GENI To Replace Internet, Gets $12M Funding 295
Postglobalism writes "A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations. Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a 'clean-slate' approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969."
Do we have enough...? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Do we have enough...? (Score:5, Funny)
Porn is not a problem. We have the technology. We can rebuild it.
Re:Do we have enough...? (Score:5, Funny)
Not rebuild it - erect it.
(snicker, snort)
Re:Do we have enough...? (Score:5, Funny)
How about some e-mail enhancement?
Stronger, Harder, Deeper, Faster (Score:5, Funny)
The Internet, A network barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic internet. GENI will be that internet. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, harder, deeper, faster.
Re:Stronger, Harder, Deeper, Faster (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and guess this 'new' more 'secure' internet will not allow for any type of anonymity, and more ease of tracking who says what and when in a more easily searched and archived format...both for government AND corporations.
After all, the current internet, for some reason, seems not to have been designed with big business commerce nor strict government control. Something that obviously (rolls eyes) needs to be fixed the 2nd time around.
I mean...the nerve of people getting on a system, where every computer is a peer, and can publish their thoughts willy-nilly and interconnect in ways not expressedly sanctioned by our government officials that obviously know what's better and safer for us.
Not to mention how it is often used now to closely monitor and poke fun at said officials...
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Re:Stronger, Harder, Deeper, Faster (Score:5, Funny)
Well my wife and I have long said that SSN's should be replaced with IP's
I was just saying that to my good friend ::fe:43:6a:9c:f9!
[and do you get a thrill clicking "Submit"?]
Re:Stronger, Harder, Deeper, Faster (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really easy to talk like that, but look at CB verses Ham Radio. The Internet we have today is like CB radio...anyone can transmit and receive. CB radio has its advantages and disadvantages. More serious radio users got into ham radio where users were more serious about radio communications, you were identified by a license, and it was highly regulated by the government. With the regulation came improved communications.
CB is good for some, ham radio good for others. So too with this. They should have a general Internet like the noisy CB band, and the other Internet with more regulation and better communications.
Re:Stronger, Harder, Deeper, Faster (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's really easy to talk like that, but look at CB verses Ham Radio. The Internet we have today is like CB radio...anyone can transmit and receive. CB radio has its advantages and disadvantages"
While I agree with you in theory, in practice we know corporations are going to do their damnest to lock it down and be able to block and censor and "black out" websites they don't like. They HATE the fact that information is free, they want to enclose the last commons which is infinite (information, ideas, etc), we can't let these pieces of capitalist shit have it. (no offense to other capitalists who genuinely believe in freedom of information)
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Interesting analogy. A year or so ago...I got a CB radio for my car, since many in my car club have them, and is fun when we all go on roadtrips (handy keeping 30-60 cars together). I never did have one as a kid in the old CB heydays of the 70's.
I must say, it is fun with it on the open road...talking to tru
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Well, the problem of people keying over each other on CB would need a capacity increase. Of course, that means channels, and that means we can't all ask about where the Smokeys are at once. Which is insolvable with CB technology. Truckers need to be posting to a Wiki for local reports. Ah, an idea! I can make money with this! BAHAHA!
Seriously, though, if everyone had a CB when Katrina hit NO, the reports would be "Traffic is hopelessly snarled, you can't get out, you should have left two days ago, get t
Re:Stronger, Harder, Deeper, Faster (Score:5, Insightful)
With the regulation came improved communications
I don't understand how a regulated internet is going to improve communications.
Re:Stronger, Harder, Deeper, Faster (Score:5, Insightful)
It will improve approved communications, non-approved communications like P2P, anonymous posting, and exposing the rich and powerful's shortcommings, negative comments about our corporate overlords, ect... will obviously not be allowed. That will free up bandwidth for approved communications, improving their speed and reliability.
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I think a better analogy is that the Internet is the medium, and CB is like IRC. But if you want a more regulated chat, well, you can find those on the Internet too. There's room for both on the same network.
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That's a very good point, and I agree that is a danger of a clean slate internet to some degree.
I think that if personal accountability is done RIGHT to some degree it will dramatically improve security for users at the same time and maybe REDUCE the amou
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Consider this... if it's setup such that a server can be 100% sure about who it's communicating with, then we could probably come close to eradicating spam and malware... ...and whistle-blowers and rape/abuse victims and critics of totalitarian governments and anyone else who may just want to discuss a controversial or taboo topic anonymously.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not just the government who would love to restrict our speech, but corporations as well. Imagine if the Internet had built in systems to keep people from saying anything negative about MegaCorporation X. Imagine if the Internet's basic systems kept you from
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The original design was for maximum reliability. If one node failed the protocol was designed to automatically route around the failure. This is amazingly robust, but does have some performance issues.
SMTP OTOH is not underlying architecture. It could easily be upgraded or replaced. The difficulty there is adoption. There are mil
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Your lack of paranoia disturbs me..
Government is all about power, and seeking more power. Power is zero sum, if you get more power I loose some. (hehe rhymes)
Business is all about money, which fortunately is not zero sum since the government can print more.
If there is a to be a new internet and Governemtn and Business are to design it, there will be a taking of power and profit for them.
No paranoia.. just proven agenda.
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We would agree on your observations regarding the government. It's nothing we haven't faced, before, or won't face again. You can go calmly through it and do what's necessary both at the design stage or the use stage, and deal with it, or you can bite your nails, quiver, and be paranoid. I prefer calmness. We'll overcome this one, too. We always do.
Re:Do we have enough...? (Score:5, Funny)
Do we have enough porn for an entirely new Internet?
If you build it, they will.... It's just too easy.
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I can haz new intarnet? (Score:2)
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The loss of all that porn would leave a gaping hole that must be filled!
Oh boy! OSI 2.0! (Score:4, Informative)
Web 2.0 isn't good enough, let's have OSI 2.0! Love them X.400 email addresses, wot?
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Does that mean we can finally throw sausage pizza away?
Layers 8 and 9... (Score:2)
Oh no, they'll be sure to implement the financial and political layers this time around. That's what this is all about, after all.
Other challenges? (Score:5, Insightful)
Other challenges, indeed. Such as surveillance, "trusted" computing, IP "protection", etc.
The new internet will be locked down much tighter, I am certain.
Re:Other challenges? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, that is *all* this is about; control. The existing Internet is just a big huge classic WAN. They want to replace it with something they can lockdown, enforce DRM, and control.
Re:Other challenges? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cable TV to which we will be allowed to contribute by supplying 'user content' for them to exploit (subject to the content being approved).
They want to replace the internet with something where they have control and the only control we have is the remote.
Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
They need to ditch this open, uncontrollable Internet for something the governments have more control over.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Funny)
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Inertia (Score:5, Insightful)
For better or worse, I think that we're stuck with what we've got. We'd really be better off improving the Internet we have (DNSSEC, end-to-end encryption on all protocols by default, PKI for the masses) than redesigning it from the ground up.
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We are improving what we have, it's called IPv6. Faster, lower latency, less load on routers, better address assignment, and connection-level encryption.
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You left off, "deployed almost nowhere."
12 Million? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dude, /. Never RTFA! /. Never RTFA!
...
First rule of
Second rule of
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No, those are the rules of posting on slashdot.
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Apparently it will only take $350 million. Whether that's accurate or not is another story. Just what TFA says.
Right... and that $200 Billion we gave the Telecos back in the '90s was supposed to garner us a full fiber network by 2000. Oh.. wait...
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Won't ever happen (Score:5, Informative)
The real problem is getting a critical mass to switch. Just look at the state of IPv6 support in home networking gear and the lack of implementation all over the web. My guess is that this will lead to some new standards that will maybe be used by people doing experiments with tons of data and nobody else. Don't expect to see this work coming to a router near you.
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>trying to redesign the Internet's protocols from scratch isn't necessarily a bad idea
Very true. We'd be foolish to blindly freeze our technology in the 20th century.
But whatever redesign shakes out of this might be worse. The US government is funding this with the intention to improve security.
It may not be the users' security they have in mind.
Re:Won't ever happen (Score:5, Informative)
However, even if it was from the DoD or NSA, the government has a strong interest in improving US users' security, so as to protect US companies from foreign espionage. Look at the NSA's contribution to various crypto algorithms (agreed upon by the security community as positive) or to SELinux.
Wheels 2.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
You joke but... (Score:2)
http://www.gizmag.com/go/3603/ [gizmag.com]
Think of the rainforests (Score:5, Funny)
Intel tried to get away from x86 three times (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom up vs Top Down (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the Internet is really just a collection of smaller privately-owned networks connected on common backbones, is it even possible to 'replace' it? I'm not sure what the goal is here. Sounds like herding cats to me.
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This is not as hard as it sounds.
Herding cats (Score:4, Funny)
True. The hard part is staying on that tiny horse.
And we all know its about .... (Score:3, Interesting)
... control, as in censorship, and target marketing. Where you can have a web site but nobody can see it .... now that's security....
So, a system where being on the internet is a right, but being seen on the internet is a privilege you have to pay for.
A tip for Stock Exchange players (Score:4, Funny)
They will need a lot of those.
Hey, look at that... there's a *NEW* Mexico now! (Score:3)
Subject is from The Simpsons, in case you didn't know.
Interesting news. Big issues, though: compatibility with the old internet will have to be maintained during a change-over time period... compatibility with old infrastructure must be maintained (running old IP, IPv6, and whatever else they develop for the "New" Internet on the same lines will be a challenge)... and government regulation and intervention should be minimal, regardless how much $$$ they pump in.
If they pull this off, they'll have really accomplished something worthwhile. Otherwise, it's just vaporware and an interesting experiment in re-designing the wheel.
But but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The internet we use today is totally different from 1969 (or 1981, or 1991). The internet evolves Darwin style already. Who uses DecNET or Banyan Vines? How about uunet, gated, gopher, or telnet?
It's gone, baby, gone.
Hell - we're having enough trouble replacing a simply-ass DNS server... who can imagine a peaceful replacement of entire the Internet (other than power-hungry numbnuts?)
Re:But but... (Score:5, Informative)
DecNET - Never part of the Internet ....
Banyan Vines - Never part of the Internet
uunet - Company is now part of Verizon
gopher - replaced by http
telnet - used it this morning
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The problem you were having with that server was due to excessive use of plain text protocols on an untrusted network.
Arrogance (Score:3, Insightful)
Systems that evolved are often not ideal or perfect, but they do work. Iterative evolution is important, because sometimes it's just not feasible to design something.
Boondoggle? (Score:2)
This thing has boondoggle written all over it.
That's it? (Score:2)
$12 million dollars to design an infrastructure to replace a multi-billion (maybe trillion?) dollar network from the ground up?
I know that they're not implementing the new network right now, but I don't see how this isn't just throwing money away. $12m dollars is the governmental equivalent of chicken scratch
Schedule a switch date now (Score:5, Funny)
Alright, you guys make this whole "new internet" thing, and we're you're done we'll just all switch to it all at the same time OK? We just need to schedule a date for when to switch to that new Internet thing. We should do it during a quiet time of the year, the month of December sounds appropriate, and I reckon it should take you guys quite a few years..
How does December 21st, 2012 sound? I have nothing in my schedule for *that* day... Too apocalyptic maybe?
Re:Schedule a switch date now (Score:5, Funny)
I'm actually expecting to be pretty busy on the 21st, but my calendar's completely blank thereafter.
I have a bad feeling about this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bleh (Score:2)
Web apps make me sick. Poor debugging tools, haphazard implementations and markup languages that have been over-extended make web development feel like we've gone back 20 years in terms of capabilities for software.
AJAX is a hack built upon other hacks. Framework libraries are a dime a dozen and none seem to be flexible enough to do what you need to do. QA'ing a complex web app is a mess.
That MS isn't learning, that much I knew (Score:2)
But can't we at least learn from their mistakes?
I somehow think MS pumped more than petty 12m into MSN. And? Failure. Why? Because it was not what people wanted.
Is that "new internet" what I want? Most likely, it's not. Can we be sure that it will be rife with tools to monitor, to snoop, to dissect my behaviour so to "serve me better" (read: target the ad spam better)? Or to do even worse? I'm kinda inclined to think so, considering the recent developments in laws in general and the "old school" internet in
security privacy and freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
when you begin to address privacy and security at the protocol and architecture level, you also begin to enable governmental control
one of the biggest philosophical issues that people don't seem to understand is that there is no such thing as centralized privacy, or government-enforced privacy. you constantly see stories on slashdot bemoaning government's inability to protect your privacy. its completely absurd. the only one who can protect your privacy is you
it is an utter oxymoronic, paradoxical way of thinking to believe government policies and privacy can coexist in the same thought process. people constantly inveigh the government to do more about privacy. no. you don't want to involve the government in privacy, in any way. if you want privacy and security, YOU need to take steps to make that work, on your own. to involve a large controlling entity to do that... what? can we say not getting the concept?
any system built to ensure "privacy" is essentially a command and control system... that can snoop on anything it wants
the same with security
it is GOOD the internet as it is has no internal safeguards for privacy and security. it means it is controlled by no one. get the point?
the riaa and beijing should fund this GENI project
Email could sure use a rebuild (Score:2)
TFA doesn't really say anything! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ain't nothing more permanent that a temporary fix (Score:2, Insightful)
And in this case, there are tons of temporary fixes all over the Internets.
This can't work... (Score:2)
GENI? (Score:2)
Will everyone's IP-number be 8675309?
[Hint:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqUPApCUt90 [youtube.com]
]
What about government snooping? (Score:2)
So are they gonna replace... (Score:3, Funny)
We'll get right into this! (Score:2)
address security and other challenges (Score:2)
in other words, you want to clamp down on file sharing and make the AA's happy.
Just call it HD-Internet (Score:3, Funny)
People will flock to it in droves, buy HD routers with HD cables and HD service plans.
Settle down, Beavis (Score:4, Informative)
The headline this was posted with is weapons-grade stupid. Nowhere in the GENI plans [geni.net] (which have been being formulated by academics over the last several years) is there any indication that GENI should "replace" the current Internet. There are a few people involved in GENI who think that the Internet of the future might look a bit like GENI in some respects, but a much more likely outcome is that future Internet innovations will emerge from experiments carried out with GENI. GENI will be a very sophisticated research platform that allows researchers to carve up the research network into reasonably isolated slices via virtualization so that experiments into new protocols, switch architectures, etc. can be run on a full-speed network in parallel with one another without interfering. Access to GENI, much like Internet2, will essentially be restricted to researchers running experiments and essentially limited to interconnects between major research universities.
Nowhere is there any suggestion that GENI will or should:
* replace the existing internet
* develop protocols to remove anonymity from the internet
* give control of the internet to any particular government
It's a research platform for academics who think that the field of networking could benefit from large-scale research projects that are more ambitious and forward-looking than the sort of thing that can be reasonably carried out by the R&D departments of large tech corporations. Full stop. There is a ton of information available about the project from their websites, and in papers that have been published over the last several years.
Re:Ok I understand the problems of our current set (Score:4, Funny)
How about cutting wellfare in half and have ten times the money. Exactly how many poor people do we really need anyway?
Re:Ok I understand the problems of our current set (Score:5, Interesting)
2007 US Military spending: $549.2 Billion. Domestic spending: $457.9 Billion. Welfare is a small fraction of domestic spending, so it cannot be 10x defense spending.
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The President's actual budget for 2007 totals $2.8 trillion [...] The total requested military budget of the United States for 2007 was $699 billion.
Social security is the biggest domestic at 586G$, unemployment/welfare is 294 G$. Your point still stands, though.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You need to check those numbers. I know the budget is not necessarily the exact same as what the president asked for, but for 2008 Bush requested $324 billion for welfare, plus $608 billion for social security, $386 billion for medicare, and $209 billion for medicaid. Domestic spending far outpaces the military, though it is clearly not 10x.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget%2C_2008 [wikipedia.org]
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"I'd call Social Security and Medicaid welfare..."
And you would be mistaken in doing so. Call anything you like welfare, but that doesn't make it so.
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Re:Ok I understand the problems of our current set (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh? Spending on welfare (TANF) is a very small part of the budget, $16.5 billion. [cwla.org] At a population of 301 million, that's $54.80/year/person, fifteen cents a day per person. The base defense budget - not including war funding - is more than $481 billion, $1598/person/year, $4.38 per day per person. U.S. military spending makes up the bulk of world military spending. [globalsecurity.org] We could cut ours in half and still enormously outspend all potential adversaries.
Conservative politicians like to conflate "entitlements" all together, which includes not just welfare but medical spending (prices for which are driven up by the for-profit model and by drug patents, both of which are made possible by government action), veterans affairs and military retirement payments (which should be properly counted under defense), and Social Security spending.
The NSF's budget is $6.065 billion [nsf.gov], $20.15/year/person, about five and a half cents a day per person.
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Yes, [wikipedia.org] because [wikipedia.org] poor [wikipedia.org] people [wikipedia.org] are [wikipedia.org] useless. [wikipedia.org]
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It's a very green environmentally too!
I know we can call the food...Soylent Green!
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That's a great economic idea!
No, it's not.
Without poor people, there will be no riches, as they depend on exploiting the poor.
Oh wait, maybe it is a good idea after all..
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Re:Just what I wanted! (Score:5, Insightful)
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replace the second DNS with TCP. Apparantly I have DNS on the brain.
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Sure. We'll just get one of those new-fangled web-based operating systems [slashdot.org] everyone is talking about to run in a virtual environment on top of the new GENI internet. I'm sure that'll give us full backwards compatibility to the old internet.
Re:Just what I wanted! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what they will have to do if they want at least a chance at surviving - provide a public gateway.
And the libertarian geekdom is actually not interested in this project to survive, because if it does, the governments will eventually push us there, where they will have all those things like internet user IDs and other funny stuff that the only the privacy concerned have bad dreams about today...
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There was an old joke in the Soviet Union that there were only four channels on television. The first three were all news and the forth was a KGB agent waving his finger and saying, "No, no, no! Change the channel back!"
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WTF is the point of this?
1. Nobody is going to fall for it.
2. goat.cx isn't obscene anymore
3. It doesn't even make sense!
What, is this the trolling equivalent of "i'm not touching you! i'm not touching you!"
Re:While we're at it let's replace the highway sys (Score:2)
If they can keep out the chuckholes that are beating my cars suspension to death every summer, im all for it.