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>After all, the internet runs on a foundation of buggy technologies, and it survives. How the Internet is buggy?

by ancarda 13y ago

dllthomas 13y ago
Because there's problems in the protocols and bugs in the code that implements them and bugs in the hardware it runs on. A simple example: there are some TCP/IP stacks where the urgent pointer indicates the last byte of urgent data, and some where it indicates the first byte after the last byte of urgent data. Obviously these aren't the same thing, and only one is correct according to the standard, but both kinds of stacks are (I think) still in use. We get around this by basically not using urgent data in our TCP streams.
UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
I am not agreeing with them, and don't like the word "buggy" but several pieces of core internet tech' are broken in various ways. BGP is a "trust" system where you just assume your peers tell the truth and action their routing changes accordingly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking#Public_incidents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking#Public_incidents DNS has no spoof protection and due to UDP can be used to DoS third parties by mislabelling your packets and requesting large records. SMTP has no built in way to verify the sender actually works for the domain it claims to work for (see SPF and DKIM as potential workarounds). Everything is being worked on and improved. But the broken stuff is still a large party of the internet today.
zanny 13y ago
No IP protocol level security (that is widely adopted, IPsec) a top down distribution of addresses. Tacked on mutant growth to fix systemic issues (DNS, NAT, etc). HTML-internet specifically, html is a document markup used for applications and javascript is a browser extension language turned Internet assembly. Maybe more than anything, people abuse what the Internet is for. Hospitals running their patient records over devices on the public Internet (that are almost certainly full of exploitable security holes on some port, which is probably an Internet "bug" in how easy it is to just barrage all the ports on a machine to find some exploitable application if they aren't proactive with managing the security).
- UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  Can you go into more detail on why you feel HTML is broken? I would have agreed with you back when IE 6 was still a "thing." But these days with strict XHTML, CSS, for appearance/layout, and JS for logic we seem to actually be at a very good place for moving forward. I'd even go as far as to say that XHTML/CSS and JS do a better job separating responsibilities than many programming frameworks I've used do. Do I think they're perfect? No. In fact I hate typeless languages like JS. But it is "good enough."
  - jaibot 13y ago
    > But it is "good enough". So is money.
  - api 13y ago
    Everything is good enough. An evolutionary biology professor said this once, and it struck me as deep wisdom: "life doesn't work perfectly, it just works." You could say life works better than dead.
dakami 13y ago
Duct tape and bailing wire, all the way down.
- AdrianRossouw 13y ago
  I often wonder how 'real people' would feel if they knew that the internet is built using duct tape and the best of intentions.
api 13y ago
Depends on how you define buggy. IP is vulnerable to all kinds of DOS attacks and weird edge case stuff. Are those "bugs?" Not really, since the spec didn't call for it to be strong against those things, but ... I guess it's a matter of perspective. One thing the Internet does show is that a system doesn't have to be perfect to be robust and incredibly useful. In fact, worse is often better in that way too. If IP were orders of magnitude more complex to deal with all its potential edge cases, it likely would not have been as successful.

>After all, the internet runs on a foundation of buggy technologies, and it survives. How the Internet is buggy?

by ancarda 13y ago

>After all, the internet runs on a foundation of buggy technologies, and it survives. How the Internet is buggy?

Because there's problems in the protocols and bugs in the code that implements them and bugs in the hardware it runs on. A simple example: there are some TCP/IP stacks where the urgent pointer indicates the last byte of urgent data, and some where it indicates the first byte after the last byte of urgent data. Obviously these aren't the same thing, and only one is correct according to the standard, but both kinds of stacks are (I think) still in use. We get around this by basically not using urgent data in our TCP streams.

UnoriginalGuy 13y ago

I am not agreeing with them, and don't like the word "buggy" but several pieces of core internet tech' are broken in various ways. BGP is a "trust" system where you just assume your peers tell the truth and action their routing changes accordingly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking#Public_incidents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking#Public_incidents DNS has no spoof protection and due to UDP can be used to DoS third parties by mislabelling your packets and requesting large records. SMTP has no built in way to verify the sender actually works for the domain it claims to work for (see SPF and DKIM as potential workarounds). Everything is being worked on and improved. But the broken stuff is still a large party of the internet today.

zanny 13y ago

No IP protocol level security (that is widely adopted, IPsec) a top down distribution of addresses. Tacked on mutant growth to fix systemic issues (DNS, NAT, etc). HTML-internet specifically, html is a document markup used for applications and javascript is a browser extension language turned Internet assembly. Maybe more than anything, people abuse what the Internet is for. Hospitals running their patient records over devices on the public Internet (that are almost certainly full of exploitable security holes on some port, which is probably an Internet "bug" in how easy it is to just barrage all the ports on a machine to find some exploitable application if they aren't proactive with managing the security).

UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
Can you go into more detail on why you feel HTML is broken? I would have agreed with you back when IE 6 was still a "thing." But these days with strict XHTML, CSS, for appearance/layout, and JS for logic we seem to actually be at a very good place for moving forward. I'd even go as far as to say that XHTML/CSS and JS do a better job separating responsibilities than many programming frameworks I've used do. Do I think they're perfect? No. In fact I hate typeless languages like JS. But it is "good enough."
- jaibot 13y ago
  > But it is "good enough". So is money.
- api 13y ago
  Everything is good enough. An evolutionary biology professor said this once, and it struck me as deep wisdom: "life doesn't work perfectly, it just works." You could say life works better than dead.

dakami 13y ago

Duct tape and bailing wire, all the way down.

AdrianRossouw 13y ago
I often wonder how 'real people' would feel if they knew that the internet is built using duct tape and the best of intentions.

api 13y ago

Depends on how you define buggy. IP is vulnerable to all kinds of DOS attacks and weird edge case stuff. Are those "bugs?" Not really, since the spec didn't call for it to be strong against those things, but ... I guess it's a matter of perspective. One thing the Internet does show is that a system doesn't have to be perfect to be robust and incredibly useful. In fact, worse is often better in that way too. If IP were orders of magnitude more complex to deal with all its potential edge cases, it likely would not have been as successful.