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, a great many projects that aim to "start from scratch" don't really make it. However, it's often the case that starting from scratch enables people to think about solutions from a fresh perspective, without all their old assumptions. Even if the actual "from scratch" product never really comes about, or if it comes about and is unsuccessful, often the solutions and the fresh insight creep into the old legacy systems' updates.
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OS/2 failed not because it was a clean sheet but because it wasn't. IBM insisted that it run on the 286. Microsoft wanted to drop the 286 and design a version that would be multi-platform and 32-bit so IBM pushed ahead with Microsoft's help with OS/2 2.0 and Microsoft started work on Version 3... They later stuck the windows GUI on it and called it Windows NT.
Itanium? Who knows. The PentiumPro as lo
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It's success/failure is not even remotely comparable to OS/2 or the Itanium... get a clue!
What I really want (Score:2, Funny)
Who's In Charge? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clean Slate Design (Score:2)
This reminds me of Meskimen's Law... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This reminds me of Meskimen's Law... (Score:4, Insightful)
In theory, ten years of computer science research might have produced a better design for the internet than the one we have today, back when it was first being developed. However, we have learned a lot from the scale-up that on a practical level would be fairly hard to duplicate in a research setting. Sometimes you just don't think of the possible consequences until you see them happen, particularly things due to human beings TRYING to bring down the system. Think about how long telnet lasted, for example.
In all honesty, it's a miracle the world wide web has scaled the way it has - consider the original scope of the military networks and the small amounts of data they were transmitting. The original designs were to Get Something Working and Justify Our Budget - that's how it has to work. I'd say the return on investment for the various stages of the internet has always more than justified even the costs of redoing it. Sometimes you can't wait to figure out how to do it right, because that will take too much time and what you can build NOW is still useful. Think about automobiles - 10 years from now we will undoubtedly be building better ones than we can build today, but the costs of waiting until we know how to do it "right" are much higher than the costs of replacement.
Now, of course, the question of knowing how to do something right is distinct from doing correctly what we already know how to do - one is a research problem, one is an implementation problem. I'm inclined to think that the web is more of a research limitation than a "do it right" issue, although I could be wrong - it depends on how much was known in the beginning states.
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I think he was mocking the clean slate scheme, rather than criticizing the original design of the internet. As far as I'm concerned, the internet was done right (which doesn't mean it was finished and carved in stone thirty years ago, but rather the opposite).
Clean Slate vs. Gummed-upTubes (Score:2)
Get rid of the porn, scam sites and domain squatters - however, this may not be possible.
Re:Clean Slate vs. Gummed-upTubes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Clean Slate vs. Gummed-upTubes (Score:5, Insightful)
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You sick bastard !
I do it in the shower, I have a great memory.
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(Yes, I know the song is from Avenue Q... it's still a funny video)
Thats it... I'm gona make my OWN internet. (Score:5, Funny)
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From overlooked-irony dept (Score:2)
Oh yeah, we really need this :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's get the guys that designed all those "wonderful" networks:
Oh yeah, let's get the "EXPERTS" involved!
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Morse Code. In general use 1844-1999.
Trivially easy to adapt to almost any form of signaling, including assistive technology for the disabled.
TeleText 1970-to date.
In the U.S. most easily recognizable as Closed Captioning for the Hearing Impaired. But it's the root of the web page and any form of interactive television.
Telex ca 1935-to date.
Rugged, reliable and cheap. In Germany alone, more than 400,000 telex lines remain in daily operat
Interesting (Score:2)
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What I like about plan 9 is that it would work with everything. You could install it on a tv to act just as a remote or local display. it doesn't care.
with plan 9 the network is just another conduit for passing back data. it doesn't matter what physical resource you are using or where on the network it is located. To the OS it is all the same.
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Fully agreed. For instance, NTFS supports alternate data streams, which are essentially really huge extended attributes. (They're a generalized version of HFS's resource and data forks. A number of other filesystems support similar things now too, such as HFS+, ZFS, and ReiserFS4 v4 in a slightly differen
Involve the porn barons! (Score:2)
Get the guys (and gals?) with the high multimedia delivery needs in on it from the start - they'll give you more bangs for the buck for both conception and practical trialling of the new system.
Great! (Score:2)
Rebuild the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets rebuild the internet because it uses too much open source software and we are not making enough money. I know! Lets get all the vendors together and rebuild it using proprietary crud so that it is impossible for any of these "open source" guys to make server platforms that are freely available.
Lets kill open standards too, because well....who needs those IETF guys anyway! They are just a bunch hippies!
Seriously, though. The internet works better than my cell phone does.
It doesn't need "fixing".
It just needs a few upgrades.
IPV6 would be a nice place to start!
GAD.
The thought of CISCO having a hand in anything the future internet could be makes me want to quit my current network manager job and open an Italian Restraunt.
-gc
-hack
Re:Rebuild the Internet (Score:4, Informative)
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The point is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The issues with the existing structure have already been addressed (IPv6, regardless of adoption rate), so I don't see what advantage there is to further development when we don't even have an idea yet what needs to be fixed.
Yeah, good luck with that. (Score:2)
I see the New Internet joining New Coke in the dustbin of history.
Not just Stanford (Score:2)
hey, lets revive DECnet Phase V! (Score:3, Insightful)
(and it got about as much attention as ipv6. they both planned for 'big networks' but we all know how popular OSI is, in the real world...)
They'll end up with a nice neat network (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's going to be useful, it has to talk to everything, that's the whole point of the network effect.
Nice try, but you are a little late (Score:2, Insightful)
-port all known software/libs to use the new protocols
-get all vendors of networking equip to issue major firmware upgrades to switches/hubs/firewalls anything that speaks on the network.
-rewrite networking code for top 6 most p
Internet Mail 2000 anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
The name is crappy, but the concept is a really good start. It's a shame this never caught on. Basically, Email's Subjects and Bodies are split, and the Subject is sent to the Receiver, and the Body is stored at the Sender's server. When the Receiver gets the Subject notification, they connect to the Sender's server and download the Body.
The point of this strange scheme would be to crush spammers under the weight of their own To list, by having millions of incoming connections. The burden of storage goes to the Sender, not the Receiver.
That should be one of the technologies Web 11.0 should implement. Somebody call up Al Gore and tell him this.
new internet (Score:2)
Content Management (Score:2, Insightful)
so the real question is... (Score:2, Funny)
A new Internet economics. A worse Internet. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Outrageous! The rich treated the same as the poor!" They want an internet in which a porn movie downloaded by a CEO preempts and disturbs a critical communication from a hospital to an investigation center.
The internet as we have it is an open field. A dumb, simple, protocol so that people can innovate in the sides. This enabled us to be independent from ISP and to design new protocols (Gnutella, Bittorrent, etc.). Of course, they now say that this "dumbness" produced lack of innovation:
It's not clear to me how having a more complex internet in the middle will be able to ease its growth. It seems as the opposite, as more complex middleware will be more complex to upgrade and setup. In fact, the main reason the current internet has "ossificated" *is* dumbness in the middle, but other kind of dumbness. The commercial companies' dumb administrators, dumb managers, who didn't care to provide us multicast, IPv6, mobile ip, IPsec, etc.
The Internet as we have it could never had happened if it were for the private sector. It's too open, private companies don't like standards. See how the classical internet infrastructure got frozen when the commercial companies took over internet in the last century. HTTP, IMAP, POP, HTML, etc. got stuck in their last versions. It's because Internet needs a strong *public* presence. Companies can exist, provide service, but Internet needs a strong presence by the people (in the form of the state..? Universities? I don't know...)
This group is not aiming at a better, utopic, internet. They are trying to recapture what they've lost when their CCITT (X.25, X.400, X.500) network wreck.
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Just wait a few months for the USA to invade Iran, causing both Iran and North Korea to launch nukes, followed by the USA's inevitible retaliation. All the EMP's will burn out the vast majority of the existing internet, paving the way for the quick adoption of all this new technology!
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Re:What material will they use? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually they discovered the problem is that the current internet is a bunch of tubes. Tubes get clogged. The new internet will be big trucks you dump stuff on.
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This new design is going to get steamrolled by the freight train that is Internet 1.0.
There. Much better.
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It has nothing to do with slander, and everything to do with not trusting government or those in power. When people in China are getting arrested for speaking out online against their leaders, it makes me nervous.
How long until disagreeing with the party line makes you a terrorist and yields you the same treatment here?
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