[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
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Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
There are multiple companies that were born to solve specific
internet's infrastructural problems (e.g. Equinix, Akamai). Looking
at the way internet usage has evolved, what kind of infra
challenges do we have to face (now or future)? [books/papers
suggestions are welcome!]
Author : vabahe7646
Score : 74 points
Date : 2022-04-10 12:59 UTC (10 hours ago)
| legulere wrote:
| It would be nice to have a cable alternative to IEEE
| 802.15.4/6LoWPAN. IP seems to be the future for home automation.
| The problem with wireless is that you end up with devices you
| have to change batteries and reliability issues in high density
| housing. Laying a twisted pair ethernet cable to each temperature
| sensor is overkill and too expensive.
| zokier wrote:
| single-pair ethernet?
| faangiq wrote:
| The infra problem is people. Cloud is creating such value and
| complexity that companies need to start paying SWE millions to
| keep up. (Top SWE can easily generate 8-9 fig pnl.) But due to
| lack of social capital it is universally still seen as a code
| monkey class.
| chudi wrote:
| Some way to companies to buy a server as an apliance to serve as
| a homepage and alla their internet nerds, just plug it yo tour
| network, setup tour domain and thats it
| teddyh wrote:
| Those companies were not created to _solve_ those problems, but
| to _profit_ by them. Do you think that, say, Cloudflare would
| like a better web protocol which would be impossible to DDoS?
| imtringued wrote:
| How would a web protocol solve this? Even if you were to create
| an internet protocol to counter DDoS attacks by allowing
| destination IP addresses to request hardware accelerated IP
| bans of abusive source addresses you still are stuck with a
| hardware and authorization problem.
|
| Even if you properly implement this system, network operators
| will expose themselves to firewall DDoS attacks by malicious
| actors that are trying to fill the firewall blacklists with
| garbage.
|
| We've reached counter counter DDoS warfare. What do you do now?
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Given that they seem to be backing IPFS, I would say so.
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...
| teddyh wrote:
| I see that similarly to Google backing Firefox. On the
| surface, it seems odd, but probably has some shrewd reason
| for it, and it would probably cease the moment the backed
| project got any real traction.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| If such a thing was possible we'd be the first to roll it out.
| DDoS is a scourge which is why we made DDoS mitigation
| unmetered on all plans including free:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/unmetered-mitigation/
| teddyh wrote:
| Allow me to paraphrase your comment:
|
| "It's not possible to solve this problem, except by
| centralizing all the web through us. Aren't we _generous_ to
| not punish our customers when they get hit by this problem?"
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Do not "rephrase" other's comments. Stick to your own.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| I wonder if DDoS could be solved (for static websites at
| least) by using P2P as a supplementary load balancer.
|
| This could be set to only be enabled if load is approaching a
| certain percent of capacity that the servers/CDN are able to
| handle.
|
| Once reaching that threshold, P2P would kick in, and existing
| visitors could serve static content to newer visitors using
| something like the WebRTC + Service Worker + IndexedDB combo
| that www.arc.io uses for their P2P CDN.
|
| Thoughts?
| whistl034 wrote:
| I think solving the "last mile" problem in the US is our greatest
| problem, especially in rural areas. Too many state and local
| governments have been paid off by lobbyists to pass laws to block
| any competition from offering cheaper and better options.
|
| Too many people are stuck with slow, expensive, and unreliable
| cable and/or DSL ISPs. Some have no choice whatsoever. Some
| others get to choose only from two equally awful options. We need
| legally available competition EVERYWHERE.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think it's a problem even in urban areas. A friend of mine is
| working on something called Flume:
| https://www.flumeinternet.com/ Their funding model (at least
| right now) is basically to serve customers where the government
| will pay for it. Many of their customers are getting home
| broadband for the first time in their life. (They remark that
| it's fun when their friends come over and they can give them
| the wifi password.) This is all happening in New York City;
| some people are getting Internet access for the first time in
| their lives, in the largest city in the richest country in the
| world.
|
| I can only imagine how fucked rural America is.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| What I don't quite understand is how these rural areas got
| electricity. If it's so expensive to run something to a rural
| area, who ate the cost of providing grid access? Or is
| cable/fiber just significantly more expensive per mile compared
| to electricity?
| duped wrote:
| The federal government ate the cost. FDR passed the Rural
| Electrification Act in 1935 as a part of the New Deal, which
| gave large loans to fund electrifying rural parts of America.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| The New Deal electrified America.
| jsz0 wrote:
| As a society we had a much higher tolerance for risk when the
| electrical grid was being built. We were perfectly fine with
| the idea some people would die building it and some people
| would get electrocuted using it. The world we live in now has
| much lower tolerance for risk. You can't even screw a wall
| mount bracket in without carrying liability insurance.
| na85 wrote:
| Society's risk tolerance varies with domain. Electrical
| power systems are well understood and thus we expect them
| to be as safe as practical.
|
| Contrast that to the reaction to Tesla's autopilot that
| will happily drive you into an embankment at fatal speeds.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| A major reason for needing to have so much liability
| insurance in the United States is the insane cost of our
| medical care.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Unfortunately that problem space is so large (every new line of
| fibre has _how many_ stakeholders?) that a single individual or
| organisation might not be able to have any impact here. Which I
| think is the root of this question.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| If there's above-ground electricity, there should be rules
| about getting pole access. And from what I understand those
| poles, and anything underground, work by getting easements
| rather than negotiating separately with every individual
| property owner.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Fibre op engineer (Canadain) here - there are rules, but
| those are a double edged sword; the proper paperwork to get
| on a pole is a large part of the total cost to attach. Ever
| see the mess of cables in a developing country? The laxer
| rules that lead to those tangles substantially reduces the
| cost of building out internet.
| talove wrote:
| Preface: Gonna do my best to not add any commentary for or
| against the social aspect of decentralization / blockchains. Also
| gonna be high-level.
|
| I can't help but feel distributed computation is a really really
| fascinating problem and if the socioeconomic wave we're going
| through now sustains even a fraction of this current moment it'll
| be a longterm engineering focus.
|
| It's impossible for me to not recognize that the diff blockchains
| mirror that of different database designs as the web scaled from
| nineties. First read capacity was needed to support e-commerce.
| Followed by social platforms where read/write needed to scale and
| adopt distributed models and eventual consistency.
|
| Now we're scaling distributed computation and all sorts of
| interesting problems emerge. If things are gonna turn out to be
| even remotely what an idealist might lead you to believe we're at
| the cusp of rearchitecting every single layer of computation.
| Networking. Machine code compilation and execution. File storage.
|
| PS I did a couple of cmd+f for keywords to find someone answering
| with this context and didn't find any. That seems crazy.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| Provable identity. Yes, you can do Oauth via the google or the
| facebook but sooner or later we need something that isn't tied to
| getting all your user interaction data ...
|
| Digital notary. So a third person (digitally) signing a
| transaction or other document exchange.
| axg11 wrote:
| Could you expand on both of those? They sound really
| interesting but I'm not sure I understand the issues or use
| cases.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| Provable identity: you get an email, hi i'm a hiring manager
| from company X, can we get in touch about job Y, could you
| please send me your (secret) phone number?
|
| It should be possible for you, the receiver of the email, to
| check if the email originated at company X.
|
| Digital Notary: this came up in several data privacy
| discussions. You (A) are in contact with B, but you don't
| want to send B something like a scan of your passport (e.g.
| for age restricted services). So you disclose the passport
| scan to Notary and he sends B the message, the passport was
| disclosed to me and the person is >21.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _It should be possible for you, the receiver of the
| email, to check if the email originated at company X._
|
| You could check the DKIM signature of the email.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| The point is "proving" something without showing them the
| proof. E.g. someone Company X trusts looks at the
| documents or etc and sends a signed confirmation that
| they confirm X, Y, and Z about Person A.
|
| The point being that Company X does not have a copy of
| the sensitive information (and neither the liability of
| losing it) and the Digital Notary would (in theory) have
| better procedures for properly deleting or storing the
| data as needed.
| na85 wrote:
| Exactly. "Did this email originate at $server" is what
| DKIM and SPF are meant to solve and IME they work well.
| Setting them up is not particularly difficult and there
| is a wealth of open documentation about it.
| Ken_Adler wrote:
| https://trustoverip.org/wp-content/toip-model/
| j_san wrote:
| I don't know if this is in the category that you're asking for
| but right now there is tons of experimentation with "Content
| centric networking" e.g. "Named data networking" to better
| optimise how we load content inside the web. Instead of using an
| IP to connect to some server of e.g. Google to get content we
| just say what data we want and load it from where ever (with
| better prospects of caching).
| jharohit wrote:
| [DISCLAIMER - I run Transcelestial which is building laser comms
| and we think about this question quite a lot]
|
| Some background maybe first.
|
| There is a massive Global Internet Distribution challenge which
| works around the cost/bit equation. They are:
|
| 1. Undersea cable networks - USD 0.5-1B to deploy over a multi-
| year project. 10s of millions to maintain with regular cable
| cuts. Typically now only deployed through consortiums of Internet
| and Telecom companies. Carry 99% of world's international data.
|
| 2. Inter-City Distribution - National Fiber and Copper networks
| which connect tier 1-3 cities, towns and villages with a backbone
| to the nearest Internet Exchange OR telco data center (which in-
| turn would have a hard line back to Undersea landing stations).
|
| 3. Last Mile or within city/urban connectivity - last & middle
| mile within a city/town connecting homes, offices, towers and
| DCs.
|
| IMHO the challenges still remain but get worse from top to
| bottom, costs and complexity often jumping in orders of magnitude
| from one to the other, with Last mile obv being the craziest.
|
| Telcos nationally in most countries still own most of inter-city
| distribution and tier 2/3/4 POPs (point of presence), leasing out
| capacity from POPs to ISPs and Enterprises. The investment in
| laying these cables is EXTREMELY prohibitive and is the main
| cause for high Mbps rates, high latency and onerous terms when it
| comes to in-country network distribution (big e.g. is South
| Africa). Numbers range from orders of magnitude more expensive
| (e.g. $1.6B for Telstra Australia in Phase 1, $130-150B for US)
| than Undersea cables primarily due to Right of Way and
| operational costs of deployment.
|
| People are now moving from Rural to Tier2-3 cities/towns and also
| there is reverse-migration from megacities like Manila to Tier2-3
| cities/towns (as evidenced by rising cities like Cebu, Bali,
| Miami, Austin, Pune, etc where housing is more affordable and
| earning potential remotely is nearly the same). Bandwidth and
| latency demands are going up 100% Y-on-Y in Tier1-3 cities,
| especially in WFH COVID times. Starlink & others in LEO wil
| definitely help with most rural unconnected places (<1-2% of
| total bulk). Telcos will eventually build out Tier1 cities with
| fiber more robustly (since they have to deliver on 5G small cell
| and potentially 6G).
|
| Mid-tier cities & towns where by far the larger total bulk is
| accumulation will need a LOT of attention and more latency
| optimized, cost/bit minimized backbones.
|
| Finally, humanity's push to get into deep space in the next
| decade will require building out infra to support robotic and
| autonomous missions. Thinking of deep space objects as islands or
| continents is a helpful model and tightbeaming laser comms to
| them as "undersea cables but in space" could help address some
| bandwidth allocation problems in the early days (but local
| distribution will again have challenges)
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| Don't got the time to write a substantial comment but I would say
| we are going to have to figure out languages and transpilation
| next.
| jokoon wrote:
| Low carbon footprint datacenters, but it requires better software
| performance. Law of Wirth explains that.
|
| Ability to do SDR for wireless networks with smarphones. 5G is
| not a good solution.
|
| Better security for routers, and generally better software
| security regulations, which are almost non existent right now. If
| cars have security regulations, software should, too.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Low carbon footprint datacenters
|
| My gut tells me it's fairly low per person served, and it'll
| only improve over time as more renewable electric sources come
| online.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| >5G is not a good solution
|
| Interesting viewpoint. Care to expand on your thoughts? To me,
| 5G seems like a stepping stone to UWB communication
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| "Ability to do SDR for wireless networks with smarphones" - you
| want to have SDR on the smartphone?
| jokoon wrote:
| Yes, I don't see why not.
| fsckboy wrote:
| _next internet infra problems_
|
| not tryna be "that guy", but, isn't the internet concerned with
| interstructure? When you get to a LAN behind a firewall or code
| inside a walled garden, ok, that's infrastructure.
|
| _e.g. Akamai_
|
| that's interstructure, though it might require support from your
| infrastructure
| emteycz wrote:
| Inter-planetary internet... How do you play a game when few of
| the players are on Mars?
| tjpnz wrote:
| How do you even reconcile time between locations that far
| apart? Syncing your system clock with an off-planet NTP server
| will be.. problematic.
| hatware wrote:
| Ping of 30 minutes
| emteycz wrote:
| Turn-based strategies.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Yep. 30 minutes is super-fast compared to play-by-mail!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play-by-mail_game
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Even with high ping, application layer is probably the wrong
| place to solve this problem. We'll likely get email working as
| one of the first problems and be back to correspondence chess
| and the like. Even Civilization 5/6 works over email.
| imtringued wrote:
| https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/8111/how-do-
| you-p...
|
| Apparently people mail each other save games.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| TIL that Civ IV has "Play by Cloud" which automates all of
| this + supports webhooks to notify you when it's your turn.
| czbond wrote:
| entangled quantum pairs?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You can't send information with quantum entanglement.
|
| This is one of the no-go theorems of quantum information:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem>
| wmf wrote:
| Some progress has been made on this; see
| http://bundleprotocol.com/
| wmf wrote:
| De-ossifying the Internet is necessary for solving many other
| problems like the IPv6 and RPKI transitions.
|
| There's a lot of room to optimize latency whether it's removing
| bufferbloat, L4S, or cISP.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| There is not many ways to get rid of bufferbloat if you want to
| keep packet routing/switching networks.
| wmf wrote:
| Obviously we can't eliminate all buffering but excess
| buffering can be reduced.
| ksec wrote:
| Interesting question. Do we still have Internet _infrastructural
| problems_ left?
|
| Akamai solved POPs (point of presence). Equinix solved DC. Both
| are matching towards table stakes in the context of internet
| infrastructural. (Not business models). We have lots of under-sea
| cables / international expansions on-going and planned. And it is
| now more of a cost efficiency problem, not an _infrastructural
| problem_.
|
| We have a decent Ethernet roadmap [1], Terabit Ethernet, Petabit
| under-sea cable by 2030. If anything I see the _only_ internet 's
| infrastructural problems being closer to the consumer / client
| side of things where Fibre Cables are not being deployed. But I
| sense the pandemic has changed a lot of perspective on fast
| internet and Government are now willing to put more pressure into
| making FTTH as requirement.
|
| If we look at Mobile, even carriers were a little too optimistic
| in Data usage projection. 5G proved to be sufficient enough in
| terms of Tower capacity with enough headroom for expansion
| without requiring Small / Nano Cells.
|
| It might be different set of infrastructural problems, but more
| regulations on internet in a per country / jurisdictions basis,
| which would require Internet infrastructure to adapt to these
| scenario.
|
| [1] https://ethernetalliance.org/technology/roadmap/
| nukemaster wrote:
| TOR is slow and unpopular, stuff like that and content
| addressable protocols like IPFS are probably where the next
| problems are.
| cube00 wrote:
| Dealing with denial of service attacks in a way that doesn't
| involve needing to own more bandwidth then the attacker can
| saturate would be something to look into.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Well, that would have to be either not having a link for them
| to try to saturate (ie, edge-distribute your stuff as CDNs
| do), or preventing them from sending packets to you (which
| means telling _other people 's_ routers to run _your_ packet-
| filtering code, which I 'd think might be a bit of a hard
| sell).
| lesam wrote:
| That sounds like a business opportunity for a service
| provider specializing in packet filtering.
| bawolff wrote:
| So cloudflare?
| [deleted]
| zo1 wrote:
| I think our next biggest "problem", though perhaps not an
| infrastructural one, is one of protocols. We've pushed almost
| everything into HTTP from my perspective and I think we'll be
| dealing or solving that next. Perhaps a resurgence of dedicated
| protocols and the routing/infrastructure to deal with them.
| 8note wrote:
| I think it's likely that we will see a rise in customs
| expectations from countries about data that is imported.
|
| The great firewall is the prototype, but as the world becomes
| multipolar again, regional powers will want to control what kinds
| of data is imported/exported
| lettergram wrote:
| While I agree for centralized services. I think In the end all
| information will be accessible and searchable. Since the
| beginning of the written word, there's been an exponential
| expansion of information. Scrolls, book, news papers, radio,
| TV, internet, etc.
|
| So in terms of infrastructure, I think a way to tap into and
| share information regardless of restraint will be the end
| result. It would need to be cheap, impossible to censor,
| searchable and able to easily hide access devices / methods. to
| said system.
|
| I see crypto currencies as the initial stages of this.
| water-your-self wrote:
| I completely disagree. We see a continuing trend of
| consolidation and obfuscation. Most social media hides and
| scatters information intentionally to absorb user time,
| theres no value in providing information quickly and
| accessibly. I fear Google becoming worse is also by design as
| well. Its only time until they introduce their own infinite
| scroll.
| lettergram wrote:
| I agree short term that'll be the case. For a long time,
| radio was viewed as a dying form of communication, until TV
| started censoring large sections of what people wanted to
| listen to. Then you had the rise of people like Limbaugh,
| Jones, stern, etc
|
| The reality is people seek the truth when they know they're
| being lied to. Very few people in the west trust news
|
| https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-
| reports/20...
|
| Part of the issue with Google, etc has to do with the
| "Trusted News Initiative".
|
| I definitely agree the trend will continue. However, once
| an innovation with then properties I described can occur it
| will dominate.
| bamboozled wrote:
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| There's still no good way for me to write an open source web
| application and have its users bear the cost of running it.
|
| This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and
| IMO is the reason open source web applications haven't taken off
| more.
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| I think we need something like micro payments. Take lichess for
| example it's the biggest open source chess website completely
| ad free and runs by donations. If you divide the total monthly
| costs to run the servers by the number of games and you get a
| tiny fraction of a dollar cent. I don't remember the exact
| number, but it has been in the order of 1k chess games equals
| 1$. If you could charge 0.1 cent per game, then this website
| could run without any extra donations.
|
| Another idea that comes to mind is that the server side could
| be somehow run by the connected users. Users have storage + cpu
| cycles. Similar to torrent as long there's enough users
| (seeders) the game server will continue to work. Lichess for
| instance has tens of thousands players online 24/7.
| zamadatix wrote:
| "How to pay" always seemed like the easy half of the problem
| to solve, "how to manage what should be paid" seems much
| harder as nobody wants to deal with sorting through fraction
| of a penny payment approvals. Is 0.01 cent per game
| acceptable? 0.05? If you accept at 0.01 and it goes to 0.05
| do you have to re-accept? If everyone decides sets 0.1 cents
| as an auto-approve boundary does that mean every site is now
| going to try to charge 0.0999 cents? Does some centralized
| entity try to set these rates instead? How does the system
| protect against the equivalent of collect call scams? Does it
| protect against that in a way that doesn't limit actually
| using a service very quickly?
|
| It's like the permissions problem (really easy to prompt,
| really annoying to do so, really really bad to just assume
| yes or no all the time) except worse.
|
| In regards to distributed serving using the client endpoints
| it has a strong tendency to be more work, less reliable, and
| not as scalable (see peertube). What has seemed to work is
| offloading as much of the functionality for that user as you
| possibly can to that user's device. E.g. want to play a game
| against the computer? Run the chess engine WASM bundle on
| your device instead of the server (lichess does this).
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| A model that is similar to donations that I feel has not been
| fully explored is charging for cosmetic items. Reddit
| essentially does this now by allowing people to buy reddit
| gold, silver, or other awards.
|
| This revenue model has turned out to be quite profitable in
| gaming and creates an experience where most people can use
| the software for free but a long tail of users spend lots of
| money to have icons next to their name or elsewhere on the
| site.
|
| For chess you can imagine how this might work, for other
| software it is not always as clear.
| zzzzzzzza wrote:
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220127005808/en/Fed.
| ..
|
| still has a 5.5 cent overhead but that's a lot better than
| whats currently on offer
| MrDresden wrote:
| The micro donations idea kind of exists for the use case you
| mention in the form of the service Flattr.
| px1999 wrote:
| This is unfortunate because a couple of attempts get _so
| close_.
|
| You've got public docker repositories, terraform, aws service
| catalog (or cloudformation), all of which could fill this gap
| directly or via their own services if they had a slightly more
| beginner-accessible workflow...
| imiric wrote:
| Forget open source--there never _was_ a simple way for users to
| self-host web ~servers~ applications that gained any traction
| whatsoever.
|
| Opera gave it a go more than a decade ago with Opera Unite, but
| that went nowhere. Like a sibling comment mentioned, Sandstorm
| was a push in the right direction, but it also eventually
| failed. Docker and current container solutions are still way
| too complicated for the average user.
|
| The fact web founders focused so much on making the consumption
| of web content easy rather than producing/serving it is partly
| the reason why the web is so centralized today.
| dijit wrote:
| This is a weird take on history and divorced from the reality
| we live in even now.
|
| The first ever web browser written by Tim Berners Lee at CERN
| on a NeXt computer was a web editor as well.
|
| He envisioned that every web user would be a web creator. He
| is quoted many times as saying this.
|
| Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and
| forward the ports on your router. Unless you're behind a
| carrier grade NAT (as those are becoming much more common now
| that IPv4 is exhausted).
| charcircuit wrote:
| Isn't the solution just to use ads to have users fund the site?
| What were you thinking of?
| kardos wrote:
| That requires running a pile of nonfree/intrusive tracking
| code, and many people block this kind of thing
| water-your-self wrote:
| How is peertube these days
| geysersam wrote:
| I think s/he wants something that the users hosts together.
|
| Ads can be blocked, reduces the value of your service and do
| not pay enough to cover infra cost unless you have many
| users.
|
| In comparison - the resources needed to run a desktop app is
| 100% provided by the user.
| cheriot wrote:
| A theory: When declarative IaaS gets to a certain point, we can
| distribute the cloud hosting version of a one-click install.
| Then use federated auth so people can choose any instance of
| the app to host their identity.
| civilized wrote:
| What's wrong with subscription fees?
| layer8 wrote:
| Sandstorm.io was basically doing that, and it's the direction
| I'd want to see as a user. Unfortunately it isn't attractive to
| application providers who want to monetize their applications,
| and without enough applications it's also not attractive to
| users. Maybe it needs to be combined with a platform like
| NextCloud.
| thorgutierrez wrote:
| One of my big realization of 2021 is that this is exactly what
| blockchains can provide. You can have permanent hosting of your
| website on Arweave[1] and interactions with the website could
| save your state on Ethereum or similar. You pay once to host
| the website, and then it's free to browse and users pay
| whenever they want to change the state (e.g. post something on
| your website). Ethereum is like this big world computer that
| anyone can publish to and users pay to interact with it. You
| don't have to worry about hosting or uptime and it will be up
| there forever.
|
| [1]: https://www.arweave.org
| matkoniecz wrote:
| How large is ETH overhead? I expect it to be atrociously
| massive.
| macrolime wrote:
| There's the SAFE Network that will do exactly that. It's pay on
| put. You as a developer would have to pay a one time cost to
| store the app on network, but that should quite cheap. Users
| would then pay to store their own private data through the
| (web)app. It uses its own browser and protocol as sites are
| stored on a peer to peer network.
|
| It's still in somewhat unstable test versions, but I think
| there's hope it can be out within the next year or so.
| afpx wrote:
| https://safenetwork.tech/
| hsn915 wrote:
| You can.
|
| If you write it in Go and package it as a single binary.
|
| You can't if you write it in a scripting language that requires
| tons of programs to already exist on the system (a specific
| version of the language interpreter + a database server + other
| servers like redis and memcache etc etc etc).
|
| This is a problem with programming languages, not with computer
| systems.
|
| Computer systems already allow you to package and ship programs
| as self-contained units. That's their default mode of
| operation.
|
| The prolifiration of scripting languages that require an entire
| environment to be configured before it can a program is
| something that programmers have done to themselves.
| carlosdp wrote:
| There's actually a lot of open source apps that have this
| property in a particular category: web3 apps. Users (or other
| intermediaries, not necessarily the app dev) pay the cost of
| transactions, and thereby pay the cost of the data storage /
| computation layer.
|
| HN doesn't seem to like web3 very much yet, but one of the most
| positive innovations it brings is giving open-source apps a
| direct business model (instead of the usual "pro" and service
| org or hosted-version model). There are plenty of open-source
| apps making hundreds of millions or billions in revenue in this
| space!
|
| Even utility open-source projects receive significant funding
| through projects like Gitcoin (https://gitcoin.co/).
| yuliyp wrote:
| web3 apps do have high transaction costs, but that's not
| really reducing the costs that the web3 app would have
| otherwise paid to have a local database. So it costs money,
| but the developer doesn't really earn anything because of it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Cheap reliable last mile internet. The core and edge is solved.
|
| Around 37 percent of the world's population (2.9 billion people)
| have never used the Internet (1 in 3 people), per the UN's 2021
| report on the topic.
|
| https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2021-11-29-Facts...
| adrianwaj wrote:
| That's important for poverty-stricken people (and slaves) to be
| able to accept crypto donations and payments directly... but
| what if it becomes a scam?
|
| Even homeless people in the west should be able to get money
| that way.
|
| So an .eth domain for every person?
| [deleted]
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| IPv4 exhaustion is still probable to happen at some point
| hatware wrote:
| Centralization and decentralization. We need an internet that
| serves the people first.
| als0 wrote:
| I'm very excited about the challenges explored in the SCION
| project and recommend having a look at their site and papers
| https://scion-architecture.net/
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| they've been at this for many years now without any traction at
| all. all they can point to are some collaborations with 2 Swiss
| based ISP's and a start-up spun out of the university. They
| seem to be utterly lacking in business acumen, or willingness
| to engage with the business community which is surprising
| considering the momentum they could have had if they tried.
| I've filed this as failed already 2 years ago.
| woah wrote:
| I'm very skeptical about "blank slate" approaches such as this.
| Can you tell me what the advantages are? From a glance I see
| two big downsides already: - Tightly coupled components unlike
| the extremely modular design of TCP/IP means that further
| innovation will probably be difficult.
|
| - The design seems to mandate source routing, where the entire
| path needs to be known by the sender. This is much less
| resilient than the current internet where each hop decides how
| to best get a packet to its route.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that BGP is still horribly insecure at its core,
| which means that all it takes for BGP hijacking to occur is for
| someone to forget to configure their filters properly.
|
| (See: that time that a bunch of Google traffic started getting
| routed through Russia. Or the time that YouTube became
| inaccessible to the entire world)
| thayne wrote:
| We've seen several major incidents caused by mistakes in the
| past few years. It's only a matter of time before an actively
| malicious attack on BGP causes major damage.
| the_biot wrote:
| BGP by itself is insecure, but an (RPKI) infrastructure has
| grown up around it so that it can, and should be by now,
| secure.
|
| Yet BGP injection attacks (ASN or prefix theft) happen
| regularly. The reason is that not everybody follows the best
| practice here. It may well take a massively disruptive attack
| before this gets any better.
| 8note wrote:
| Electrical waste is an obvious one. The devices that the internet
| run on are a part of that problem.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| China being better than the rest of the world at IPv6
| myself248 wrote:
| I have a real simple proposal: Turn off (block) ipv4 for one
| minute a day. Next month, increase it to 2 minutes...
| HNHatesUsers wrote:
| shad0wfax wrote:
| Good question!
|
| I am biased in this answer because I am building https://hotg.ai/
| but I see the world going towards a more fragmented ecosystem.
| So:
|
| - Portable computations - sending your workloads to any place
| where the data is
|
| - Good local storage that keeps you compliant with local laws
|
| (edited for format)
| alexashka wrote:
| Re-writing all the software, in short.
|
| It is all a steaming pile of garbage.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| What programming language is "short"?
| alexashka wrote:
| None so far, they're all steaming piles of garbage.
|
| We're still typing single characters in text files as if
| we're on a terminal in 1960s.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| I don't think the medium (text files) is the real problem
| for SW. There are ways of creating SW by clicking things on
| a screen.
|
| We're in the middle of a SW quality crisis, because a lot
| of people have not the slightest idea what they are doing,
| but they are encouraged by their managers to ship
| immediately.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| The medium is part of it. A huge number of programming
| language features stem around the fact that we make text
| files the human interface. "Clicking things" is not the
| next step because clearly keyboards are faster. Imagine
| something more like a "notion for code" where things are
| 1) clearly keyboard focused 2) clearly being stored as
| structured data not plain utf8 text.
|
| Comments, build configuration, platform specific
| implementations, _alternate implementations_ (e.g.
| (re)implementations of an interface used by an
| application), tests, and etc. could all be _part of the
| "program"_. In many ways we try to do this already by
| hacking together git repos with everything stored in
| there as text and then require very particular versions
| of programs to run everything in there anyways.
|
| I think it's all sufficiently powerful already to build
| awesome things, but I do not doubt that in the next 10
| years something will be built that realizes the ideas
| which have been kicked around since Smalltalk/Self and
| raises the bar of productivity.
| karmakaze wrote:
| If/when interactive VR experiences go mainstream, network latency
| will have to be much better--not the average but rather the
| p99.99 latency. Having an immersive 90-120+ fps world
| stall/stutter routinely makes it unlivable.
| wilde wrote:
| The biggest challenges are people problems. Why the hell don't we
| have fiber to the home in most of America? Regulatory capture and
| market failures.
| klysm wrote:
| The cost of running new lines on poles is also insane, our
| infrastructure is racking up so much debt.
| imtringued wrote:
| There was a well meaning president that wanted to solve the
| problem until his program was cut down to nothing. Instead,
| we are heading towards an economic recession. Quite amusing.
| rejor121 wrote:
| Hell, the current infrastructure is the States is still a
| problem. I don't even want to think about the next version!
| jmrm wrote:
| I don't know if this is totally related to the question, but I
| think in a near future will be more and more common to have 4G,
| 5G, or 6G in your devices (not only phone and tablets, but also
| laptops and desktops computers) instead of using cable, fibre or
| others and a router.
|
| I don't know in the US, but in most parts of Europe we have
| reached such levels of speed and low ping that in not too much
| time it would be more clever and cheaper to ISPs to have more
| towers than wired solutions.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| My home internet (in Seattle) is T-Mobile 5G. Only chose it
| because there are no high speed wired options for my address,
| but it works pretty well.
| bryan_w wrote:
| How can we get the layperson to run a "homeserver" to host all
| their data locally and have a strong pki infra.
|
| 30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers,
| so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Pray that Apple makes one.
|
| I'm only half joking. I was just fantasizing about this the
| other day. I'd love this to become reality but I'm worried
| reality diverges from this idea further with each passing day.
| People produce more and more data that's useless outside of a
| closed platform. Nobody owns media to host.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| What about Helm?
|
| https://thehelm.com/
| jmrm wrote:
| Probably some ISPs will sell NAS or similar device and, with a
| monthly fee, you would have external access via a custom domain
| name (like john_doe.verizon.com, for example).
|
| A lot of non-techy people already have NAS, external hard
| drives, and things like that. I don't know how ISPs haven't
| done already this.
| depingus wrote:
| That's a DOA product. ISP's are notoriously terrible at
| everything; especially firmware. They can't be trusted with
| something like this.
| HNHatesUsers wrote:
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The first problem to solve would be getting a symmetric fiber
| connection to their home so they can actually upload at more
| than a highly volatile 5Mbps that is probably split amongst
| whole neighborhood. Second would be ipv6 address to not have to
| deal with CGNAT and make the ISP as dumb of a pipe as possible.
| richardw wrote:
| Why? Honest question.
|
| I fully appreciate owning your own data and hosting it
| somewhere, but no idea why we need to host anywhere but hyper-
| connected data centers.
|
| I'd like to own my social graph, my profile, my permissions for
| who can contact me and read my data. But no reason for that to
| execute on my phone or home server. Have service providers do
| it, compete, scale and specialise. Let me host at home if I
| want to, but that doesn't feel like the default we need.
|
| But prove me wrong. I like learning!
| imiric wrote:
| Because it's _my_ data. I should decide who can access it,
| when and on what terms. Relying on someone else to do it for
| me is an unnecessary middle man that exists for the only
| reason web developers haven 't made a good technical solution
| that would be simple, secure and reliable enough for everyone
| to use. For goodness sake, we've had to come up with laws for
| how companies can use our data instead of solid technical
| solutions that address the problem.
|
| The focus for the past 30 years has been on simplifying web
| content consumption. Everyone knows how to use a web browser.
| Why hasn't there been a similar push to make serving web
| content easier? There have been some attempts (Opera Unite,
| Sandstorm, Docker... web3?), but none have prevailed.
|
| A possible answer could be because it has created a huge
| market for 3rd party services to step in and make things
| easier for web users. And now it's probably too late to stop
| the train. But there's no reason this couldn't work while
| empowering the user.
| water-your-self wrote:
| Apple is now policing the images you own. They intend to
| observe everything you upload to ensure it aligns with local
| legislation. Some good, a lot of bad.
|
| Beyond that, if someone owns your data they can simply decide
| what you pay tomorrow and its burn it or pay.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives_
|
| I want that, but for the masses of tech-illiterate Average Joes
| out there, it's tough to compete against the sheer convenience
| of "tap next to trust big tech with all your private data and
| sync it all in the cloud" that you get when you unbox your
| iPhone/Android. And for most people their phone is their
| primary computing device now so their lives are tied to those
| ecosystems and we've been conditioned for over a decade now to
| just give our private data to the phones' ecosystems without
| asking questions because everting is so convenient and
| ignorance is bliss.
|
| Trying to get average consumers off the big-tech ecosystems at
| this point is like trying to unplug people from the matrix.
| It's nearly impossible, unless some new EU-style regulations
| break up these monopolies first so that third party
| alternatives can compete on feature parity.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > tap next to trust big tech with all your private data and
| sync it all in the cloud
|
| Consumer NAS management should be way easier. Why can't I tap
| my phone to my NAS to pair and then go anywhere in the world
| with a network connection?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Because
|
| 1) most consumers have no idea what a NAS is, and even when
| they do, consumers have been conditioned that all their
| data is automagically beamed to the Apple/Google cloud at
| any and all time there's an internet connection without any
| user involvement beyond entering their ID when they unbox
| their phone for the first time, so it's impossible for a
| third party device or service to compete with this level of
| out of the box integration and convenience
|
| 2) NAS devices aren't made by Apple and Google so NAS
| integration into these ecosystems is a second class
| experience at best, and Apple and Google will never make
| NAS devices as they're incentivized to get you to pay for
| their cloud storage subscriptions for your data. Plus, as a
| a cherry on top, this way they can silently data-mine you
| as well.
|
| Basically the industry is moving, or we can argue that it
| has moved already, towards subscriptions, where you never
| really own your music/movies/data but have access to it as
| long as you pay your monthly/yearly fee, because this is so
| much more lucrative for big-tech than getting you to buy
| commodity HW like a NAS and physically owning your data.
| layer8 wrote:
| Routers work because ISPs require them. ISPs however aren't
| fond of supporting the home server use case.
|
| I wish for a world where battery tech wasn't so limited.
| Imagine if everyone could just run a full-fledged server 24/7
| on their phone, as a simple app, with a reasonable data plan.
| depingus wrote:
| > Routers work because ISPs require them. ISPs however aren't
| fond of supporting the home server use case.
|
| This is the obvious and simplest solution. A built-in self-
| hosting platform right in the router, extensible with an
| external USB drive if the user needs it. But ISP's are
| notoriously terrible at everything and certainly can't be
| trusted with something like this.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why not ? Free (for instance) went pretty far in this
| direction 11 years ago (v6) :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox
| CyanLite4 wrote:
| We could use a very basic standard so that I don't have to click
| on cookie banners for every single website...
| mmastrac wrote:
| How do you detect and block coordinated troll farm attacks when
| they use arrays of LTE modems and look like a a bunch of
| passionate users?
| cinntaile wrote:
| That should be relatively easy for the mobile carrier, they're
| always in the same spot.
| sbazerque wrote:
| Making the network information aware is the next Internet infra
| problem.
| tootie wrote:
| I think observability has made a lot of strides but still isn't
| good enough. I get instant reporting of abstruse errors like API
| failures but actually understanding why to the point of being
| able to fix it is still really hard.
| Havoc wrote:
| As buzzwordy as it sounds I think between AR/VR/metaverse there
| will be some infra challenges that extend beyond "just needs a
| fatter pipe".
|
| A bit like games need complicated netcode to compensate for
| latency.
| cletus wrote:
| Three things spring to mind:
|
| 1. IPv4 will persist, possibly forever. There's really no
| compelling reason to migrate to IPv6 other than address space and
| we've had decades at this point of getting around this problem
| with various flavours of NAT.
|
| 2. Ossification. We've taken the quite reasonable step of
| discarding any packets or traffic we don't understand from a POV
| of minimizing threats. For example, there were cases of bypassing
| security using packet fragmentation. But this makes it
| increasingly difficult to extend the protocols (eg reliable
| connectionless messaging aka a reliable UDP).
|
| 3. We don't really have a good solution for roaming. If you
| switch hotspot and get a new external IP it'll typically break
| your connections. A lot of work has been done to workaround this
| (eg carrier-grade NAT for mobile IPs) but identifying an endpoint
| with (address,port) (or just (address) for IPv6) is less than
| ideal.
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