5 ms·

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 oth

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

corford 5y ago
The chicken/egg problem is a hard one to solve. Looking at quic and noise, the future seems to lie in extending on top of UDP as a way of sidestepping the adoption problem.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  Which in turn means that all those firewalls and related things will take deeper look at UDP packages and mess with them. :)
  - wmf 5y ago
    From now on everything will be encrypted so all they can do is block it or not.
jeroenhd 5y ago
> 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 Sadly, this isn't the case anymore since shitty middleboxes have taken over the internet. Using extensibility features in all kinds of protocols (be it TCP, TLS, UDP, or any other three letter protocol, really) causes middleboxes to drop traffic. Since we've all decided that shitty middleboxes are the protocol's problem to solve (because end users usually can't decide whether or not they're behind shitty middleboxes) all attempts at a new protocol are big puzzle pieces now. Even existing protocols like MTCP and SCTP are dropped in favour of UDP because shitty firewalls can't deal with anything that's not TCP or UDP anymore. TLS 1.3 looks like TLS 1.2 packets because shitty middleboxes will just terminate your connection if they see TLS with an unknown version number. It's quite depressing, really. I'm sort of hoping that at some point some weird proprietary or open source product with a fancy protocol comes out and becomes a hit, forcing shitty middlebox manufacturers to get their shit together (or tell the end user that the product won't work right because of shitty middleboxes and that they should complain to their service provider about it). I'm all for backwards compatibility, but I'm sick and tired of MitM protocol parsers that refuse to follow spec being respected and worked around when it comes to new protocols. If you can't read the RFC, get out of the network protocol space.
- dharmab 5y ago
  Related reading on why HTTP/3 uses UDP rather than a new protocol: https://lwn.net/Articles/745590/ https://lwn.net/Articles/745590/
- tialaramex 5y ago
  As a silver lining to that particular cloud the shitty middleboxes made the case for work resulting from BCP #188 (Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack) very easy. It wouldn't be difficult to find engineers at an IETF meeting who aren't very interested in whether Fatemah can send messages to her mother without them being read by her husband - that's a policy problem, not their business. But once they realise the shitty middleboxes to prevent Fatemah from evading her husband's surveillance make their beautiful new protocol design undeployable they're on board with encrypting absolutely everything everywhere all the time.
  - babagabooj 5y ago
    - sho_hn 5y ago
      I read this differently, as intentional effort not to just use Bob/Alice, being English-centric names. In Korean you sometimes see Chulsoo and Yonghee used as generic names, going back to school textbook characters. Maybe Fatemah is similar?
    - enneff 5y ago
      I’m not familiar with the background of the poster you replied to, but your assumption that they are not simply choosing a common name from their culture is telling.
      - koprulusector 5y ago
        I also assumed commenter picked a familiar name, rather than the cynical version.
    - 5y ago
teleforce 5y ago
Truth be told, those who do not understand Internet are condemned to reinvent it, poorly [1]. Remember ATM? (hint: it's not the machine you withdraw the money from). Internet is specifically designed with a narrow waist, as most things in nature as posted in HN recently [2]. I think the latest and most promising Internet protocol is Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE) protocol that can hopefully generalized tunneling for the Internet and it's probably as simple as it can get [3]. [1]The Twelve Networking Truths: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1925 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1925 [2]The internet was designed with a narrow waist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30483914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30483914 [3]All Tunnels Lead to GENEVE: https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/all-tunnels-lead-to-geneve https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/all-tunnels-lead-to-genev...

corford 5y ago

The chicken/egg problem is a hard one to solve. Looking at quic and noise, the future seems to lie in extending on top of UDP as a way of sidestepping the adoption problem.

johannes1234321 5y ago
Which in turn means that all those firewalls and related things will take deeper look at UDP packages and mess with them. :)
- wmf 5y ago
  From now on everything will be encrypted so all they can do is block it or not.

jeroenhd 5y ago

> 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 Sadly, this isn't the case anymore since shitty middleboxes have taken over the internet. Using extensibility features in all kinds of protocols (be it TCP, TLS, UDP, or any other three letter protocol, really) causes middleboxes to drop traffic. Since we've all decided that shitty middleboxes are the protocol's problem to solve (because end users usually can't decide whether or not they're behind shitty middleboxes) all attempts at a new protocol are big puzzle pieces now. Even existing protocols like MTCP and SCTP are dropped in favour of UDP because shitty firewalls can't deal with anything that's not TCP or UDP anymore. TLS 1.3 looks like TLS 1.2 packets because shitty middleboxes will just terminate your connection if they see TLS with an unknown version number. It's quite depressing, really. I'm sort of hoping that at some point some weird proprietary or open source product with a fancy protocol comes out and becomes a hit, forcing shitty middlebox manufacturers to get their shit together (or tell the end user that the product won't work right because of shitty middleboxes and that they should complain to their service provider about it). I'm all for backwards compatibility, but I'm sick and tired of MitM protocol parsers that refuse to follow spec being respected and worked around when it comes to new protocols. If you can't read the RFC, get out of the network protocol space.

dharmab 5y ago
Related reading on why HTTP/3 uses UDP rather than a new protocol: https://lwn.net/Articles/745590/ https://lwn.net/Articles/745590/
tialaramex 5y ago
As a silver lining to that particular cloud the shitty middleboxes made the case for work resulting from BCP #188 (Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack) very easy. It wouldn't be difficult to find engineers at an IETF meeting who aren't very interested in whether Fatemah can send messages to her mother without them being read by her husband - that's a policy problem, not their business. But once they realise the shitty middleboxes to prevent Fatemah from evading her husband's surveillance make their beautiful new protocol design undeployable they're on board with encrypting absolutely everything everywhere all the time.
- babagabooj 5y ago
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    I read this differently, as intentional effort not to just use Bob/Alice, being English-centric names. In Korean you sometimes see Chulsoo and Yonghee used as generic names, going back to school textbook characters. Maybe Fatemah is similar?
  - enneff 5y ago
    I’m not familiar with the background of the poster you replied to, but your assumption that they are not simply choosing a common name from their culture is telling.
    - koprulusector 5y ago
      I also assumed commenter picked a familiar name, rather than the cynical version.
  - 5y ago

teleforce 5y ago

Truth be told, those who do not understand Internet are condemned to reinvent it, poorly [1]. Remember ATM? (hint: it's not the machine you withdraw the money from). Internet is specifically designed with a narrow waist, as most things in nature as posted in HN recently [2]. I think the latest and most promising Internet protocol is Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE) protocol that can hopefully generalized tunneling for the Internet and it's probably as simple as it can get [3]. [1]The Twelve Networking Truths: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1925 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1925 [2]The internet was designed with a narrow waist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30483914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30483914 [3]All Tunnels Lead to GENEVE: https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/all-tunnels-lead-to-geneve https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/all-tunnels-lead-to-genev...