What Does the 'Next Internet' Look Like? 283
Kraisch writes with a link to the Guardian website, which again revisits the subject of reconstructing the internet. This time the question isn't whether it should be done, but what should the goals of a redesign be? From the article: "'There's a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you're talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you're really doing so,' said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. At the moment we are still using very clumsy methods to approach such problems. The result: last year alone, identity theft and online fraud cost British victims an estimated £414m, while one recent report claimed 93% of all email sent from the UK was spam ... Many ideas revolve around so-called "mesh networks", which link many computers to create more powerful, reliable connections to the internet. By using small meshes of many machines that share a pipeline to the net instead of relying on lots of parallel connections, experts say they can create a system that is more intelligent and less prone to attack."
It looks like (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It looks like (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously. How about plain text, maybe a standard color and graphics set, no embedded content, downloadable material only. We could even let the government have their infinite monitoring system. If it were all plain text then there'd be no secret to it. To make encoded binary workarounds undesireable, limit the whole sha-bang to 4800 bps. That'll please the recording industry too. Blank CD sales will go through the roof.
Draw a few lines to keep the network secure. Let the crowd whine and cry that it's too difficult to download a file and open it locally with the appropriate application. Those people never really wanted or needed computers anyway. Let them go back to playing dominos or Yahtzee or something.
Do you realize how many problems we could solve by putting the open network back on the terms that it should never have left?
Re:It looks like (Score:5, Insightful)
The OP meant 1984 in an Orwellian sense. Which is much likelier than the scenario you describe.
I dread an overhaul of "The Internet", whatever that even means, because there is no way in hell it would be allowed to be the Wild West that it is today. It would certainly be much more like television or radio in that large corporations would "broadcast" to you and user generated content would be completely on their terms. Gone would be the days where anyone could start up a website about anything; some sort of expensive license would be required and personal pages would be relegated to whatever version of Myspace or Facebook still exists. Anonymity would, of course, be impossible.
The goverment and communications companies were taken by surprise the first time around.. That's not happening again.
How Much Does Correct ID Cost? (Score:2)
My Question: How much did it cost British victims to have a correct identity and have a clerical error or other problem occur with their accounts? I bet it's 10-20 times this number. Which goes to show, there are bigger problems. I hate it when newsies put a dollar figure on something like this. Identity is not really a big problem in groupthink anyway--just abstract the individual as an average of t
The cost of identity and a clerical error (Score:2)
/ you may note the Official. It was the guy who played Arthur Dent [wikipedia.org] in the TV version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Re:It looks like (Score:4, Funny)
That means that any and every participant can be identified. Anonymity leads to fraud and hence it cannot be tolerated. If you post anything, it should always be possible to trace that back to you.
Also, there should be good record keeping of all online activity, not just for receipt verification but also for legal purposes. This gives the added benefit of making cyber-terrorism more difficult, and enabling a wider range of response options for law enforcement.
Also, there should be very tight controls on the sorts of actions that people can take online. The duplication of intellectual property is illegal, so the system should be designed in such a way that makes this nearly impossible to do (and easy to observe and pinpoint when done). A good way to do this would be to have a central registry of file transfers that administers file transfer licenses on a case-by-case bases. Vendors can pre-authorize the repeated distribution of their products while individuals will need to individually authorize each file they want to transfer. The files in question will, of course, have copies preserved for tracking purposes.
Lastly, better controls on encrypted data exchange need to be put in place. When everyone and his brother can encrypt their communications it becomes impossible to enforce the intellectual property laws which serve as the backbone of the new economy. Ideally individual users would never be able to encrypt anything unless working within the some pre-approved context, such as development on a government contract or what-have-you. Again, some central agency should serve as the distributor of encryption licenses, granting them in bulk to vendors as appropriate for the nature of their business.
Such an Internet would make it much more difficult for people to commit IP crimes, thus freeing up law enforcement resources to focus on other matters. Also, it would allow businesses to easily keep very accurate track of the activities of their clients, and trade this information with one another for demographic marketing efficiency. The greatest benefits of all go to the consumer, of course, since they will have convenient access to online products of every variety for very affordable prices...that alone being more than enough justification for requiring them to absorb the costs of all the data-tracking that needs to be done in order for this infrastructure to exist.
The future is so bright, I need to dim my monitor!
Re:It looks like (Score:5, Funny)
AOL!
Re:It looks like (Score:4, Insightful)
That means that any and every participant can be identified. Anonymity leads to fraud and hence it cannot be tolerated. If you post anything, it should always be possible to trace that back to you.
Also, there should be good record keeping of all online activity, not just for receipt verification but also for legal purposes. This gives the added benefit of making cyber-terrorism more difficult, and enabling a wider range of response options for law enforcement.
Also, there should be very tight controls on the sorts of actions that people can take online...."
Wow....I don't even know where to start to reply to this, I seriously hope this is a troll and no one truly wants this. If you were serious, man, I'd be scared to live in your world.
That first statement...I dunno, I work, I earn money, but only to live and have fun...it is NOT my primary concern. And commerce can and did exist quite well before the internet. Believe it or not, commerce was a late commer to the internet age...it wasn't invented for commerce, and I see no reason it should change and lose the things that make it great just to accomodate commerce. If they want a separate network for that, ok, but, not the common internet.
I can see the 'wild west' days of the internet coming to a close already, kinda sad. I personally like it unregulated, where any crackhead is free to spout off anything they want, and rant as long as their modem holds out. In the midst of all that's out there, I've found some interesting stuff, and some valid viewpoints that have changed my views on many things.
I hope they never take away the ability for Joe Sixpack or Thomas Genius to freely get on and publish what they want. That scares the govt. and those in power in some cases. That's why anonymity is often needed too.
If they lock down the internet (Web, USENET, etc...), it sure will make a day of surfing around a lot less fun and informative.
Woooooosh... (Score:3, Informative)
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I didn't think you liked slashdot.
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Rather ironic that this little monograph was posted Anonymous Coward, eh?
300 baud dial-up! (Score:2)
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It will be a dark repressive place, devoid of any humanity or honest information.
Dont throw away your modems, i can see the world of local dialup BBS's returning.
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I know what it looks like (Score:5, Funny)
I don't care what it looks like (Score:4, Funny)
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You're saying it will be mostly Canadian?
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I happen to have a preliminary overview of the design, although it's just the abstract:
#
NeXT Internet? (Score:2)
Oh, you mean after the Web 2.0 bubble bursts [slashdot.org]? Probably like a deflated weather balloon just waiting for capital to be pumped in for Web 3.0.
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Meet the New Internet... (Score:4, Funny)
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But we "Won't Get Fooled Again."
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My ideals on the "next internet". (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever seen the Ghost in the Shell [wikipedia.org] movies and series? Make that "Net" real.
Re:My ideals on the "next internet". (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My ideals on the "next internet". (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, and I want it to be not more than 5mm thick, never need recharging, and be stylish and elegant. And a pony.
Re:My ideals on the "next internet". (Score:4, Funny)
No, you can't have a pony [tri-bit.com].
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I agree, but I'd go one step further.
Everyone should be assigned a personal cert by a central authority as part of signing on. For communication where you want to be able to verify your authenticity, you use the personal cert. Everyone can use this cert for anything---encrypted communications, commerce, etc. In addition, they should be allowed to use it to sign and revoke keys for other systems such as web servers that act as proxy to a sale, provide a secure connection for ssh, etc. At that point, if
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Trouble is...once this is done, they'll then make it MANDATORY to use this cert to sign on....there would be no more 'when you want to' to it any longer.
I'd rather take my chances on protecting my identity...and allow myself and other to have anonymity when needed or wanted.
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No, no, the personal key should not be part of the protocol at all. In fact, it should be explicitly banned from being used in any way other than to manually sign keys for someone or something operating on your behalf or to manually sign documents used in commerce. Laws should be written to protect the use of this key just as it protects the use of a social security number.
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I still don't understand why His Majesty the King of Sweden won't sign my GnuPG key. Or some equivalent national system.
There's something like it in .se: "E-legitimation".
A certificate you can order from the major banks.
However, it ap
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Not completely orthogonal. I'm saying that it would be useful to have a standardized additional protocol---a document signing protocol, if you will---for the explicit purpose of providing a document to be signed, signing it, and returning the signed copy. I'm also saying that getting an ISP account should give you a key (or ideally several keys) that you can use for those purposes. It need not be vetted by a central authority; your ISP's acknowledgement that you are the owner of your ISP account is suffi
Save us from morons (Score:2)
Mesh networks? Interesting for some uses, useful for places with no cellular or wifi connectivity. Otherwise just a hassle- low speed, sharing issues, and a high risk of man in the middle attacks.
I'll keep th
Re:Save us from morons (Score:4, Insightful)
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This sounds familiar (Score:4, Funny)
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But, for the love of god, WILL IT RUN LINUX?!?
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uh.. put that knife down..
the internet is for porn (Score:5, Funny)
except with more high quality Blu-Ray porn of course
There is no next. (Score:2, Interesting)
No more anonymous cowards? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, a non-anonymous internet provides even more incentive for identity theft. "No, no it wasn't me who was looking at gay porn. See, look at the ID"
These people have serious free time... (Score:2)
That sounds like a man-in-the-middle attacker's dream. I like today's system of "connect directly from my desktop to my bank". Count me out.
Re:These people have serious free time... (Score:4, Insightful)
The "new internet" (Score:5, Interesting)
* No more anonymity. You'll need to identify yourself just to get onto the network, and protections will be in place to keep you from hiding behind a proxy. Your computer's unique ID will be registered in your name, and it will be available to the FBI, CIA, and RIAA upon request (no warrant required).
* Large barrier to entry. No more setting up your own server without getting special permission to act as a server. There will be a barrier between servers and clients, and consumers will be second-class citizens in this regard.
* Probably less spam. Tighter controls will make it harder for spammers to get their unwanted traffic into the intertubes. Also, now that it's possible to implement an email tax, email spam could be made prohibitively expensive.
* Better security. Locking the internet down will help somewhat in keeping the criminal element out, because it will (theoretically) be a lot easier to trace where they're coming from.
So, you win some, you lose some. There's a use for this kind of network, but only for secure transactions. I don't think a "new internet" is something that anyone here would want to use.
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In general, I'd take our current Intarweb over that, warts and all.
Re:The "new internet" (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple disagreements:
Correction, less unauthorized spam. You'll get more than your daily dose of Real Official Good For You spam straight from whoever owns the Internext.
I'd lean heavily on the "theoretically" part. There's still registered handguns killing people, licensed drivers doing illegal things on the road, and scammers using Ma Bell's network. The Internext might change the frequency and face of Bad Shit Going Down, but won't eliminate it.
Re:The "new internet" (Score:5, Insightful)
Large corporations are horrible with regards to security. It's a rare exception that they have better security. More importantly, on this level they will - if at all - have the better security for them, not for the users. Which means we will face the same virus, trojans and bot networks problem as right now, with the spam coming right out of those owned machines.
The most likely bullet point that you forgot to mention is this one:
* It won't work. There will be 500 incompatible, competing, closed protocols for everything. And players like MS will add new variations on purpose all the time, so every time the market consolidates, it'll be splintered again, except among less players.
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The first internet was designed by governments and large corporations, and yet we don't have any of those things you mention.
Privacy concerns (Score:4, Interesting)
I view this much in the same way as why a presidential election is kept as a secret ballot. Much of the information about browsing history and activities can reflect both positively and negatively on your own personal views which one should have the ability to keep private if they wish. In this way we can choose our religious, moral and personal views much more freely and need not tolerate unwarranted persecution.
I just hope this idea isn't being considered too seriously.
Where are the trolls? (Score:5, Funny)
Change will be evolutionary (Score:2, Insightful)
Within a few years, expect almost every computer to have a TPM-like chip installed. It will be up to the user and the operating system to provide support for this chip. However, banks and similar web sites may refuse to talk to customers who are not using these chips.
What will the future hold? Some entities, like Banks, will insist on stronger authenti
Excuse Me, But... (Score:2)
Well Excuse Me, But, two attack vectors are immediately apparent:
The single pipeline is a single point of failure.
Low power jamming, or simple data flooding, of the mesh.
ID theft is not an internet problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
ID theft is not limited to the internet. The waiter who takes away your credit card, or people who steal from your mailbox, or people who file a change of address form to intercept your mail, or employees who have access to the credit card numbers in the sales/accounting dept, employees in doctor's offices or hospital billing dept, can steal identities.
It is stupid to assume id theft is an internet problem or to find technical solution for it when there is no incentive for the credit industry to cut down on it. If a lender damages my credit rating by lax lending, the lender is liable for a sum like 10% of my annual income. Then they will clean up their act in a hurry.
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I noticed this in TFA too; you guys need to switch credit card companies if they make you pay for unauthorized use of your credit card. I've had it happen to me before, someone just stole my CC#, I told the CC company and they took it from there (it was around $200 spent online). It was a Visa CC from USAA but I also have a B
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In America there is no reason to drown in debt except for the extremely poor people. There is no public transportation infrastructure here. So the poorest of the poor are just one fender bender, one alternator failure, one radiator failure or one medical emergency from bankruptcy. Their
Poorest of the poor? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm 25 years old, just finished at university (with a crappy degree that won't be of much use to me), and have been working between half and full time at about 2x minimum wage for the past five years while in school. I rent a room in a four-bedroom house with some friends of mine, at the lowest rates I can find in this town. (Admittedly an expensive town - Santa Barbara, CA - but it's where I grew up and I'm still here). I couldn't afford to rent the wh
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Tubes of course. (Score:2)
Mesh networks and security... (Score:2)
encrypted, decentralized p2p network (Score:4, Interesting)
Now instead of just email, change this to any kind of data. Create your own username with a private key, and you can use it to get access to data directed to you on any machine connected to the PKI network.
Want anonymity? Just create another identity.
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Freenet is very similar to this, but suffers from being incredibly slow. I loved the idea when I first heard of it, but after trying it and having to wait 5 minutes for any sort of content to load I gave up on the idea. The problem is that there needs to be some way to intelligently perform routing, just passing data down the stream doesn't cut it in a decentralized environment.
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Yes (Score:2, Interesting)
Good enough idea, but internet[0] can already do this.
Proceed to shitlist everyone that you've yet to arrange a keyswap with, and enjoy fully encrypted communication.(--If both parties agree that a bond via electronic communication is 'important enough,' you'll soon see your f[r]iends converted to encryption in an eyeblink..)
Should you wish to 'invite' more people once they turn responsible, you're free to do so.
(Effectivity by using lowest acceptable sanity-denominator.)
There is no next, just evolution (Score:2, Insightful)
The Internet as we know it will always improve a series of small steps and as time goes by it will get faster, and improved. The one year your local Telco will offer 512k DSL lines, the next they suddenly have 4mbit lines available. But inbetween there was 768k, 1024k, etc.
--deckert
The real issues, and how to fix them. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are only a few major issues:
- Identifying sellers. If you're a seller, you can't be anonymous. That's the law in California and the European Union, but enforcement is weak. We're dealing with that at SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], where we try to find the business behind the web site. If we can't, we downgrade their search ranking.
- Identifying buyers. That's a problem for the credit card industry. If they really considered it a problem, they'd fix it. They have the tools. One-time credit card numbers, confirmation by cell phone, smart credit cards - solutions are known.
- Spam Spam by legitimate businesses mostly died with CAN-SPAM, because anything clearly identifiable can be easily filtered. Everything left comes from crooks. And not very many different crooks. Notice how few different spams get through your filters. What's left is a law enforcement problem. Someday the main Viagra spammer will be found and arrested, and that problem will shrink. The US SEC is working the pump-and-dump problem.
- Vulnerable clients Make Microsoft financially liable and the problem gets fixed, fast.
We don't need to redesign the Internet, much as some telcos would like to so they can raise rates. All the major problems are at the endpoints.What will the next Internet look like? (Score:2)
Multi langauge urls. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just having most Chinese and Indians on the net. The governments quickly find that they don't need grand cultural firewalls. China and India making editing/expanding wikipedia a primary school class that students start in elementary school and have every year thereafter.
oblig. futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Professor Farnsworth: Actually, that's still the case.
QD - Futurist! (Score:2)
And better, um, fonts.
It looks like this one: (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll take the spam.
Pick two (Score:2)
Privacy (Anonymity), Accountability, Connected.
Pick 2.
The "Problem" Is Open Endedness (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The "Problem" Is Open Endedness (Score:5, Insightful)
The layered approach is the greatest thing ever. The network we use today looks nothing like it did in the 80's, and yet nobody had to build a "new Internet" to get us here. Does anyone remember the big wavelength division multiplexing upgrades in the 90's? Or the shift away from ATM? No, you don't, because it happened without you having to realize it. (I know, unless you work for a communications company...)
In order to have this flexibility, you need to have a dumb network at the base, that simply routes packets as quickly as possible. Any tradeoff designed to increase performance will adversely affect flexibility, and I think we can all agree the flexibility is a huge win.
I want it (Score:3, Funny)
hmmm. (Score:4, Funny)
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It would help keep your identity from being stolen. Which, I think it has. Just look at all the folks who have been posting under your name!
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Of course real criminals would have ready access to false credentials. There's of course nothing new to fake id, whether that's false passports, drivers licenses or whatever.
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How does that jive with anonymous cowards wanting to keep thier identity hidden?
When I think online identity management, I don't think name, social security number, age, etc.
There just needs to be ubiquitous and robust means to confirm that Anonymous Coward 2058436658 is Anonymous Coward 2058436658. Whether you attach that identification to a real name & information (or not) should be immaterial.
I'm divided over any attempts to create a mandatory means of identifying internet users by age. On the one hand, maybe the government will create a walled off under 18 internet, which mean
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Re:The first thing to come to my head... (Score:5, Funny)
"Ooooooohhhhhh? You have no idea!
Ready Normal People?"
"Ready."
"Ready."
"Ready."
"Let me hear it!"
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Stupid. All the privacy/identity stuff they want can be implemented in the existing framework using encryption and personal certificates, but start encrypting everything, and the government will shit its pants, so that never happens.
As for upgrading the protocols, etc, the fact is that simple pro
Re:Is this the one? (Score:4, Insightful)
We wouldn't even need to raise the question of a "next internet" if people were trained to pay attention to the domain info in their browser address bar, and in the links underneath their mouse pointer. That's in addition to using and paying attention to certificates/SSL status as you pointed out.
Every person who opens a browser window should have an intense awareness of the various certificate alerts that the browser may display (what what to do about them).
That all is not a lot to ask of the average Internet user. I'd even bet its far less complicated and frustrating than what a "Next Internet" with remote attestation scheme would demand from users' time and attention.
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No shit Sherlock.
Or Apple vs Boing. Or Microsoft vs BMW. (Even worst, since TCP and IP are 2 different things).
What are you trying to compare ? Ethernet and Token Ring, or IP and IPX ? Just so you know, IP is anything but simple. And Ethernet doesn't work better than Token Ring. It simply is better. You have several factors that have nothing to do with "working better", like cost.
Also, there is always the
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For certain problem sets, yes. There are a lot of cases where Token Ring is a far better choice. Shame it went the way of MCA, Betamax and a whole host of other proprietary closed standards that were expensive to licence.
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The first part is probably client authentication.
This could be useful. A standardized way of verifiably authenticating a user, and information about that user. Of course, only if the user wants to.
For example, I don't have a problem with a (pr0n)website automatically knowing my age, as long as nothing else is known. I could then make that info available to the world in some auth scheme, but nothing else. A shopping website might request my name and address, and I could grant that info on a case-by-case basis, and the info received by the website would be
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