[HN Gopher] Arpanet pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was n...
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       Arpanet pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished
        
       Author : onei
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2022-03-12 13:47 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
        
       | tonymet wrote:
       | For one we're limited to TCP and UDP- without a better protocol
       | for media streaming .
       | 
       | authentication was omitted , resulting in horrifying UX and
       | security holes
       | 
       | and the omission of encryption led to sloppy tunneling solutions
       | that are still being reworked 50 years later
        
         | Karrot_Kream wrote:
         | > For one we're limited to TCP and UDP- without a better
         | protocol for media streaming .
         | 
         | What's wrong with UDP for media? Is it the lack of multicast?
         | 
         | > authentication was omitted , resulting in horrifying UX and
         | security holes
         | 
         | While this is painfully obvious now I don't think the original
         | Internet pioneers have ever really thought of the need for
         | authentication as the ubiquity and threat landscape was very
         | different. Regardless, we're all paying the price now.
        
           | tonymet wrote:
           | that's like saying addresses are enough to deliver mail.
           | there's still flow control , error correction , buffering ,
           | authentication , stream multiplexing, compression, encoding
           | etc etc
           | 
           | streaming protocols handle this at the app layer but it would
           | have been nice to have a protocol between reliable tcp and
           | wild west udp
        
           | kragen wrote:
           | UDP supports multicast
        
       | wyldfire wrote:
       | One of the biggest bummers is how much the Internet has mostly
       | collapsed to TCP and of that a very large share is http/https.
       | UDP is still going strong for a handful of important
       | applications. But if it's not one of those two -- good luck
       | getting end-to-end transit.
        
         | alar44 wrote:
         | What exactly is your complaint?
        
           | malwarebytess wrote:
           | I thought he was pretty clear. The internet itself shouldn't
           | be limited to merely TCP et al. It's just wires.
        
           | Karrot_Kream wrote:
           | That middleboxes constantly stymie innovation through
           | ossification. At least that's what I would think and I was
           | going to post something very similar. At least we can just
           | put overlay networks up and ignore most of the middleboxes
           | out there.
        
         | icedchai wrote:
         | Residential ISP policies on port filtering, NAT, and lack of
         | IPv6 uptake are also to blame. The average consumer doesn't
         | care about any of that though, as long as FB, Netflix, and a
         | handful of other sites load. Today's internet may as well be
         | interactive TV.
        
           | Karrot_Kream wrote:
           | At least HTTP2, HTTP3, and overlay networks (like ZeroTier or
           | Wireguard) are opening up ways to have actual peers on the
           | internet behind NAT4.
        
       | richardfey wrote:
       | The article fails to mention what are these planned improvements
       | that he had; does he mention them in the video?
        
       | Taniwha wrote:
       | Way back then there were competing visions of what the internet
       | might be - some were corporate (and somewhat based around
       | corporate lock-in) DNA/BNA/SNA/etc others were more com ing from
       | a postal/telegraph sort of world X.25/OSI - in many ways TCP/IP
       | was an outlier, the fact that it didn't really belong to anyone
       | had a lot to do with why it succeeded (also they understood
       | datagrams, and weren't really worried about how to charge for
       | dropped packets).
       | 
       | I suspect (I wasn't even close to being in the room) that
       | freezing TCP was likely a very pragmatic thing, if you wanted to
       | be accepted as THE internet you had to be perceived as finished,
       | otherwise someone else's many 1000 person-year project would have
       | won.
       | 
       | One of the great things about IP is that it's extensible, there's
       | still room for protocols other than UDP/TCP, you can still write
       | something new and better, or a fixed TCP, and install it along
       | side the existing protocols - of course getting everyone to
       | accept it and use it will be difficult
        
       | tomcam wrote:
       | That's always been obvious to me. The Web & Net are built on
       | RFCs: Requests for Comment. They aren't called PRD's (protocol
       | requirement documents) or something along those lines. Kind of
       | beautiful actually, that it wasn't as top down as I would have
       | expected.
        
       | themerone wrote:
       | It would be nice to have more details than,"I didn't think TCP
       | was finished"
        
       | batch12 wrote:
       | Interesting that the same issues he experienced at oracle are
       | still happening today and this is attributed to releasing TCP
       | earlier than the developers wanted. With that said, I can't think
       | of many flavors of technology that are "finished".
        
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       (page generated 2022-03-13 23:00 UTC)