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Consider the case where you've got a computer aboard a delivery truck and it's hopping on and off home wifi networks as it moves through the neighborhood. From

Consider the case where you've got a computer aboard a delivery truck and it's hopping on and off home wifi networks as it moves through the neighborhood. From prior experience it knows which topics it is likely to encounter publishers for, and which it is likely to encounter subscribers for. There's a place for some logic--it's not precisely routing, but it's analogous to routing--which governs when it should forget certain items once storage is saturated for that topic. IP is pretty much useless here because both the truck (as a carrier) and the people (as sources/sinks), end up with different addresses when they're in different places. You'd want something that addresses content and people such that the data ends up nearest the people interested in it. It's an example of a protocol which would be in the waist, were it not so thin.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
The computer aboard the delivery truck can just broadcast every time it hops on to a new access point? It might not have the authority to broadcast via every access point, so it will likely be very circumscribed, but that’s just a question of the relative rank and authority between the truck operators and access point operators, routing layers, etc… not a question of the technology. Since even several round trips of handshaking across the Earth takes only a few hundred milliseconds, and the truck presumably spends at least a few seconds in range.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  If you're in a situation where: > even several round trips of handshaking across the Earth takes only a few hundred milliseconds then I'm not sure why you'd bother using the delivery truck as data transport anyhow. I'm more interested in the case where such infrastructure is either damaged, untrustworthy, or was never there in the first place. If there was a fallback which worked, even if it wasn't shiny, there'd be something to use if the original went bad for some reason.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    What do you mean ‘If’? Everyone on planet earth is in that ‘situation’ called reality where signals take time to propagate. And in any case how does this relate to the previous comments?
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I took from your description that these broadcasts were being forwarded by other parties around the planet. But in the alternate reality I'm trying to sketch, the one where something quite different from IP is in the thin waist of our protocol stack, something content-addressed and not machine-addressed, nodes only select data from their peers if they're interested in it for some reason. If you've got a network of people that are so motivated to share what you have to say that it shows up on the other side of the planet near instantly, with no time spend validating it for accuracy or whatever other propagation criteria is relevant for that data, then you're likely a very influential person. That's the unlikely situation I was talking about.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        In your alternate reality, signals will still take approximately the same time? plus minus some milliseconds. I’m not really sure what the point of this comparison is. And in any alternate reality I imagine the access point operators will still get to choose who access is granted to, or not?
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        No I anticipate that it could take days or weeks for a given message to hitch a ride all the way around the world. It would have to be rather important for so many people to decide to allocate space on their devices for it. (Whether that's automated or involves a human in the loop would be an app-specific detail). Of course you could sort of fake locality by piping it through the traditional internet, but the point is to design something (an alternative to IP) that would be resilient even when the traditional internet has failed so using the traditional internet is sort of cheating. As far as access... I'm not really sure what that means if we're addressing content and not devices. A node isn't going to pick up some data unless it finds that data to be interesting for some reason--likely because it bears a signature from a trusted individual and the cryptography checks out re: its not having been tampered with. If you're assessing trustworthiness based on content there's no need to scrutinize the device you got it from. Also I apologize I haven't been making a tremendous amount of sense. I think I've maybe had COVID brain for a few days and only just now have I become fully aware of how impaired I am.
wpietri 2y ago
I think you lost me at the point where the truck was hopping on and off home wifi networks. That doesn't really match with our current notion of local networks as security contexts. I'm also not clear about exactly who the truck would be talking with here, or what it would have to say. Maybe you can expand on that part?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Well, in the world that grew up around IP addresses, in our world, you need to have security contexts like that because somebody can just reach in from anywhere and do something bad to you. But if I try to envision an alternative... one where we're not addressing machines, then I figure we're probably working in terms of users (identified by public key) and data (identified by hash). In this world security looks a bit different. You're not open to remote action by third parties, they don't know where to reach you unless they're already in the room with you. Instead you've got to discover some peers and see if they have any data that you want. Then the game becomes configuring the machines so that data sort of... diffuses in the appropriate direction based on what users are interested in. It would be worse in many ways, but better in a few others. So suppose the whole neighborhood, and the delivery driver, all subscribe to a topic called "business hours". One neighbor owns a business and recently decided that it's closed on Sunday. So at first there's just one machine in the neighborhood with the updated info, and everybody else has it wrong. But then the driver swoops by, and since they're subscribed to the same topic as the homeowners, their nodes run some topic-specific sync function. The new hours are signed by the owner of the restaurant with a timestamp that's newer than the previous entry, so the sync function updates that entry on the driver's device. Everyone else who runs this protocol and subscribes to this topic has the same experience, with the newer more authoritative data overwriting the older staler data as the driver nears their house. But at no point does the data have a sender or a receiver which are separated by more than a single hop, and we trust or distrust data based on who signed it, not based on where we found it. I have an application in mind that I think would run well on it, but because our world has crystalized around point-to-point machine-addressed networking, like a million tiny phone calls, it feels like a pretty big lift whereas innovating at other layers in the stack feels much easier--a consequence of the thin waist.

MichaelZuo 2y ago

The computer aboard the delivery truck can just broadcast every time it hops on to a new access point? It might not have the authority to broadcast via every access point, so it will likely be very circumscribed, but that’s just a question of the relative rank and authority between the truck operators and access point operators, routing layers, etc… not a question of the technology. Since even several round trips of handshaking across the Earth takes only a few hundred milliseconds, and the truck presumably spends at least a few seconds in range.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
If you're in a situation where: > even several round trips of handshaking across the Earth takes only a few hundred milliseconds then I'm not sure why you'd bother using the delivery truck as data transport anyhow. I'm more interested in the case where such infrastructure is either damaged, untrustworthy, or was never there in the first place. If there was a fallback which worked, even if it wasn't shiny, there'd be something to use if the original went bad for some reason.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  What do you mean ‘If’? Everyone on planet earth is in that ‘situation’ called reality where signals take time to propagate. And in any case how does this relate to the previous comments?
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I took from your description that these broadcasts were being forwarded by other parties around the planet. But in the alternate reality I'm trying to sketch, the one where something quite different from IP is in the thin waist of our protocol stack, something content-addressed and not machine-addressed, nodes only select data from their peers if they're interested in it for some reason. If you've got a network of people that are so motivated to share what you have to say that it shows up on the other side of the planet near instantly, with no time spend validating it for accuracy or whatever other propagation criteria is relevant for that data, then you're likely a very influential person. That's the unlikely situation I was talking about.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      In your alternate reality, signals will still take approximately the same time? plus minus some milliseconds. I’m not really sure what the point of this comparison is. And in any alternate reality I imagine the access point operators will still get to choose who access is granted to, or not?
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        No I anticipate that it could take days or weeks for a given message to hitch a ride all the way around the world. It would have to be rather important for so many people to decide to allocate space on their devices for it. (Whether that's automated or involves a human in the loop would be an app-specific detail). Of course you could sort of fake locality by piping it through the traditional internet, but the point is to design something (an alternative to IP) that would be resilient even when the traditional internet has failed so using the traditional internet is sort of cheating. As far as access... I'm not really sure what that means if we're addressing content and not devices. A node isn't going to pick up some data unless it finds that data to be interesting for some reason--likely because it bears a signature from a trusted individual and the cryptography checks out re: its not having been tampered with. If you're assessing trustworthiness based on content there's no need to scrutinize the device you got it from. Also I apologize I haven't been making a tremendous amount of sense. I think I've maybe had COVID brain for a few days and only just now have I become fully aware of how impaired I am.

wpietri 2y ago

I think you lost me at the point where the truck was hopping on and off home wifi networks. That doesn't really match with our current notion of local networks as security contexts. I'm also not clear about exactly who the truck would be talking with here, or what it would have to say. Maybe you can expand on that part?

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Well, in the world that grew up around IP addresses, in our world, you need to have security contexts like that because somebody can just reach in from anywhere and do something bad to you. But if I try to envision an alternative... one where we're not addressing machines, then I figure we're probably working in terms of users (identified by public key) and data (identified by hash). In this world security looks a bit different. You're not open to remote action by third parties, they don't know where to reach you unless they're already in the room with you. Instead you've got to discover some peers and see if they have any data that you want. Then the game becomes configuring the machines so that data sort of... diffuses in the appropriate direction based on what users are interested in. It would be worse in many ways, but better in a few others. So suppose the whole neighborhood, and the delivery driver, all subscribe to a topic called "business hours". One neighbor owns a business and recently decided that it's closed on Sunday. So at first there's just one machine in the neighborhood with the updated info, and everybody else has it wrong. But then the driver swoops by, and since they're subscribed to the same topic as the homeowners, their nodes run some topic-specific sync function. The new hours are signed by the owner of the restaurant with a timestamp that's newer than the previous entry, so the sync function updates that entry on the driver's device. Everyone else who runs this protocol and subscribes to this topic has the same experience, with the newer more authoritative data overwriting the older staler data as the driver nears their house. But at no point does the data have a sender or a receiver which are separated by more than a single hop, and we trust or distrust data based on who signed it, not based on where we found it. I have an application in mind that I think would run well on it, but because our world has crystalized around point-to-point machine-addressed networking, like a million tiny phone calls, it feels like a pretty big lift whereas innovating at other layers in the stack feels much easier--a consequence of the thin waist.