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It would have been so cool if the USSR had its own internet and shared it with China and China were still running it now because wouldn't it be great to stop he
by ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
It would have been so cool if the USSR had its own internet and shared it with China and China were still running it now because wouldn't it be great to stop hearing about how people think firewalling the entire Chinese IP space will keep hackers out. Also a parallel internet built on something other than TCP/IP would promote competition to see which internet design is technically superior. But realistically nobody wants two internets that are incompatible. We already have IPv6 which is incompatible with the rest of the internet and that's enough trouble as it is.
- nradov 6y agoWe had other protocols. TCP/IP won exactly because it was technically superior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars
- cafard 6y agoThanks. I haven't thought of X.25 in 25 years.
- non-entity 6y agoHeh I'm currently working on a toy X.25 stack implementation as a side project
- thodin 6y agogithub link, please? :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Spooky23 6y agoSomewhat related, Netheads vs. Bellheads https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/ https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/ I briefly worked at a place fully dominated by Bellheads early in my career. They were bemoaning IP and holding on to ATM stuff as late as 2001. I'm told that the last of their tribe (after I left) fought off VoIP as a passing fad well into the 2000s.
- simonjgreen 6y agoATM is still actively in use in broadband networks all over the place. Its a real pain when you're on the ISP side.
- mherdeg 6y agoHard to believe this was nearly a quarter century ago. T he references are getting dated: > "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them that right now performance is bandwidth-limited, but that additional infrastructure is being deployed." > … > One result is undergrads who, for $29.95 a month, clog up the Internet with CU-SeeMe sessions.
- ZinniaZirconium 6y agoIs IPv6 winning yet??
- ben509 6y agoIt's hit 35%, and has broken 40% in many countries: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html IPv4 will probably never go away because it's a better choice for private networks.
- xxpor 6y agoDepends what you're looking at, on mobile it absolutely is. Not sure what the situation around the world is but in the US pretty much all LTE connectivity is via v6. T-Mobile at least doesn't even dual stack, if you need to go somewhere that's v4 only they do NAT64
- xorcist 6y agoNo, it won because it could be carried over all other protocols. It had a simple design and real world use cases too, which helped. A classic example of "worse is better".
- enkid 6y agoWouldn't real world use cases be a technical advantage?
- enkid 6y agoThey would just have gateways that translated between the two protocols. Think changeover in railway gauges. Realistically, one would become the standard and swamp everything else. Look at how slow IPv6 adoption has been.
- gen220 6y agoPoetically, this universe you've created reminds me of the story of the Berlin metro during the Cold War. Prior to the division of the city, the metro system spanned the whole city, and was rebuilt to functioning capacity in the aftermath of WW II. Once it became necessary to construct a controlled border between the NATO and Soviet sectors, they eventually erected barriers on the tracks; creating two disconnected transportation graphs. Except! There were some lines that began and ended in "West Berlin", but needed to pass through a couple of stations in "East Berlin;" these were allowed to continue operating, but the train conductors were not permitted to stop at the "Easte Berlin" stations under any circumstances. The Geisterbahnhöfe (ghost stations) were patrolled by armed guards. This system persisted from the early 1960s until 1989. Both sides made improvements to their respective pieces of the U-bahn, to service the local populations. But they never made any changes that would make a reunion impossible (for example, changing the track widths, or signalling technology). When the wall came down, the system united into a fully-functional whole remarkably quickly. Imagine if the internet partitioned between "east" and "west"; but, in order for the internet backbone to reach India for example, it would first need to pass through Russia or China. I wonder if something similar would happen! Editorializing, it's fascinating to see how these systems, that are designed to (more or less indiscriminately) connect people, behave when they are suddenly coerced to instead keep people apart in unnatural ways. It never seems sustainable, and the separation seems to revert so easily once the coercion is lifted. It's kind of a hopeful story for humanity, I think.
- xxpor 6y agoWere the armed guards there to keep the western trains from stopping or for keeping easterners from escaping via the tunnels?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gen220 6y agoI think this is one of those cases where the most correct answer is simply "yes". Realistically, the guards were put there to halt the transfer of people, goods, and currency: to be the physical manifestation of a hard border. Although, the motivation for this border (who it benefits, is it to keep "others" out vs "us" in) was a dynamic concept that evolved over time. However, if you integrate the motivation function over the entire time of separation, which is one way of reducing the complexity, the primary result is to keep easterners from escaping. In the early days of widening division, there was a mass migration of people fleeing "The East"; each person carried a multitude of reasons for their flight. One effect of the border was to halt this flow. There were easterners who sincerely viewed this differently, and wanted to keep westerners out (especially the "spies"!); however, their perspectives were definitely a minority, and don't survive the integral.
- 082349872349872 6y agoEvery now and then I run across a site still serving X-Clacks-Overhead.
- smsm42 6y agoHaving used early Soviet computers - before they gave up on trying to design anything and just copied or used Western schemes - I can say the USSR internet would definitely be different but there's no way the design would be technically superior but for some improbable accident.