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NSF Ponders New And Improved Internet
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Aug 27, 2005 12:36 PM
from the can-this-one-deliver-soda-over-ip? dept.
from the can-this-one-deliver-soda-over-ip? dept.
diorcc wrote to mention a Wired article about a NSF Project that could completely rebuild the Internet as we know it. From the article: "The National Science Foundation is backing a major initiative that could lead to a completely new internet architecture, with built-in security measures and support for ubiquitous sensors and wireless communications devices, among other things. The Global Environment for Networking Investigations, or GENI, will include a research grant program to fund new architectures and an experimental facility, which has not yet been planned in detail."
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Technology: What Does the 'Next Internet' Look Like? 283 comments
Kraisch writes with a link to the Guardian website, which again revisits the subject of reconstructing the internet. This time the question isn't whether it should be done, but what should the goals of a redesign be? From the article: "'There's a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you're talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you're really doing so,' said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. At the moment we are still using very clumsy methods to approach such problems. The result: last year alone, identity theft and online fraud cost British victims an estimated £414m, while one recent report claimed 93% of all email sent from the UK was spam ... Many ideas revolve around so-called "mesh networks", which link many computers to create more powerful, reliable connections to the internet. By using small meshes of many machines that share a pipeline to the net instead of relying on lots of parallel connections, experts say they can create a system that is more intelligent and less prone to attack."
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Idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Idea! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Idea! (Score:3, Funny)
Misleading.. (Score:5, Informative)
To rebuild the internet is insane. To slowly change the direction we are building it is more likely.
Re:Misleading.. (Score:5, Informative)
I agree. It's about standards that companies should follow. Those that fail to follow the standards will lose relevance and compatability.
And yes, the article title was misleading. They won't be rebuilding the Internet any time soon.
Parent
Re:Misleading.. (Score:3, Funny)
For some reason all I could think of after that was the phrase 'Internet Explorer and CSS Support'... (That said, I still mainly agree with the idea).
Uh Oh (Score:5, Funny)
NII2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NII2 (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why expecting public money to return products of its investment is "stretching it". We're buying R&D, we should get the R&D. Except where secrecy is important to, say, national security (tiny percentage of research), or the results would be premature to release, of course we should get access to what we bought. Why not?
If an org wants to keep its research products private, it should use only private money. Perhaps there's a case to be made for proportional return on proportional investment (eg. publishing 80% of I2), but that's surely balanced by 1> the critical enabling support of the public money; 2> the vast public research predecessors on which all this new research depends; and 3> the essential role of publishing research results anyway, to science, culture and business. Otherwise, siphoning off all the oxygen produced will leave the system stagnant, and the private systems will wilt and die also.
Parent
Re:NII2 (Score:5, Insightful)
The return to the public is in research and education (which is what universities do). Where else would you expect it? Serving inane comments on Slashdot quicker? Supporting the latest dot.com fad? When the industry is ready to embrace new standards (hint, this is not a rational or controllable process) they will come to the mass-market. Not before.
I'm afraid your free market ideology is blinding you to the benefits of public research and public funding. The 'all power to the poeple' line is very seductive, but research takes time, and the best research is not calibrated, and is not predictable. It does not obey the laws of the market and will never do so.
(foreigners are welcome to ride for free, as usual
What a tired old canard. Where did the tags your writing is surrounded with come from? (hint, not the USA).
Parent
Re:NII2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there's your ducktalk about HTML tags. I didn't say the US invented everything. But we did invent the Internet. And until an American invented the IMG tag, the Web wasn't useable by most people. So take a hint, and show some gratitude, instead of your jealous spite. We're not cranking out this tech for your thanks, but you could at least show some dignity when you accept our gifts.
Parent
Good News / Bad News (Score:3, Funny)
They're rebuilding the internet to make it more secure, eliminate spam, virus, spoofing and so on.
Bad News:
Initiative will use Microsoft programming techniques as its foundation.
:-) :-)
{just joking}
Sensors? Intelligence? This could lead to... (Score:3, Insightful)
Human, may I surf your mind?
Needs a Killer App (Score:3, Funny)
GENI are Evil (Score:4, Funny)
Hell I didnt even know they had a internet.
Strategic Incrementalism (Score:3, Interesting)
While there are intrinsically very ugly problems in client and server software right now, it seems that "Little Science" is displaced by "Big Science" (viz, NSF) in addressing incremental substantive improvements in security and availability for the Internet masses.
So, for example, as valuable as a *waving hands* non IP infrastructure blah blah might well be... there could be greater good achieved with work on secure computing environments, strong authentication, one time pad encryption methods and etc.
As a very dear friend of mine was fond of saying "if you want security, pull up your own shorts".
So, while big honkin backbone and new architectures are and will be very important, some think time at the "big level" regarding applications architecture and services would, likely, produce faster returns and shorter implementation times.
IPv6? (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words... IPv6?
Trusted Network Connect (Score:5, Interesting)
It could use IPv6, but "built-in security measures" makes me think of Trusted Network Connect. Imagine if you needed a Trusted Platform Module plus an approved, unmodified operating system plus an approved, unmodified dialer program that verifies the "integrity" of your machine just to get an IP address. Some analysts claim that most major cable and DSL ISPs are likely to require TNC by 2015 [slashdot.org].
Parent
Re:Trusted Network Connect (Score:5, Insightful)
(I also hear that there's a movement for a sarcasm tax per-double-quote in the house committee, so I'm tryin' to use 'em while they're free!)
This all being said, the concept of a mesh network and the work of the guys at DefCon WiFi Shoot-out might be very, very valuable sooner rather than later. Man, wouldn't that be fantastic? A geek-run national wifi mesh... It's be just like 1990s Internet again, until the FCC started raids...
Parent
New and Improved (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
this is easy to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering we can break anything we make, no matter what is done, it comes down to this.
giving access to personal and private information to other humans...
May as well just start installing gps tracking and personal data recording chips in all humans...
Then it really won't matter what internet or other future tech we make use of.
Of course included is a punishment system of shock therapy and AI second guessing what you do to stop you from doing anything on the list of things not to do..... A list created by a few faulty humans of course....
The point is, there is nothing we can build that we cannot break.
Making this whole "better internet" just a carrot to get the donkey to move...... in circles.
In related news... (Score:4, Funny)
GENI, reinventing, and incremental change (Score:3, Informative)
First off, there are a number of major challenges facing the Internet. The ones that spring immediately to mind are security, management, and availability. To see some of these, compare the Internet to the (good parts of) the telephone network. 911 emergency phone service has roughly 99.99% availability; the Internet is an order of magnitude worse. You can't get a virus over the phone lines, and it's very difficult to create a botnet of 100,000 people to DDoS, say, a hospital's telephone system. Now, that ignores many of the good things about the Internet -- you can create and run fabulous applications that the network designers never envisioned, etc., at least, if you're not running behind a NAT. ;)
But wouldn't it be nice to have a network that had the best of all worlds? A network that cost 1/10th as much to manage as it does today? A network where your parents didn't call you up frequently and ask, "It says it couldn't find my DHCP server - what's wrong??" A network where you didn't resort to weird (but clever) hacks like traceroute to try to diagnose problems? Where Scott Richter couldn't create a spam-blasting army of drones? I use Vonage, and I had to dial 911 a few weeks ago to report a fire at the apartment across the street. During part of the conversation, I couldn't hear the operator well enough to understand the questions she was asking. It was a frightening and educational experience.
One of the most important parts of this program is that it's encouraging researchers to not feel constrained to fit into the current design, and is looking at ways to get that deployed in a way that it can gateway to or run on top of the current Internet. There's a big difference between this program and the Internet2, IPv6, etc. It's both higher risk and (hopefully!) higher reward. Internet2 was pretty much "Internet + faster links + some focused researchy bits"; it got co-oped early on because it provided lots of bandwidth to big science, and was too entrenched to try radical new things that (gasp!) might break. GENI is research + interfaces to allow early adopters -- like, say, slashdotters -- to make use of its services. The idea of creating an infrastructure that can safely be used simultaneously for testing out new research prototypes at all levels and running production versions of those services that succeed is a powerful notion that will give GENI a big edge over prior attempts.
It's an exciting proposal, and a scary one. If it gets funded, it could be either the biggest success in networking since the Web, or the biggest flop.
(Disclosure- I'm a networking professor at Carnegie Mellon. This is my field, I've been involved in some of the GENI discussions, and I intend to submit funding proposals to it. I think it'll be one of the best things in years to help academic networking research have a big impact on the real world.)
Re:You guessed it (Score:3, Funny)
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/ [cyvin.org]