Researchers explore scrapping Internet

[TechBear_Seattle]

Source: Associated Press

NEW YORK - Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."

No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070413/ap_on_hi_te/rebuilding_the_internet

---

It would also be a great opportunity to build a whole bunch of fascist controls -- excuse me, anti-terrorist oversight necessary for the security and safety of us all -- into the one remaining avenue of information exchange.

[acmavm]

1. KEY WORDS: "with the federal government's blessing ..."

[Eurobabe]

2. they better not f'ing scrap it before they have another one up and running

Are you sure ROVE isn't behind this??

[KansDem]

8. CorpUSA hasn't been able to "privatize" the internet(s)...

...via premium broadband, so the next best thing is to scrap it a build another one that meets their expectations.

If you can't beat them, junk it and create another one

[Schema Thing]

3. Aha! So there are tubes!

[KansDem]

4. They need to consult with Al Gore...

After all, he's the one who invented it/them.

[melody]

6. Al Gore never said that

For the record ... but since when will facts every fly in the face of a preferred belief?

[hippiechick]

9. I believe the reference to Al was made in jest ?

:eyes: Ever heard of sarcasm?

[melody]

12. Ever heard of setting the record straight?

I wasn't posting to the poster, darlin', but to the topic.

:eyes:

[KansDem]

Sorry, I forgot the "sarcasm" smilie

:sarcasm:

[melody]

14. No, Kansie, I got the sarcasm

See my other post.

[melody]

16. I guess I need to highlight this and put neon around it

***For the record***

[Demit]

17. Um, what you need to do is click 'reply' on the correct post.

Your 'for the record' post says you replied to post #4. That's why it looks like you are responding to post #4.

[Bjornsdotter]

5. Couldn't we just get

..bigger tubes?

Cheers

[AnneD]

23. I hear Condi

has some aluminum tubes.

[Bjornsdotter]

27. You're right!

I forgot all about those.

Cheers

[AnneD]

34. How could you ever forget Condi's...

aluminum tubes. Didn't she make the centerfold of Americana Heritage Monthly with that display. They launched a million Neocon wet dreams....:spray:

[melody]

7. Here comes the Gestapo n/t

[sutz12]

10. China's internet is newer than ours....

We could use them as a model.

:evilgrin:

[0rganism]

11. IPV6 is already available, let's try it first before scrapping everything and starting over

when mass media latches onto a phrase like
'many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges'
WATCH OUT!

[snooper2]

13. mkay.....

scrap the existing internet, the millions of DNS servers, trillions of static and bgp routes, re-ip the world...sure.....

[central scrutinizer]

15. Many universities are already using internet2 to speed things up

and make things more efficient for massive research projects. 90% of internet1 is porn anyway.


http://www.internet2.edu/

[GreenTea]

18. A new system to search out & destroy ALL liberal sites-would make the Internet much more efficient.

Let's get to work on it right away....The Bush government already has given it's blessing.

And let's make the new Internet easier to find liberals, sorry, terrorist more easily with their name address and phone number.

[Tuttle]

19. Maybe we need a "surge" to fix it?

n/t

Tut-tut

[Xipe Totec]

20. Come up with a replacement for the QWERTY Keyboard too!

Good luck replacing a working piece of technology.

[anotherdrew]

39. yes and let's get rid of that damn x86 instruction set while we're at it

just scrap everything! what a joke. this is the most foolish thing I've read in a long time.

[AnneD]

21. The internet is a starfish,

governments want spiders.

Miracle it is still working my ass..it is working too well, that's the real problem.

[baldguy]

22. The internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack.

It was intentionally made non-centralized and interconnected, so that if one portion was lost then the remaining portions would still be able to function normally.

[Zhade]

24. You want a revolution? Fuck with the internet.

Just TRY, you fools. Even corporate America will bring torches.

[daleo]

25. Scrapping internet?

No problem, there will still be plenty of other "internets" around (according to Bush).

[bemildred]

26. Sounds like an employment act for old programmers.

Y2K on steroids.

[entanglement]

28. They also plan to send the old internet to Ted Stevens...on a truck

:silly:

[lithiumbomb]

29. put the tinfoil hats down. :)

The article is probably a bit more sensationalistic than it needs to be. The internet we have today, even considering the coming migration to IPV6, can always use improvement and its basic design is quite old. I'm pretty sure that for the end user any migration to a "new" internet will be 10-20 years away and will probably be invisible except for increased bandwidth and features.

Part of the drive for this is researchers want to transfer HUGE amounts of information between universities around the world. Distributed computing and information sharing. The commercial backbone just can't support it at least at a cost they can afford. Where I work we have a number of dedicated links to other universities so that they can simply transfer data directly without hopping all over the country. The development done on these research networks will trickle down to the consumer networks over time.

Obviously there should be some oversight to ensure the rights of the users and net neutrality, however I think you'll find that the motivation behind a "new" internet is quite sincere.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

30. damn you for stealing my thunder. however,

every single bloody point you make is spot on.
what are we? seriously, here on DU, what are we? At the same time that this damned fool named edison was stringing WIRES around a street, claiming he could make light without gas, the lamplighters' union decided to strike for yet another raise. Can't blame them. It was dangerous work. BUT

guess who won that battle.

Another example. at the turn of the century. NO not this one, the one before. as we hit 1900, EVERY (almost) scientist thought that they had the physicks by the proverbial balls. they were ready to explain everything. Honestly. They really wrote and talked that way. Some silly, underpaid, ridiculous, patent clerk had other ideas.

My point is this: The tubes are doing pretty good, thank you Al gore. They allow us all sorts of avenues. But the idea that we cannot improve upon it is as stupid as the physicists who really fucked up in 1900, as stupid as the lamplighters a century before. Of COURSE we can do better, and our job is to make sure we keep a voice in the improved system.

[Mika]

35. interesting analogy you make

Yes, Edison was stringing wires to make light w/o gas, but his system was a direct current system that was highly inefficient. It wasn't until Tesla came up with the alternating current system (electrification 2.0) that it became efficient enought to use on a large scale.

Just thought I'd add the .02 cents.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

36. great point.

Are the current tubes DC or AC? and are the better ways available in the future? I'd agree with that.

[skids]

31. Been tried and tried and tried.

IPV6, ATM, two flavors of I2, all of them markedly improved "ground up" technologies aimed at modernizing the way we do things.

I am as skeptical that it will ever happen as I am that operating systems will ever get smaller and faster.

Nobody is interested in a ground up upgrade. Everyone just wants a quick fix to deal with the latest feature.

In the software world we call this "bloat" and it comes from a total lack of effort to consolidate reams of redundant libraries, along with over-reliance on OO language features as a prosthesis for well thought and well implemented abstractions.

In the network world nobody seems to notice it, but the word for "bloat" would most certainly be "encapsulation." Every packet you send is wrapped in another wrapped in another wrapped in another like a big set of those Russian egg dolls.
TCP/IP wrapped in GRE wrapped in IP wrapped in MPLS wrapped in IPSEC wrapped in LWAPP wrapped in extended VLAN tags wrapped in AAL2/3 ATM wrapped in circuit emulation over Ethernet (because it was cheaper than SONET) wrapped in more extended VLAN tags as traffic is tunnelled hither and thither. The more the years go by, the less useful payload is actually being carried -- the pipes are crowded with junk, headers and frames from thousands of encapsulation standards.

One time Nortel sent me a single bolt for a piece of network equipment. Just one bolt. It was in a box a foot on a side, filled with packaging material, inside another little box, in a little plastic bag.

The Internet is sort of like that these days, and always getting worse. There's this camp of people that seem to want to make everything run over everything else, but especially everything must run over IP and Ethernet, even things for which IP and Ethernet were not designed. So you end up with a 6-foot high pile of RFCs defining encapsulation standards which all must be implemented and tested -- the man hours spent on this globally must be insane.

But they couldn't all buy ATM switches, oh no. Those were too expensive.

[bemildred]

33. LOL. Well said. nt

[ChairmanAgnostic]

37. yeah, once we have 1 gig of RAM, a MS - OS will probably use 85% of it.

every new buggy OS from Microsopht eats ram like I drink scotch.

[Politicub]

32. Yeah, because the Internet is so unsuccessful

Why, it barely even works! /sarcasm

Who are these yahoos, and are they for real?

[anotherdrew]

38. the article is total BS and here's why...

the only problems with the capabilities of 'the internet' are fully addressed by IPv6. If they want to make more secure systems they are free to do so at any time using existing technology. Rather than do that hard work, they'd rather hit reset and start another 20 years of 'fumbling' and failure to build secure systems that they'll get to blame on "oh it's so new and there's still bugs to work out" If M$ and the rest want to implement secure systems, they are free to do so, the tech exists and is used already. Another solution in search of a problem.

another thing about this... it's just another grant gravy train, your tax dollars being wasted so these idiots can play with really expensive toys and dream up something that is simply NOT going to happen.

[sofa king]

40. Heh. It's too late now.

The protocols are all in place and millions of people around the world know how it works. Cut the lines and we'll go wireless. Jam the airwaves and we'll use the power and phone lines.

They can try to kill off what we already have, but at this point I'm beginning to think that this Wild West is here to stay.