[HN Gopher] Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet -...
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Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet - what do you
change?
This was just an idle conversation we were having at work. Imagine
that one day you wake up and you've been sent back in time, where
you are now a researcher at DARPA in the early 1960s. You've got
the influence to effect fundamental changes in the next sixty years
of the Internet's history, and can make your changes any time in
the next sixty years - but you know that as soon as you change one
thing in history, you'll be sent back to 2021, to continue living
in the world you have wrought. How are you going to make the
Internet better?
Author : lowercasename
Score : 107 points
Date : 2021-06-28 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
| efficax wrote:
| Widespread adoption of trusted keystores and encryption keys,
| completely eliminating the need for passwords.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| Get rid of limited TLDs, making any combination of
| something.somethingelse a registerable domain.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Smart documents instead of web apps. And no JavaScript of course.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"This was just an idle conversation we were having at work.
| Imagine that one day you wake up and you've been sent back in
| time, where you are now a researcher at DARPA in the early 1960s.
| You've got the influence to effect fundamental changes in the
| next sixty years of the Internet's history, and can make your
| changes any time in the next sixty years - but you know that as
| soon as you change one thing in history, you'll be sent back to
| 2021, to continue living in the world you have wrought. How are
| you going to make the Internet better?"
|
| You leave it the hell alone! <g>
|
| You leave it the hell alone -- because if you don't, upon
| returning to 2021, you'll discover that in addition to your
| wanted change -- there will be all kinds of unwanted "butterfly
| effects" in the world, resulting from that change, and not
| limited to the Internet, either! <g>
|
| Like, propagating in and through actual reality -- not just
| constrained to a computer screen or virtual world!
|
| Unwanted/unforseen/unexpected (but mostly unwanted!) "butterfly
| effects" (imagine just how scary these could be if you were
| unprepared for them -- the scariest Stephen King novel wouldn't
| do them justice!) resulting from Chaos Theory (which programmers
| know to be actual fact -- make a small change early on in a
| program -- get vastly differing results later on, as the program
| moves through TIME...)
|
| So if it one day happens that you magically appear (through time
| travel, or other plot element) at DARPA in the 1960's -- then you
| take a quick look, like Clark Griswold in "National Lampoon's
| Vacation", when he takes a brief look at the Grand Canyon (all of
| a few seconds!), and you appreciate all that DARPA and all of the
| other earlier Internet researchers did -- and you leave all of it
| the hell alone! <g>
|
| Yup, sorry, nothing to see here, nothing to change here, no
| changes for me! Just passing by, not going to touch a single
| thing! <g>
|
| You also appreciate the fact that while today's reality is a mess
| in many ways (and it is!) -- it could also (with Time
| Travel/Butterfly Effects/Chaos Theory) -- have been a much, much
| bigger mess(!) -- with Butterfly Effect horrors beyond your
| wildest understandings! <g>
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butterfly_Effect
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
|
| Disclaimer: The above was written for thought-provoking and
| possibly (depending on the reader's viewpoint!) comedy purposes
| only! <g> (Though it also works if read from a serious
| viewpoint...)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Oh, something minor. I'd make both domains and paths go from
| least significant to most significant, so
| com.google.mail/u/0/html
| TheSpiciestDev wrote:
| One of my only two attempts of an Ask HN was this specifically
| [0] and I've wondered this still. With subdomains, top level
| domains being at the top and being able to drill down into
| subdomains and then folders feels a lot more intuitive. Could a
| browser add-on be made to experiment this?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24438978
| dijit wrote:
| I didn't realise how much I wanted this until now.
| nickt wrote:
| JANET in the UK did this until it adopted the internet
| standards in the 1990's. Always seemed more logical to me too.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS
| dbingham wrote:
| Find a way to better decentralize it, so that it doesn't rely on
| single hosts(and later sites) as the source of truth for any
| particular function.
|
| The original idea was that protocols would allow any one to
| participate by simply making their own webpage. But dynamic IP
| addresses, the DNS system, and even just HTML design were out of
| reach for most people so that got lost and monsterous websites
| under centralized control became the mediators for most people.
|
| So if we could find a way to bake that decentralization into the
| protocols even more strongly while making them accessible to non-
| technical people, that's the change I would make.
|
| The aim is to create a world where central platforms are not
| dominant, but any user can easily participate in the
| communication protocols with out there being a central point to
| collect all the data or force changes from.
|
| ...of course, I have no idea how one would go about doing that,
| and there in lies the rub.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > So if we could find a way to bake that decentralization into
| the protocols even more strongly while making them accessible
| to non-technical people, that's the change I would make.
|
| Have you heard of Holochain?
|
| _" Holochain is an open source framework for building fully
| distributed, peer-to-peer applications.
|
| Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer
| Validation + Gossip (data propagation).
|
| Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and
| thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or
| mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans
| to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set
| of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or
| unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means
| you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g.,
| Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it."_
| handrous wrote:
| > The aim is to create a world where central platforms are not
| dominant
|
| Centralization has been greatly enabled by it being legal to
| hoover up all kinds of user data and monetize it by selling ads
| or using it for ML training. _Huge_ moats, unassailable by
| anyone trying to charge money directly and discouraging
| interest and participation even in free, volunteer efforts
| (since the commercial ones are already no-charge...) while
| encouraging players to jealously keep their users captive,
| avoiding open protocols and certainly not developing new ones
| (notice how application-level network protocol development and
| support started to dry up fast as FB and Google 's money-
| printing machines _really_ started to get going?).
|
| I'd say the shortest path to fixing the Internet is making that
| illegal, especially since that activity is also horrible and
| dangerous for other reasons. Ideally, the same law would
| hamstring the credit reporting agencies and also keep banks and
| other financial institutions from using/selling your data.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| You seem to be talking about WWW and not the Internet. The
| Internet itself was designed to be decentralized, in fact that
| was a major motivator (distributed command & control in the
| case of a major war cutting off large chunks of the C&C groups
| from each other or eliminating them entirely).
|
| Now, it could've been done in a better fashion, more
| deliberately, or more broadly, but there are at least two
| notable early protocols with decentralization/distribution in
| mind: email (consisting of several protocols) and nntp. Now an
| individual may still access a, to them, centralized authority
| for sending/receiving content, but the protocols themselves
| were meant to support a distributed architecture.
| dbingham wrote:
| While yes, "the internet" and "www" are different systems,
| the latter built on top of the former, in practice "the
| internet" and "www" are one in the same. When we're talking -
| culturally - about problems with the internet, we mean the
| problems with "www".
| Jtsummers wrote:
| In practice they are not the same thing. And the original
| prompt poses sending you back to the 1960s, about 30 years
| before the WWW came into existence.
| mbreese wrote:
| If we're starting from the 60s, there's no guarantee that
| by now the two would be practically the same (which isn't a
| given, even now).
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Add a fallback protocol, that allows for onion-protected mesh-
| net-routing. All that is ever revealed for routing a package, is
| the next human-supra-organism you want that package to be handed
| over. Imagine you write a reply: "This is not a good idea" and
| hit send, but some benevolent leader decides this message is not
| a good idea. So it fails on the centralized infrastructure.
|
| Now you wrap the adress of me: Individual > Household> Street >
| City> Airport into encrypted shells, that only reveal the next
| destination upon arrival within the data-organism.
|
| These of course are valid only, if a public ledger certifies
| their longterm existence.
|
| Your reply will take time, it will travel on land, air, water
| and, by all means possible. But it will reach me, i promise you
| that. To add plausible deniability, all you need is hostile apps,
| who participate within the meshnet, without the users consent. To
| add motivation to participate, just allow the transfer of crypto-
| currency - a currency backed up by the promise of data-transfer,
| no matter were, no matter what.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| Laws to prevent and penalize monopolies from forming on the
| internet. E.g. prevent google, facebook, amazon, etc from
| becoming all-consuming evil entities.
|
| That and probably mandatory native layer 3 encryption
| kderbyma wrote:
| I would have built in a protocol which could be used for
| decentralized ad networks in a federated fashion unlike the
| craziness that we see today with TOS designed to fight all
| competition and to selectively control the markets.
| DLA wrote:
| 3 things: Security, Security and Security. BGP security, DNSSEC,
| TLS by default, etc.
| wmf wrote:
| Imagine if 1980s security (single DES, no public key crypto)
| was baked into IP though.
| mikewarot wrote:
| None of those things secure the nodes of the internet, if the
| nodes aren't secure, nothing is.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Ome change is enough to transform the mature of the net: no
| JavaScript or other way for pushing esecutable code or dynamic
| state chamges to the client, instead, extend HTTP to contain a
| Turing complete query language to be executed on fhe server.
|
| Pondering the implications is left as an exercise for the reader.
| aliasEli wrote:
| Security should have been been a top priority right from the
| start. It is very strange that ARPA, a DOD agency that sponsored
| most of the Internet technology, cared so little about security.
| eqvinox wrote:
| A gun doesn't have built-in security either. But there's
| generally people with guns standing in front of the armory. I'd
| say they probably expected people with guns standing in front
| of the computers too.
| abecedarius wrote:
| The most basic problems seem to be:
|
| 1. Everything being 'free' by default drives us to ad-supported
| centralized services. Economics aren't a separable concern.
|
| 2. Too few IP addresses. (At least one of the pioneers, I forget
| which, said he pushed for longer addresses but was overruled. So
| the technical constraints probably did not force this.)
|
| I'm not sure how to fix #1, but here's an approach from the 90s:
| https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.16....
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I think this is a problem with the World Wide Web, not the
| Internet. At the network level, per-user cost accounting and
| quality of service is implemented quite well, to the point of
| being able to pay per byte if you really want to. And access to
| any network beyond your own LAN is not free.
|
| The problem of how to fund actual web application development
| is not much different from the problem of how to fund media
| development in general. Newspapers, television, and magazines
| alike long ago settled on some mix of premium-tier subscription
| services augmenting a more open, ad-funded free tier.
|
| This is so much more of an issue today than 30 years ago not
| because of anything specifically about ads to fund media, but
| because ad profitably has been driven sky-high by individual
| consumer profiling that relies upon privacy invasion and
| surveillance of your customers. Ads back in the day would
| improve via voluntary focus groups and that was fine. Today,
| they improve by tracking every digital action a person ever
| takes in order to more accurately correlate interacting with an
| ad with making a future purchase. Volunteers for focus groups
| are pretty much okay with giving their opinions in return for
| cash. Every person on the planet is not nearly as okay with
| having every digital action they ever take recorded and
| analyzed.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| > 1. Everything being 'free' by default drives us to ad-
| supported centralized services. Economics aren't a separable
| concern.
|
| I hate this argument. I've been online for a long time and the
| internet existed just fine without, for example, facebook. We
| don't have to accept ads but we do have to be willing to not
| use certain things out there.
| aspyct wrote:
| IPv4 adresses fit in a standard 4byte integer, that might be a
| reason.
|
| Quite frankly, if they didn't allocate full /24 to single
| entities (including localhost...), we might still have enough
| addresses left.
| jhgorrell wrote:
| Isnt it "127.0.0.1/8" which is allocated, not "127.0.0.1/24"?
| deckard1 wrote:
| yes, according to wikipedia[1]
|
| IPv4 is just inefficiently allocated in general. Why does
| the world need 10.0.0.0/8 in addition to 192.168.0.0/16?
| Isn't 65k addresses enough? Is there a private organization
| in need of 16 million addresses?
|
| Not to mention AMPRNet (amateur radio) owned the entire
| 44.0.0.0/8 up until 2019 (a portion was sold off to
| Amazon). That may have seemed reasonable in 1980 but now
| it's just plain crazy.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses
| asymptosis wrote:
| It's not about number of addresses available, it's about
| reflection of organization hierarchy in the octets. The
| 10.0.0.0/8 range is useful for breaking a distributed
| company's network up so each major office gets a
| 10.x.0.0/16, and each department a 10.x.y.0/24.
|
| This is why 192.168.0.0/16 is often used for services
| like libvirtd, kubernetes and docker. And the use of the
| range by those services makes it even more unwieldy to
| try and put some other LAN in there.
|
| You can work around these considerations if you want, but
| many people won't. When you're the network engineer
| responsible for designing a company's networks, you'll be
| wanting to keep things simple and robust. When you're
| called in at 3am on a Sunday because the network is down,
| you better hope your ability to recover doesn't require
| making a bunch of subnet calculations because you decided
| to try and use the pool of available IP addresses
| efficiently.
| profmonocle wrote:
| > Is there a private organization in need of 16 million
| addresses?
|
| Plenty of mobile phone networks have well over 16 million
| subscribers, and they typically don't have enough public
| IPv4 addresses for everyone. This has led to really hacky
| stuff, like using DOD IP ranges as psuedo-private space,
| or re-using private IP addresses in different regions
| (which can't be fun to maintain.)
|
| Some networks have fixed the problem by using NAT64 -
| forgoing IPv4 altogether internally, and translating to
| public v4 at the edge. (Works surprisingly well, T-Mobile
| US has been doing it for the better part of a decade.)
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _we might still have enough addresses left._
|
| For how long?
| [deleted]
| profmonocle wrote:
| Nah, if you sort by date here you can see how quickly IANA
| was doling out /8's to the RIRs up until they ran out:
| https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-
| space/ipv4-add...
|
| Even if we hadn't wasted /8s on huge allocations to single
| companies, and things like 240.0.0.0/4, we'd still be
| basically where we are today, with v4 address space being
| scarce and traded as a commodity.
| ryeguy_24 wrote:
| I might have read somewhere that the original design of HTTP
| allowed for transactions to occur. This free point is a big
| one. Once Apple set the price of 0.99 for an app it really
| dropped the market price for software. It's funny that there is
| so little different between enterprise software and consumer
| apps except for a monstrous difference in price point. Funny
| thing is, consumer apps are sometimes better.
| mprovost wrote:
| The 402 HTTP status code is "Payment Required". At one time
| people envisioned micropayments etc but it never went
| anywhere.
| philipswood wrote:
| Require emails to be signed by the sender cryptographically.
| dijit wrote:
| We have DKIM and you can safely drop non-DKIM mail. This tells
| you the MTA is actually sending the mail.
|
| The problem is that these MTAs get hacked or people just hijack
| domains.
|
| Heck, the barrier to buying a domain is so low that this is a
| legit way of spamming too.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| > safely drop non-DKIM mail
|
| Yes, _but_ the customer will blame you when e-mail from a
| misconfigured MTA doesn 't arrive (from my experience running
| one).
|
| If only we'd had DKIM from the start, preventing thousands of
| broken servers from being set up in the last twenty five
| years...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > the barrier to buying a domain is so low
|
| This suggests that one way of making spam unprofitable would
| be to require any domain which sends email to put up a bond
| of $100 which is forfeited if any of the big four email
| providers decide that the domain is sending spam.
|
| To make this acceptable to public opinion, the forfeited
| bonds would to go directly to popular charities, and all
| existing domains would be automatically grandfathered in, so
| there would be no extra cost for any current business or
| user.
| jart wrote:
| It's the 1960's. There's no RSA or AES or even DES.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| Sure but it's a small community that hung out in person a
| lot. Tokens, pass phrases or one-time-pads could have been
| physically swapped.
|
| There's really just a difference in thinking, "private by
| default for email" vs "public by default." Or "untrusted
| network" vs "trusted network." However you want to think
| about it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| PGP with good UX could've been great. Too bad it missed the
| mark.
|
| S/MIME seems to work pretty well, but the paid certificates
| pretty much doomed its uptake. I think I still have a Startcom
| certificate from back in the day that has long since expired.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I'd advocate to build DARPANET for an _untrusted_ environment
| with the expectation that DARPANET would be unleashed on the
| masses at some later point.
| polygotdomain wrote:
| This. I think there are so many changes that I'd like to make,
| but a lot of them stem from switching from everything being
| public and out there to being private and with restricted
| access. I would only hope that assuming things would be
| untrusted from the beginning would lead to a more securely
| designed web from day one. I'm sure that's wishful thinking,
| but still.
| diminish wrote:
| i would remove javascript.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| I think there would always be something invented to take its
| place. It addresses a real need that lots of people have. If
| you want to remove it, you have to replace it with something
| else...
| thrill wrote:
| Eliminate comments.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Better child protections. Not sure what the implementation would
| be though.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Ban children from Internet. Solves even more problems.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| This is a really great question! I can't help but think that for
| some small multiple of the cost of the International Space
| Station or Large Hadron Collider or any other large government
| science experiment, the nations of the earth could have gotten
| together early on and funded a free satellite internet project.
| It would have been limited bandwidth, high latency and error-
| ridden but it would have been ubiquitous in coverage, much like
| the GPS system. And would have accelerated adoption of many of
| the digital cash and e-banking innovations we are seeing today.
| As well as gotten a jump start on the physical layer of space
| based internet ;)
| onion2k wrote:
| I'd make payments a prominent, application-native, _easy to use_
| feature from Day 1, right down in the network protocol level.
| 100% of the transaction would be transferred from the user to the
| service owner without a middle-man service taking a cut (payment
| gateway fees not withstanding). That way there wouldn 't be any
| need to rely on advertising, app stores, or external
| subscriptions to run something on the internet.
| asciimov wrote:
| That would have just made the internet in accessible to the
| poor.
|
| I remember my dad scraping enough money to buy us a computer in
| '97 with unlimited internet (aol was still selling the internet
| by the minute back then). As a kid who hardly ever had enough
| money to buy a comic let alone magazine, and who's local
| library was lacking, it was life changing being able to just
| lookup and read about anything for free.
| onion2k wrote:
| The price of giving free access to everyone has been very
| high though. We continue to pay with our eroded privacy,
| personal information that's frequently breached, the cost of
| advertising that's passed on through product pricing, the
| cost of giving up so much control of the internet to three or
| four giant companies, the sheer cost of fighting against
| advertising in our browsers and so on. We're practically held
| hostage by advertising - a downturn in ad spending leads to
| content and publishing companies closing down. The cost of
| free is strangely expensive.
|
| Maybe it would be better to fund more useful things, like
| sites that give children access to knowledge through direct
| contributions. Like how Wikipedia is funded.
| topspin wrote:
| > That would have just made the internet in accessible to the
| poor.
|
| We have that problem now, apparently. Every consent decree
| that happens to some monster ISP includes a "low cost service
| for poor people" mandate.
| tpmx wrote:
| Observation: That's how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
| flourished and then stagnated and ultimately died when facing
| competition from the more "free" Internet. (Still upvoted you.)
| onion2k wrote:
| Today I learned. That sounds like a good system. It's a shame
| it didn't lead to a more payments-oriented internet.
| LeonB wrote:
| Ted Nelson envisaged micro-payments as part of the underlying
| platform (he invented ... waves vaguely ... all of this)
| phkahler wrote:
| Verifiable identity. We need to be able to verify the source of
| all data on the network, even if that's just proving the source
| IP address, or better yet the physical location it came from.
| People often argue that anonymity by default is a good thing, but
| I argue that trust of origin by default is better.
|
| You can still strip identification for things like posting in
| public forums, but for everything else knowing where shit came
| from is critical. From spam email to well everything. It baffles
| me that spoofing callerID is not only possible but that some
| people think its important.
|
| Along these lines I have a pet idea that a subset of IPv6 be geo-
| located, meaning your latitude, longitude, and possibly altitude
| are encoded in the IP address. This allows routing without the
| huge tables in the routers. Combined with the ability to verify
| that a packet came from its advertised location this is very
| powerful for security.
|
| One way to verify the origin of data (email for example) is not
| to send it, but to send something akin to a URL (preferably
| better than that) so we have to at least be able to request the
| data from somewhere rather than have it sent to us anonymously.
|
| Unfortunately being able to verify the source of data also
| enables end-to-end encryption fairly easily and nobody in power
| wants the public to anything like that...
| fragmede wrote:
| Facebook verifies identities, yet it's still a cesspool of hate
| in some corners, so it might help, but it's no panacea.
| president wrote:
| It could help cut down on bots and spam. Think of a Twitter
| free from bots and propaganda from marketing agencies and
| governments.
| president wrote:
| I have gotten massively downvoted on various social media
| platforms for suggesting verifiable identity so I think there
| are some people that are just really resistant to this idea.
|
| I don't think it would solve all problems but it would be
| useful for cutting down on bots and spam for certain types of
| websites. Many people don't realize that a large chunk of
| content on sites like Twitter and Reddit (and probably HN) are
| propaganda from marketing agencies or hostile foreign
| governments. That argument that you had with someone on Twitter
| - you could be trying to chat it up with a Chinese paid
| internet troll. How would you even know? There is a complete
| lack of good faith on the internet now and verifiable identity,
| it would be nice to think of how the internet would have been
| different with it. Unfortunately, we also have a huge number of
| people/groups/companies that depend on lack of verifiability so
| I think this is why the idea has become so controversial.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Not necessarily as an enforced standard, but normalizing
| sharing your identity online earlier on might have changed some
| of the formational culture of the Internet. The Internet was
| also a dangerous place, and still is, so perhaps this is not
| the best idea
| nickdothutton wrote:
| There is no need to put IP stacks on non-server endpoints unless
| you know what you are doing and the implications. Each non-server
| device could establish a context with the network as and when
| needed to send and receive traffic, as you did in the dial-up
| age. Removes a huge raft of security problems, IP address
| shortages, DDoS, privacy/tracking.
| brundolf wrote:
| IPv6 from the beginning.
|
| I have a theory that NAT killed the open web. There was this idea
| at the beginning that everyone could host their own website,
| email, etc. But when you're behind a router, you suddenly have to
| be quite technical in order to set all that up on the computer in
| your room. So only (bored) technical people bother. It's possible
| this is the reason platforms came to dominate.
| [deleted]
| btgeekboy wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd subscribe to that theory. The port forwarding
| issue is a few clicks; actually getting a site to host is
| another issue entirely. Even if it was some application you ran
| on your desktop 24/7 that holds your hand through the process,
| NAT + DHCP aren't insurmountable.
| brundolf wrote:
| Port forwarding + static IP. And don't be so sure that it's
| trivial; despite having taken a course on the network stack
| I'd have to do some research to figure out port-forwarding
| and get it set up correctly. Normal people's response would
| be, "What's a port? Like the holes on the back of the
| computer?"
|
| In an IPv6 world you could have a free program you download
| that gives you an interface like Squarespace except you can
| host it for free on the very computer you're using to make
| your site. Could be totally accessible to nontechnical
| people. Same goes (much more powerfully) for distributed
| protocols like Matrix. You could have encrypted messaging
| platforms like Signal that don't even need a handshake
| server; devices talk exclusively to each other. Etc. It would
| be a radically different internet.
| generalizations wrote:
| Is there any way to get there from where we are now? Seems
| like even with ipv6 we still have to use routers.
| brundolf wrote:
| My understanding is it would be hard/impossible to get
| everyone to IPv6 at this point because there will always
| be a long tail of devices that aren't there yet, and we
| can't just jettison those from the internet
|
| But yeah, I think even if everything magically changed to
| v6 overnight, we'd still be stuck with NAT to a large
| extent because so much is tangled up in it at this point.
| For one, it probably makes it easier for ISPs to bill
| their customers. Especially the dynamic-IP side of
| things.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I think it was a combination of bad actors (spam and malware)
| and market segmentation. (Soak the businesses)
|
| It's always been a somewhat niche, difficult thing to run most
| standard servers. (Web/mail/ftp/gopher/nntp)
| noobquestion81 wrote:
| It's not entirely fair, because in the 60s basically all modern
| crypto primitives were missing. If I had those:
|
| 1. Encrypted onion routing on layers that betray source/dest IP.
| 2. eSNI on all TLS connections. 3. Privacy-focused DNS.
| dxbydt wrote:
| i had to answer this question on my computer networks exam ages
| ago. i forget my exact answer, but it was along the lines of "ATM
| is the greatest tech since sliced bread. IP is bad because
| connectionless blah blah... therefore http over tcp over atm
| better than http over tcp over ip"
|
| i passed the course.
| pmontra wrote:
| > How are you going to make the Internet better?
|
| Anything that allows me to send files to a device of a person I
| know on a direct connection without a service in between and
| regardless of our locations in the world. Still an unsolved
| problem AFAIK.
| FranchuFranchu wrote:
| If you're both connected to the Internet and NAT didn't exist,
| you could run a small server and he could get your files
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| _At least one_ domain where NO commercial activity is allowed. No
| buying, selling, advertising, trading. Companies who are
| convicted of _mens rea_ transgression (along with whichever
| employees are guilty) lose ALL access to the internet in
| perpetuity.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| > advertising
|
| This one would be hard to enforce. Still a good idea.
| warmfuzzykitten wrote:
| This seems unworkable. Gaining attention is intrinsically
| commercial activity. Attention has value; you can't stop it
| bleeding into the rest of the world. Some examples and
| questions:
|
| - An "influencer" gets her photo on a Wheaties box. After that,
| the influencer doesn't have to do overt advertising to promote
| the cereal, their fortunes are bound together.
|
| - In politics, as the former US president so amply
| demonstrated, attention is a currency.
|
| - What about the exchange of ideas? Can one talk about the
| contents of a book without selling (or discouraging the sales
| of) the book?
|
| - Is any mention of brand names to be prohibited? If you can
| mention a brand, unless all the brand's marketing has been
| completely ineffective, you are selling the brand. Don't like
| it? Pass the Kleenex.
| [deleted]
| muxxa wrote:
| Decentralisation in that you'd preferentially download 'web'
| content via your friends. Every house has an always-on server and
| networking hardware to enable selected local connections (long
| range WiFi?) across town with no reliance on an ISP. Think
| Wikipedia content living in tens of millions of locations around
| the world, with updates being pushed out with versioning and
| flagging if your extended network lacks consensus on a change.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I pick the year 1995, right as the web starts to hit the
| mainstream.
|
| I'd add some kind of built-in, frictionless, privacy-respecting,
| user-friendly, transparent payment/micropayment system. Built on
| open standards so we could have multiple competing UX's and the
| best one(s) would win.
|
| Basically, think about how Patreon and Kickstarter (which are not
| without their flaws) have allowed people to support creators more
| or less directly. Now, imagine if we'd somehow baked something
| like that in to the internet itself.
|
| The web is 99.9999% garbage and one of the biggest reasons is
| because we spent nearly two decades training people that
| everything on the interwebs was _free_ which meant that it had to
| be _ad-supported_ which means that nearly everything has been
| forced to pander to the absolute lowest common mass-market
| denominator.
|
| Even with some kind of "good" micropayment system, sure, most
| stuff would still be free/ad-supported lowest common denominator
| crap. I have no illusions. Just look at every other form of media
| that has ever existed.
|
| However, just imagine how _books_ or _movies_ or _whatever_ would
| look they were de facto forced to be free for the earliest part
| of their existence.
| pkb wrote:
| Add requirement for every user to have to solve mathematical
| equation before being allowed to post anything. Make it hard
| requirement and enforce at all times.
| selfsimilar wrote:
| Wider IP address space at the beginning could have led to static
| IP deployment to the home, allowing for self-hosted websites and
| email service that would have obviated the need for ad-supported
| websites and web services. We still would have had the issue of
| asymmetrical home connections but that's a separate issue.
| rouanza wrote:
| I want to be able to run a lan cable from the street and basicly
| join the worlds largest LAN. Free open access
| nasalgoat wrote:
| Zero trust as a factor of the protocol itself.
| munro wrote:
| Fiber internet. Having 1000 mbps up/down was so nice when I lived
| in a city where I had access to fiber.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| Replace HTML with something closer to hypercard - it would give
| simple interactions, database management and user interface that
| you need.
|
| Failing that, Flash should have become open source and part of
| the W3 web standards, but opened up such that we could observe
| the code that's running.
| masswerk wrote:
| Actually, this became a thing very early on, compare Viola Net.
| holidaystarship wrote:
| The internet itself is pretty solid: other than a few technical
| tweaks, I think the infrastructure evolved as well as it could.
| One thing I'd like to see changed is a re-thought internet
| protocol that's more privacy focused: an IP address is an
| absurdly specific identifier, fingerprinting a user down to a
| single household in most cases. An ephemeral addressing scheme
| for clients that changes with every new connection would be
| really quite helpful, perhaps along with some safeguards that
| allow law enforcement to still track that ephemeral identifier to
| an internet connection in the case of abuse.
|
| The web is a different story, especially social media. I'd like
| to make social media, and the web in general, more forgetful.
| "Digital natives" (second-flight millenials and Gen Z) are going
| to get screwed with the persistence and easy archiving of social
| media data. This is partially a result of the natural shift in
| cultural expectations that occurs over time, as well as a
| consequence of having their awkward-for-any-generation blunder
| years recorded forever. This is definitely more a legal change
| than a technical one, but I would mandate (1) a time span (such
| as 5 years) where public social media posts _must_ revert to
| author-only private unless consent is otherwise obtained and (2)
| a prohibition against public mass archiving of social media posts
| from people who aren 't public figures.
|
| This type of mass archiving for the use of closed-off academic
| research libraries is acceptable, but merely going and hoovering
| up every public tweet or Youtube comment or Reddit post and and
| putting it up with a public search engine shouldn't be permitted.
| Treat it like many countries treat the census, and only allow
| publicly opening up these archives far into the future (for
| example, the raw underlying questionnaires used for the Canadian
| census are not released to the general public until 92 years
| after collection). Different story for public figures such as
| politicians, but we shouldn't archive everything that everyone
| has said in perpetuity.
| anotherevan wrote:
| Civility.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| The most toxic part of the Internet today is identity. Some of
| the IP address space should have worked like mobile phone numbers
| - paid for by subscribers and representing single identities.
| Even better, after the invention of RSA, the government should
| have backed ISPs or states issuing signing identities for a
| protocol level identity standard - sort of like SIM cards that
| would "represent" you on a single, authoritative device without
| the possibility of delegation.
| tpmx wrote:
| What you're suggesting is a dystopia.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Just as an alternative to a different dystopia though.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think they were being sarcastic, given that they're writing
| it under a pseudonym.
| tpmx wrote:
| Almost all of us are writing under pseudonyms.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Are cellphone numbers a dystopia?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Yeah, I keep getting solicitors and I can't easily change
| my number to something only my friends know. I also can't
| easily separate my business number from my personal
| number without paying for a second phone subscription,
| even though it wouldn't cost the phone company anything
| more.
| brewtide wrote:
| Completely not that important, but I did this a year or
| so ago, committed 'the number' to google voice, and
| handed out my new one to close contacts. It took a bit
| for people to filter their calls correctly, and I could
| always answer the 'business line' regardless, but I have
| zero regrets about it now.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Unfortunately, using Google Voice in that manner is USA-
| only, and much (most?) of the rest of the world has no
| comparable alternative.
| NewNetNow wrote:
| My guess is that most people who use the internet by 2050 will
| be strongly authenticated, whereas the current anonymous
| internet will remain as a relic of barbaric times for most, but
| still in use.
| handrous wrote:
| I expect we'll have one or more protocols enforcing end-to-
| end route verification at the packet level on most Internet
| routers by 2050, so I'm not sure how anonymous _any_ Internet
| served over that infrastructure will be. I expect bans will
| be much more effective, international traffic will have much
| more advanced filtering and blocking, and that proxying will
| basically be illegal without some kind of business
| arrangement and being subject to surveillance & ban-
| supporting laws (and anyway, proxying weird traffic will get
| you banninated by the entire "legitimate" Internet, much
| faster than it does now).
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I'd go so far to say that by 2030, at least one OECD
| country will have a law requiring ISPs to enforce remote-
| attestation of the Secure Boot of every device accessing
| the internet.
|
| Such a government could then require app stores to remove
| "dangerous" technologies like Tor and messaging apps that
| support end-to-end encryption.
|
| Perhaps ISPs would be allowed to support "legacy" devices
| and OSes, but with a special "Evil Bit" set on packets, so
| that websites could (and in some cases would be required
| to) refuse access.
| bodo11 wrote:
| I agree on the general problem of identity. Implementation-wise
| one could also think of some kind of digital numberplate, which
| can change, so that people can't follow you around on the net,
| but is still unmistakenly linked to you or your device.
| bryan_w wrote:
| I agree that there needs to be some way for identity to be
| strongly represented on the internet but there should be a way
| or places where it isn't required. This could be something that
| perhaps allows indemnity for user generated content as long as
| the content is attributed to a person otherwise the site is
| responsible. This would allow the small time cars forum to
| (with identity) operate safely as they do today, but would also
| allow 4chan to (anonymously) operate as long as they ensue the
| content wont get the website operator in trouble.
|
| The other problem you run into is ease of use. Most users of
| the internet can't understand PKI based certificates so I don't
| know how an interface could look that would provide a strong
| guarantee of identity but also allows my mom to use it and not
| get phished.
| sa1 wrote:
| Decouple IP addresses from locations, to make it harder to
| balkanize the internet.
| cesarb wrote:
| I would make packets over the MTU truncate (with a flag
| indicating the truncation), adjusting the IP checksum (the same
| way it's currently adjusted for changes in other fields like the
| TTL) to match, instead of fragmenting or dropping. That would
| avoid all the issues with PMTU blackholes or non-initial
| fragments.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Encourage the App store paradigm and discourage the browser
| paradigm. Users download apps that they trust instead of using a
| browser to directly go to a URL that (a) could be fake e.g.
| "whitehouse.com" (b) installs malware on the client computer. The
| theory here is that app developers know how to wade the shark
| infested waters of the internet better than grandpa or grandma
| and can code basic protections in the app. e.g. just because a
| website says click here, you don't really have to click there.
| Especially if a dialog pops up asking do want to give elevated
| permissions to XYZ?
|
| Encourage the development of browsers for kids. Parents can
| configure their kids' computer to only run "KidFox" browser which
| has all the security features turned on. Only allows white listed
| sites that has been vetted by various agencies, denies escalated
| privileges, turns off all webcams, prevents remote hackers taking
| over their kids computer etc.
|
| Lastly, it is more of mindset. Developers should take the
| attitude that every client computer, server, and database has
| been compromised to some degree. That is we should have defense
| in depth and not rely solely on one mechanism to protect us from
| the bad guys.
| joemaller1 wrote:
| The internet actually works really well. Its problems are human.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| I mean, kind of. It does work, but under the hood there's a big
| fossilized mess of a technology stack that could have been
| better had it not been the result of many years of accumulated
| unrelated solutions to different, smaller problems...
| shutdownhn wrote:
| Easy, I'd shut down this website.
| alfanick wrote:
| Symmetric connections for everyone, everywhere by default
| (assymetric only when it's not feasible, i.e. mobile devices).
| This I always thought would open door for more peer-to-peer or
| onion or some superdecentralized architectures.
| mikewarot wrote:
| It was pretty much always symmetric connections at the
| beginning. It's only the economics of ISPs that changed it.
| notamy wrote:
| Javascript. Not to remove it, but to make it better from the
| start. Current JS feels painful to me because it feels like
| piling hacks on top of a poorly-designed language to make it
| palatable. Doing it better from the start sounds amazing.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I'd give it a better name, which does not involve the word
| "java."
| creativeembassy wrote:
| And ECMAscript still sounds like a disease.
| FranchuFranchu wrote:
| Ecma balls
| kzrdude wrote:
| let's just pick a letter and it's fine.
|
| escript cscript mscript ascript
| [deleted]
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Let's face it, it would end up as "JScript". What we now
| know as "JScript" would probably become "MScript" or
| something.
| ryall wrote:
| But it's such a great litmus test to instantly identify the
| people that don't know what the hell they're talking about ;)
| masswerk wrote:
| The original name was LiveScript...
| masswerk wrote:
| The thing I'm most offended with: about every generation has
| now dumped their favorite interface pattern onto it, mostly
| reused from the fancy language of the day. It has become a
| Frankenstein language without internal strictness or attitude
| (which had been once a major trait.) I guess, it's the language
| most disrespected by its developers.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| What a great question. One of two things:
|
| A) Establish the expectation that websites "close" in the middle
| of the night for ~5-6 hours, local time / for each timezone. I
| don't know if would best be done via cultural influence -- giving
| talks, writing essays, personal communication, testifying /
| making inroads with politicians -- or via creating some sort of
| protocol. The idea is to prevent the unhealthier aspects of
| internet binging and screen addiction.
|
| B) Establish the expectation that internet comments are
| transcriptions of voice recordings. I.e. to leave a comment, you
| have to call a phone number and leave a message which then gets
| transcribed as "the comment." In order to respond or reply to a
| post or a thread, you have to listen to the message and tone of
| voice of the person you are replying to. I don't think this would
| solve every internet dialogue, but it'd promote healthier
| interactions and less division.
|
| In my book, the largest problems with the internet are techno-
| cultural, not technological.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Regarding the second point, it would probably just make people
| say things like "you sound fat". It's still anonymous enough.
| In fact, people say mean things in public all the time. It
| seems some people are just inherently mean.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| I don't disagree. The main problem I'm attempting to solve is
| the non-anonymous case. Even discussions on social media,
| where people are either "friends" or have the same shared
| interest, still devolve into discourse where few come away
| satisfied. Instead, many people feel either negatively
| critiqued or that other posters "just don't get it." Every
| time this happens, the sense of group cohesion frays a
| little.
|
| I see this is as a problem of the medium of discussion more
| than anything else.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Fun fact, closing websites do exist among ultra-orthodox (esp.
| haredi) jewish communities in Israel.
|
| You can read a bit about how it works in practice on the web.
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ultraorthodox-jews-are-co_b_1...
|
| http://www.hareidi.org/en/index.php/Hareidi.org%27s_Kosher_I...
|
| Background:
| https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau7....
| dentemple wrote:
| Regarding A, for which timezones? Any attempt to narrow
| browsing time would ultimately fail as soon as the web goes
| global.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| Good question. Ideally, each user's timezone would be
| required information. The server would check to see if the
| requesting user's local time meant that the website should be
| "open" for them.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| A minute of silence for those with unusual circadian
| rythms.
| bmcooley wrote:
| Honestly this would probably just make VPN services more
| widely used to workaround shutdowns.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| True, unless the timezone was tied to each user's
| accounts. The website doesn't have to "not work" it just
| has to return a page that says something to the effect of
| "we are closed for business."
| sithlord wrote:
| So a user couldn't just change their timezone? What if
| they moved?
|
| Also who is this to protect? The user? What if they work
| midnights or their days are backwards?
| NewNetNow wrote:
| Lurker here. These ideas, especially #2, sound interesting for
| a discord-style (when they did embedded comments only) startup.
| woodruffw wrote:
| DNS is a bit later, but: the domain-name specificity notation.
|
| As a coworker of mine pointed out, it's a little bit ridiculous
| that URLs on the web look like this:
| `more.and.more.general/more/and/more/specific`. They should
| really be `more.and.more/specific`, just like bang paths[1] were.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path
| [deleted]
| thrower123 wrote:
| Brendan Eich gets to actually use Scheme for Netscape. It never
| takes off, because everyone hates Lisps, instead VBScript becomes
| standardized through IE, which is then phased out in favor of a
| C#-based script in the early 2000s, and we have a massively
| better web development enviroment.
| asciimov wrote:
| I would fix the order of URLs instead of
| http://news.ycombinator.com/item it would be
| https:com/ycombninator/news/item
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I actually really like this idea (and once created a browser
| extension to at least make URLs look like that in the address
| bar), but I still think there is a benefit to having domain
| names distinguishable from paths, so it would be:
|
| https://com.ycombinator.news/item
|
| Having just checked, I see that ycombinator.news has already
| been registered, so maybe the lesson is that everyone should
| register "palindromic" domains, like com.ycombinator.com for
| example.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Can we just do this now anyway?
|
| Also I like that ycombinator becomes "ycombninator".
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Adam Curtis provides some historical context on what went wrong
| with the internet https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-
| machines-of-lov...
| jjav wrote:
| Honestly, just one thing, and I only need to go back to the early
| 90s.
|
| Just before the Internet was opened to commercial use in the mid
| 90s, would've made a perpetual prohibition of advertising over
| the Internet. Ads are what have ruined everything.
|
| Take just about anything unpleasant about the Internet today and
| it is either directly a consequence of ads, or an indirect
| consequence of someone trying hard to make you see ads.
| mattzito wrote:
| It's interesting, I wonder if the internet would have been
| successful at all without something to monetize? Yeah,
| e-commerce probably would have been doable, but it would have
| been like the dotcom era - generic domain names running ads to
| try to get you to walk over to a desktop computer and type in
| the domain name.
|
| Digital communities would have been really hard - a lot of
| online forums, I know, depend(ed) on advertising to pay for the
| then-expensive hosting costs. I'm a believer that Facebook now
| is long past its prime, but I remember how exciting it was in
| the early days when it was connecting me with family members
| and friends. Advertising is how all of those things were able
| to become accessible to everyone.
|
| Maybe a better solution would have been to ban personalized
| advertising? A lot of the really gross behaviors with ad
| exchanges, data brokers, ISP interception, etc. are all to
| allow for highly targeted and personalized ads. Maybe you could
| only target ads towards "interests", which could be set at a
| browser level, and a user could configure if they wanted to see
| more relevant ads.
| jjav wrote:
| > without something to monetize?
|
| Not without something to monetize. Just no advertising.
|
| Commerce sites would exist largely as-today in this alternate
| universe.
|
| Early on there was a lot of interest in micropayments for
| funding sites with interesting content. That pretty much all
| dies because it was a harder problem to kickstart off the
| ground than just stuffing every page full of ads.
|
| But, with ads prohibited, the Internet would've evolved
| differently and we'd probably have a very convenient way to
| pay some fraction of a penny to any site we frequent, all
| with zero ads and none of the toxic consequences of forcing
| people to view ads.
| runjake wrote:
| There were thriving communities like MUDs and IRC and Usenet
| before e-commerce and corporations moved in.
| mattzito wrote:
| Absolutely true, but I would say that MUDs and IRC and
| Usenet are the definition of pre-Internet boom culture. It
| was a big deal when my parents were able to get online and
| use a browser to engage with other people. My dad could
| have been playing chess online via IRC and email for years,
| but it wasn't until he had a browser that it was within his
| technical comfort level.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| E-commerce existed before MUDs and IRC and was
| contemporaneous with Usenet. Online Services like
| Compuserve, Prodigy, and Qlink (which became AOL) allowed
| people to buy and trade products like you do on E-bay.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Take just about anything unpleasant about the Internet
| today and it is either directly a consequence of ads,
| or an indirect consequence of someone trying hard to
| make you see ads.
|
| I largely agree but would solve it a slightly different way.
|
| The ad-supported model became the overwhelming default because
| payments/micropayments were hard and scary so we spent a whole
| bunch of years conditioning users to believe everything on the
| internet had to be free.
|
| Payments/micropayments _still_ are hard /scary to a large
| extent. Large swathes of internet users literally would not
| dream of paying for content or community membership. Thus,
| nearly everything online remains riddled with ads or the
| consequences thereof.
|
| So rather than banning ads I wish we'd made somehow
| payments/micropayments easy, safe, and transparent and baked
| that right into the internet somehow.
|
| Think about how Patreon and Kickstarter (which are not without
| their flaws) have allowed people to support creators more or
| less directly. Now, imagine if we'd somehow baked something
| like that in to the internet itself.
| asciimov wrote:
| Ad's got us here to begin with. Without ads the internet would
| have been only for the rich.
|
| There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no
| kindles. I'd still be ordering everything from the Sears
| Catalogue, waiting 6-8 weeks for it to arrive.
| pmontra wrote:
| I don't think so. Everybody pays for their internet
| connection and always had. News on paper have always been
| supported by ads so it's fair if news on the internet have
| ads too. Amazon sells things, they would still sell them.
| Phone makers sells phones and we had Symbian before Android.
| Wikipedia has no ads.
|
| But I don't see how we could actually forbid ads on the
| internet and the legal basis for it.
| jjav wrote:
| Of course there would be amazon (widespread e-commerce, if
| not literally amazon.com), android, kindle. None of these are
| ad-driven products.
|
| google as it exists today, an advertising company hoovering
| up private data while masquerading as various services, all
| in the name of pushing more ads, is not a net positive to the
| Internet. Having it not exist would be wonderful in this
| alternate universe.
|
| Of course there would be search engines though. There were
| plenty search engines before google, before ads, and those
| would've evolved along a different path from where they were
| in the mid 90s.
| philwelch wrote:
| No Amazon, really? Amazon ships physical goods to your house
| in exchange for money--they aren't dependent on advertising.
|
| Even Google landed on advertising as a monetization technique
| but existed before it and easily could have been a
| sustainable business without it (though not the behemoth it
| has become).
| jedberg wrote:
| Google existed before ads but had no revenue. Ads are the
| only thing that kept it alive other than investor money.
| philwelch wrote:
| I might have overstated a bit. Ads were obviously a
| sufficient revenue source, but provide far more revenue
| that is necessary for the core search engine. It's
| possible some other revenue source might have been
| sufficient to support the search engine, even if not as
| lucrative.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| And how do you know this. Also, you are referring to the web,
| not the internet. I have been using the internet since the
| web was opened to the public. It was already growing like
| crazy without ads. You make some very strange assumptions. By
| all means, find the silver linings, but there is no basis for
| making a causal connection between computer networks and
| advertising. Ads are not why we have conveniences. Networking
| technology, continually decreasing in cost, is the reason.
| There is no inherent connection between computer networks and
| advertising. The connection exists in your mind because
| computer network technology is dirt cheap to produce and
| people have resorted to sketchy behaviour to try to make
| money from it.1 It would still be dirt cheap without the
| sketchy behaviour. The argument that the internet would only
| be for "the rich" is laughable. It must come out of a Big
| Tech PR department. Sounds like what Facebook likes to say to
| the press in response to criticism. Yeah, the internet is for
| the rich: the people who started a small number of oversized,
| overtrafficked websites and will use whatever means necessary
| to stay on top. There is nothing egalitatrian about today's
| internet.
|
| 1 The number of people who became wealthy from this behaviour
| is relatively small, but news of their "success" is widely
| disseminated.
| jedberg wrote:
| TL;DR: Constants shouldn't be hard coded in the software, they
| should always be in a separate config
|
| The problem is that it's the 60s. My first thought was
| "security", but unless you an also teach them about elliptic
| curves, they're going to use the security of the 1960s, which as
| we now know isn't very secure.
|
| Maybe at least having security baked in would help make it easier
| to switch to better security later, like how ssh can use
| different protocols as old ones are broken. But you'd have to
| make sure that you were very clever about how it was implemented
| so that it could be switched without major changes.
|
| Another thought is "more IP addresses", but again you are in the
| 60s. The computers don't have enough memory to deal with IPv6
| length addresses. So again the best you can do is try to set them
| up with easy upgrades.
|
| Which makes me think the best suggestion would be to teach them
| about Moore's Law, which of course would have a different name,
| and try to push for every protocol being extensible as technology
| grows -- make sure that more octets can be added to IP addresses
| without them breaking, that security is baked into everything but
| everything has a way of negating a protocol so that they can be
| upgraded, that there are no hard upper limits that are assumed
| and can always be changed.
|
| Basically, teach them what we now know are software best
| practices -- constants shouldn't be hard coded in the software,
| they should always be in a separate config.
| tpmx wrote:
| So you're essentially pushing against specialized IP-oriented
| VLSI chips in everything from NICs to switches to routers...
| instead they should all have been reconfigurable general
| computing devices?
|
| Don't you think that would have slowed down the growth quite a
| bit?
| jedberg wrote:
| Maybe. I'm just saying that we should teach people in the 60s
| to design for the future and make things extensible. Maybe
| we'd still have custom silicon, but they would be designed
| with an external bus to a second chip that can be easily
| switched out or upgraded or something as a way of dealing
| with future growth of address space.
|
| Obviously it wouldn't apply to everything, but back in the
| 60s future growth was clearly not thought about the same way
| as today.
| tpmx wrote:
| They could have had a design rule that all network
| endpoints must work with 32/64/128 bit IPs.
|
| This could perhaps have been implemented in VLSI back in
| the 80s in such a manner that 32-bit IPs ran at full speed,
| 64-bit at half speed and 128-bit at quarter speed.
| jedberg wrote:
| Yeah, perfect. If the standard had said IPs could have
| any bit length they would have designed accordingly.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| I really don't understand what stopped ipv4 from being extended
| like this: w.x.y.z == 0.0.0.0.w.x.y.z
|
| In fact, you can even ping any 32 bit unsigned integer and it
| will turn it into an ipv4. Try it: `ping 134744072` will ping
| `8.8.8.8`
|
| So why not 64 bit? 32 bits fit in 64.
|
| Instead we now have 2 concurrent protocols.
|
| ps. 8*256^3 + 8*256^2 + 8*256 + 8 = 134744072
| jedberg wrote:
| Because all the existing routers would break on all the new
| addresses. A new protocol was created specifically so that
| legacy equipment would never get the request.
|
| For example, if an old router got a packet for
| 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8, where would it send it, if it didn't crash
| just trying to read that address?
| pie420 wrote:
| Yes, let's design the internet around keeping 90s routers
| running as long as possible. Excellent. Let's also design
| highways with a max speed of 20 MPH so we can accommodate
| Model T's
| OJFord wrote:
| A better analogy might be something like upgrading roads
| with the newly liberated fourth dimension; so mere three
| dimensional Model Ts - that people will try to use no
| matter your protest - are very unlikely to end up in the
| right place. (And not just Model Ts, but the entire
| twentieth century and a bit's worth of vehicles.)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The issue is replacement cost and feasibility. As roads
| got better pavement (or were more reliably paved) speed
| limits could increase. I still have some 20-30mph dirt
| roads near my home here (actually quite a few), but
| highways were specifically made to support higher speeds
| (longer straight sections, in sane places smoother
| curves). Notably, improving road quality did not obsolete
| the Model T (though it did become obsolete) on its own.
| It just made them particularly outdated when other,
| faster, options were now viable.
|
| Nothing has stopped making faster cars just as nothing
| (fundamentally) has stopped us from making a "better"
| Internet (supporting more addresses and other features).
| What hasn't been done is to say, "Ok, so we already have
| this massive hardware rollout but we're going to
| literally obsolete 99.99% of it overnight and cost
| everyone, home users, small businesses, governments,
| megacorps, billions or trillions to replace their
| hardware."
|
| Why didn't that happen? Because it would've been stupid.
| Instead we ended up with what's amounted to two Internets
| with bridges between them. The transition hasn't been
| smooth, but it has been happening.
| jffry wrote:
| There's no way we could ever stop the world and get
| everybody to use a new protocol overnight.
|
| Attempting to change the format of an existing protocol
| in-place in a way that existing hardware and software
| cannot handle, would be an effort that's dead on arrival.
|
| The global transition to ipv6 is already hard enough, and
| that's with it designed as a separate protocol so that
| existing equipment that doesn't understand it can at
| least gracefully discard it instead of mishandling it.
| jedberg wrote:
| Funny you should mention the Model T. We did the exact
| same thing with roads as we did with IPv6. We created a
| new type of road (highways) that the Model T could not go
| on. But the new cars can still use the old roads, albeit
| slower than their max speed. This is the same as IPv6
| going through carrier grade NAT.
|
| Slowly over time the roads were upgraded, so now you can
| use mostly high speed roads to get between places and you
| don't really see Model Ts anymore because it's not
| convenient to avoid all the high speed roads.
| bena wrote:
| An IPv4 address isn't A.B.C.D though. That's just a shorthand
| way for us write it down because those chunks are easier for
| us to deal with. An IPv4 address _is_ an unsigned 32 bit
| integer.
|
| The address is not the real issue. An IPv4 header contains 32
| bits for the source address and 32 bits for the destination
| address. That's what needed to be extended. IPv4
| implementations expect the destination address to be 32 bits
| after the source address.
|
| Any fix you can think of to extend the address fields in the
| header will fall into the situation of having an additional
| protocol. Because changing the v4 header and calling it a v4
| header would probably get your packet dropped as bad. Or have
| it being sent to somewhere else. Or some other undefined
| behavior.
|
| So your best option is to have it identify as a new version.
| Yes, v4 implementations will reject your packet, but that's
| what you want in this case.
| jffry wrote:
| Because "just add 4 more bytes of address space" wouldn't be
| backwards-compatible with the world's worth of hardware and
| software built around IPv4 anyways. There just isn't anywhere
| in an ipv4 packet that you could put those extra bytes that
| wouldn't break existing systems.
|
| So the only real option is creating a new protocol with a new
| protocol ID in the header. And if we're making a new protocol
| anyways, we might as well design it to fix more problems than
| just address space exhaustion.
|
| And that's what IPv6 is. The Wikipedia article has a lot of
| details on the kinds of changes it makes and why:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Comparison_with_IPv4
| d--b wrote:
| Honestly I think it couldn't have gone a lot better...
|
| The worst that happened to the internet is Google becoming evil.
| The internet circa 2000 was mind blowing.
| harel wrote:
| It was mind blowing indeed. It was such an adventure building
| stuff on the web back then. We didn't have the choice we have
| today. I don't think Google became "evil". It just realised (or
| remembered) it's a business.
| paulcole wrote:
| Just curious, how old were you circa 2000?
| [deleted]
| raarts wrote:
| Not GP but I was 40. You?
| reactspa wrote:
| Emails cost money to send. The money goes towards some good cause
| (maybe even towards internet infrastructure).
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Honestly most of it is pretty great. Folks who want to give it
| better, more reliable performance end up reinventing circuit
| switching, and anything involving security is difficult to solve
| at the IP layer.
|
| The last big things to secure are DNS (can be done with DNSSEC),
| and possibly somehow mandate TLS for connections (although you
| definitely don't want that all the time).
|
| One big glaring problem is BGP, which we don't really have an
| answer for. Whereas "just use DNSSEC" pretty much solve the last
| big security hole above, BGP is still difficult because you have
| to basically have a system to attest the path for each BGP node.
| AS1 can't say "I have a path of length 5 through AS2 AS3 AS4 AS5
| AS6 to AS6" unless that message can be attested to by each node,
| but then this comes into a bootstrapping problem (e.g. how do you
| reach those ASes to get some sort of key without going through
| AS2 first?) or trusting some authority as we do for ssl certs.
| God knows the first thing I do on any fresh install is uninstall
| those root certs from any sketchy government I don't trust.
|
| Having worked on SDN in its heyday for some of the big players in
| the space, there are definitely good ideas in the space, but
| getting to adoption is damn difficult, bordering on impossible. I
| don't know what it will take to oust BGP, so we're kinda stuck
| with it for the foreseeable future.
| busterarm wrote:
| > One big glaring problem is BGP,
|
| I see what you did there :D
| iptrans wrote:
| There are only about 100k ASNs. It would be fairly easy to
| solve the bootstrapping problem by just preloading all the
| keys.
| uncomputation wrote:
| Push for content-addressing over URLs. To be honest, I don't know
| if this would hamper the development of the internet or be a good
| thing at all, but I would love to see what people would come up
| with and how it would change the web.
| rektide wrote:
| The Web Packaging specifications[1] are surprisingly close to
| turning URLs into a content-addressed system. Content-addressed
| networking is all about names for content, after all, which
| philosophically is a close match for what a URL is, it just so
| happens that HTTP uses urls to resolve servers that serve the
| content. But with Web Package, content is signed by the origin,
| and can be distributed via other means.
|
| One of the primary uses cases for Web Package is to let two
| users exchange content while offline, perhaps via a usb stick
| or what not. This isn't part of the specification, but we could
| begin to imagine sites that have a list of the web packages
| they have available for download. And we could imagine
| aggregating those content indexes, and preferring to download
| from these mirrors over downloads from the origin's servers.
|
| I'm hoping eventually we get a fairly content-addressed
| network, via urls.
|
| [1] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage
| cpr wrote:
| I think you mean the late 60's and early 70's.
| [deleted]
| strictfp wrote:
| Put AJAX back in the bottle.
| cmason wrote:
| I'd make it so you can only set the evil bit to 0.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Does this include laws about the internet? Because I think if the
| Computer Fraud and Abuse Act were altered somehow sufficiently
| that aaronsw hadn't been arrested, I'd prefer that future.
| janci wrote:
| 1. Prevent protocols to cross layer boundaries. FTP, SIP, etc.
| are application protocols, yet they use ports and IP addresses
| for identification of endpoints. They break if the transport
| layer does something they did not anticipate (e.g. NAT). NAT is
| not evil, nor broken. Protocols not respecting layer boundaries
| are broken.
|
| 2. Make use of DNS SRV records for all services. Why HTTP must be
| on port 80? Why not consult DNS to resolve the port too? Pretty
| much related to my first point.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Not sure how to accomplish it, but advertisements should be
| captured in a semantically distinct way in markup. I hate ads,
| but I'm not saying you can't have them if you want, you just have
| to wrap them in the equivalent <advertisement>../</advertisement>
| tags, so that there is no question about what content contains an
| advertisement and what doesn't. That way, it's trivial for me to
| block them. The flip side of the coin is that my browser will
| tell you if I'm blocking ads, and you can decide if you want me
| as a viewer or not.
| teraflop wrote:
| Even if you could come up with an "objective" definition of
| what counts as an advertisement, what incentive do site owners
| have to be honest about it? Likewise, why would I want my
| browser to tell the site that I'm blocking ads?
|
| This idea reminds me of the Evil Bit:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3514
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Not sure how to accomplish it
|
| I am hoping that the same technology that transported me back
| in time and made me director of DARPA would help me solve
| those issues.
| K33P4D wrote:
| _Search for URL, should be hardcoded into a new standard|_ Every
| PERSONAL IDENTITY/WEB URL should exist as its own resource
| cluster on the hosting server, either as a microservice on a
| distributed kuberenetes and provide API's to query information |
| _NEWS and ELECTIONS should be blockchain |_ Blood donation/organs
| should be on global blockchain | _A new Data standard for open
| health analytics |_ Pollution, toxic levels of chemicals from
| known pollution control boards of every country, based on
| location should be on blockchain.
| closeparen wrote:
| I would probably have most nodes on some kind of overlay network
| contained within a jurisdiction/extradition area, with fewer and
| more structured interconnections across hostile national borders.
| I don't think it's reasonable to make every small business with
| an email or web server for its local customers and partners, have
| to defend against large and well funded criminals operating in
| broad daylight from Russia.
| Animats wrote:
| Changes I would have made in the early days:
|
| - 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128
| bits was overkill.
|
| - Nodes, not interfaces, have IP addresses, so you can use
| multiple paths.
|
| - IPSEC available but initially optional.
|
| - Explicit congestion notification, so packet loss and congestion
| loss can be distinguished.
|
| - Everything on the wire is little-endian, byte oriented, and
| twos complement.
|
| - You can validate a source IP address by pinging it with a
| random number. If you don't get a valid reply, the IP address is
| fake. Routers do this the first time they hear from a new
| address, as a form of egress filtering. This contains DDOS
| attacks.
|
| - Routers will accept a "shut up" request. If A wants to block B,
| it sends to a router on the path, the router pings A to validate
| the source, and then blocks traffic from B to A for a few
| minutes. This also contains DDOS attacks. Routers can forward
| "shut up" requests to the next router in the path, for further
| containment.
|
| - Fair queuing at choke points where bandwidth out is much less
| than bandwidth in.
|
| - Explicit quality of service. At a higher quality of service,
| your packets get through faster, but you can't send as many per
| unit time.
|
| - No delayed ACKs in TCP.
|
| - Fast connection reuse in TCP.
|
| - Mail is not forwarded. Mail is done with an end to end
| connection. Mail to offline nodes may be resent later, but the
| sender handles that. Mail, instant messaging, and notifications
| are the same thing. Spam is still possible but hard to anonymize.
| If you want your mail buffered, use an IMAP server at the receive
| end.
|
| - One to many messaging uses a combination of RSS and
| notifications.
|
| - Something like Gopher should be available early. The Web would
| not have fit in early machines. but Gopher would.
| darkr wrote:
| > 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128
| bits was overkill
|
| The least significant 64 bits in IPv6 are used for link-layer
| addressing, which is how IPv6 supplants older L2 protocols (ARP
| etc) with NDP etc, thereby fixing (or at least improving) some
| significant issues with larger IPv4 subnet
| scalability/reliability
| kodablah wrote:
| > Mail is not forwarded
|
| Go one further, mail is pulled, not sent. One such approach is
| https://tonsky.me/blog/streams/. It'd be hard to prevent moats
| and people might still coalesce into a few popular middlemen,
| but at least spam would be reduced. Spam is the primary reason
| client-side/self-hosted mail is left to the tech-savvy.
| science4sail wrote:
| > 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128
| bits was overkill.
|
| What if humanity becomes a Kardashev type-2 or an interstellar
| civilization? In that case the population of humans, much less
| computers, could easily succeed 70 trillion.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Nodes, not interfaces, have IP addresses, so you can use
| multiple paths._
|
| Operating systems would quickly develop "multi noding"; binding
| multiple node identities to a host, and then partitioning those
| among the interfaces.
|
| Separate IPs for different adapters is a good idea, and needed
| for NAT: e.g. a home router being 192.168.1.1 inward-facing,
| and having some external IP. I
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| > Nodes, not interfaces, have IP addresses, so you can use
| multiple paths.
|
| Isn't this difference academic/software? What is the crucial
| point here that can no longer be implemented as an abstraction?
| (Not a networking specialist so this might just be my ignorance
| speaking.)
|
| > You can validate a source IP address by pinging it with a
| random number.
|
| Good idea, but I suspect this is the type of feature that might
| quickly fall prey to implementation laziness/incompetence, or
| in other words, enough implementers would both ignore it and
| not use it until it became unreliable.
|
| > Routers will accept a "shut up" request
|
| I like this idea but couldn't this system be abused by a
| malicious man in the middle to much more easily hinder
| connectivity to a targeted system? The man in the middle can
| fake the validation too...
|
| > Mail is not forwarded
|
| I don't think this is a good idea. People would quickly invent
| a forwarding protocol if one didn't exist. I mean, I see what
| you're trying to do here, but I don't think you would succeed
| on this one.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Re: mail - I believe what gp is saying is that mail will be
| sent directly - made possible by the larger IP address space.
| Once it's on your device you can copy and move it wherever.
| This would actually match the original design of email before
| it became the case where everything was via pop and imap. Of
| course the biggest flaw with email was not expecting spam. My
| change would be accepting messages only from known senders or
| those who have done the needed "work"
| https://www.w3.org/2003/10/acquaintance-protocol/
| Buttons840 wrote:
| >> Routers will accept a "shut up" request
|
| > I like this idea but couldn't this system be abused by a
| malicious man in the middle to much more easily hinder
| connectivity to a targeted system? The man in the middle can
| fake the validation too...
|
| I think of it more as a "I'm just ignoring these, you mine as
| well stop sending them" request. After all, a man-in-the-
| middle can already just drop the packets.
| solatic wrote:
| > Routers will accept a "shut up" request
|
| This shifts the DoS threat from servers to clients. How does
| the router know that the request from A to block B is legit?
| Just because the router can ping A? Behold, a system where you
| can shut down your enemies for good by paying botnets to send
| requests to block B.
| FranchuFranchu wrote:
| I'd include some extra bits in IP addresses to eliminate NAT
| seltzered_ wrote:
| backlinks.
|
| (see
| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpdDtK5bVKk&feature=youtu.be&...
| by Jaron Lanier, also see Ted Nelson)
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Going a bit more philosophical, I found myself thinking about
| the lack of backlinks and people like Rene Descartes (via
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rene_Descartes) :
|
| " Refusing to accept the authority of previous philosophers,
| Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers
| who preceded him. In the opening section of the Passions of the
| Soul, an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so
| far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one
| had written on these matters before." "
| therealplato wrote:
| Client certificates are required with every http/s request. Back
| in 2021 we've never logged in with user/pass
| _joel wrote:
| That sounds horrendous imho, how would it be administered and
| what privacy concerns would there be.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I think it's too soon, but security security security.
|
| I'm push as many examples of capability based security into the
| academic world as I possibly could, in the 1970s.
|
| Alternatively, push a version of Pascal with a standard library,
| and drown the insane practice of ending strings with a null
| instead of knowing their lengths.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| There is only one protocol, for file transfer.
|
| Consequences:
|
| * There is no live user tracking.
|
| * Access control can be user/password or ssh keys
|
| * You always have an archive of what you read
|
| * You always have an archive of chats
|
| * Everything is _in principle_ decentralized (whether it is in
| practice depends on whether people keep files.
|
| * Clients are in control.
| FreeAssange wrote:
| Nothing bad could ever be permanently fixed, because these
| changes were inevitable.
|
| The problem is how laws destroy fair competition by favoring
| those with the most $$.
|
| Fix that, and you fix everthing else (not gonna happen).
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I assassinate Osama Bin Laden and therefore prevent the patriot
| act and the erosion of personal freedoms in the pursuit of
| "national security".
| ayansq wrote:
| s-expressions instead of docbook or xml.
|
| (html (head ...) (body ...))
| awill wrote:
| replace https:// with https: (I believe that was TBL's biggest
| regret too) :).
| grillvogel wrote:
| Cancel the project, Terminator 2 style
| lurker137 wrote:
| I don't know how it would be implemented but I always thought it
| would have been better if there was more meaningful separation of
| domains, and that you need a different browser to connect to a
| different domain. That way the net could be divided. There could
| be a domain for only verified information. A domain for public
| use. A domain for only educational content, etc. I have no idea
| how it would be moderated though
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Such a categorisation already existsed in the form of the
| original top-level domain names, but it was never enforced.
| .gov for government, .mil for military, .com for commercial,
| .edu for educational facilities, etc.
|
| For good reason, though. Who says what information is
| "verified", the government, the news media, the publishers? And
| what governments, media, and publishers get a say?
|
| Perhaps it'd be nice for browsers to show a little indicator to
| confirm that a website is hosted by a government (although .gov
| and .mil are only valid for American governments, government
| could use a given domain as their government basis). There's a
| big difference between what's right ("climate change is real")
| and what the government is saying ("who knows, maybe drinking
| bleach is a good idea?").
|
| Dividing the net goes straight against the idea of the
| internet. I don't think using a special browser for special
| domains is very tempting. We'd probably end up with the alt-net
| version of onion.to to proxy all different kinds of sites to a
| single application.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| You're conflating authenticity with authority. It would be
| nice to quickly and reliably tell whether something is a
| government source, or a educational institution, or what have
| you. Whether the information is then correct, that's another
| matter.
| [deleted]
| swiley wrote:
| We already have IPv6.
|
| The only things broken on the internet are smartphones and closed
| IoT firmware.
| bob1029 wrote:
| >We already have IPv6
|
| I feel like _starting_ with IPv6 would make a dramatic
| difference in adoption rates today... I.e. IPv4 never gets
| created. Imagine a world without a single NAT device or port
| translation algorithm.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Why am I the only one who likes all my devices in my house
| having one IP address. It's no one's business if I have 10
| computers in here or 1.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Separate data and views.
|
| Basically: servers focus on serving their data, and then it's up
| to the user to figure out which "renderer" they want to use to
| display it. Ofc defaults would be provided.
|
| But, say, you wanted to view tweets in a table form: no problem.
|
| Or maybe, you want to have a really wacky "whip the llamas ass"
| UI for podcasts: go for it.
|
| -----
|
| The big benefit of this is that it would allow for artistry in
| websites, rather than the boring old blue, black, white, grey
| material design.
| breck wrote:
| 2-D syntax everywhere. It's a 2-dimensional binary. Suddenly the
| intermediate layers between binary and the higher level langs we
| work with day in and day out have the same form.
|
| For example, 2d langs for HTML, CSS, JSON, others:
| https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/
|
| A 2D lang that replaces Markdown: http://scroll.pub/
|
| You can have 2D langs for TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, et cetera. A grid is
| all you need.
|
| I figured the math out 8 years ago, https://medium.com/space-net,
| and slowly getting there. Still in early days, but good annual
| growth rate. I'd be surprised if it doesn't happen. The math
| makes too much sense.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I don't follow. Can you elaborate? What is 2-D syntax?
| breck wrote:
| 1D syntax assumes a linear pass from beginning to end across
| the bytes of a program to build the AST. You have concepts
| like brackets and parens and quotation marks and colons.
|
| 2D languages have none of those. They imagine all programs as
| laid out on a grid. Think of a spreadsheet. For trees, you
| use indentation. There is not a single computer language in
| all the world that cannot have it's semantics represented
| with just that 2D syntax. This realization has long
| fascinated me. It knocks me off my feet, the same way I feel
| about binary notation.
|
| Here is a talk I gave in 2017 about 1D vs higher D languages:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldVtDlbOUMA
|
| Here is a video that makes the connection between programming
| languages and spreadsheets clearer:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k
| neolog wrote:
| Are you related to https://www.tree-annotation.org/ ?
| breck wrote:
| No, but this is really interesting! Thank you so much for
| sharing!
|
| I obviously have quite a passion for the idea that
| there's a universality to Tree Structures and some
| fundamental simple notation we are stumbling towards, so
| interesting to see others with that!
|
| This page (https://www.tree-annotation.org/blog/no-
| escape.html) is close to one of the benefits, but it
| turns out you don't need any escape characters at all!
| Simply indentation let's you have blocks that cut and
| paste naturally with no escaping.
| herbst wrote:
| What is making Scrolldown more 2d than markdown? Is it just the
| extendibility? The intends?
|
| I don't think I fully understand your concept
|
| I also noticed your example grammar often contains a lot of js
| code. So it's not intended as different language but as data
| model with built in JavaScript? Kinda like a more modern XSLT?
| underseacables wrote:
| I remove most centralized control so that private companies have
| no power to censure, but governments could if they chose. I think
| private companies have vastly too much power over the internet,
| something that is unlikely to change.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| ...also I'd like to add... It's a pity @dakami isn't around to
| give his response, I'd have liked to hear it.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Stretch goal: No password authentication whatsoever.
|
| Target goal: No cleartext password authentication. (No telnet as
| it was, no ftp as it was, no smtp as it was, etc., yada, and so
| on....)
|
| Fallback goal: Get HTTPS right far sooner, with cryptographers
| working on SSL 1.0 from the beginning, with funding, and
| eliminate HTTP as soon as possible.
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(page generated 2021-06-28 23:01 UTC)