Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by CoolHand on Monday May 04 2015, @08:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the old-wine-in-new-bottle dept.

While most of us have been binge-streaming or strapping computers to our bodies or wrapping our heads around the ins and outs of net neutrality, an international team of academics and some of the world's biggest technology companies have been quietly pondering how to rewrite the basic structure of the internet—for our sakes.

Their idea sounds simple: instead of numbers, use names. Focus not on the locations of things, but on the things themselves.

The proposal, called Named Data Networking, shifts the focus from the numbered locations of data—IP addresses like 174.16.254.1—to the very names of data—something like motherboard/stories/NDN/photo1. Under this system, for example, when your computer makes a packet request for a new Netflix release, you could retrieve the video from the nearest computer that has it, rather than wait to get it from Netflix's heavily-trafficked centralized servers.

"As far as the network is concerned," the project's website says, "the name in an NDN packet can be anything: an endpoint, a chunk of movie or book, a command to turn on some lights, etc." An internet not of numbers, but, if you will, of things.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-of-names
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday May 04 2015, @09:39PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Monday May 04 2015, @09:39PM (#178797)

    Basically the people that control DNS will control this as well, except now they can hijack connections much more easily.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @10:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @10:17PM (#178819)

    Along with everyone else. Just advertise popular netflix media. Everyone in the area will be downloading whatever you have on offer that carries the same name.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Monday May 04 2015, @10:19PM

    by frojack (1554) on Monday May 04 2015, @10:19PM (#178820) Journal

    I doubt that, because nobody wants to play this game.

    Look, this might be nice for a corporate network, so you could find a file if you actually know its name (which you mostly don't), and it could be good in combination with something like baloo feeding a huge corporate database.

    But that's as far as it goes.

    Nobody is going to offer up their file systems, or even their entire web server for anyone to find anything by name. People don't want to get stuff from just ANYWHERE that happens to have a file with a specific name. They want it from a specific source. I don't want to download an ISO named OpenSuse 13.3 from who ever is close. Who knows what might be in there.

    Location Location Location.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @11:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @11:41PM (#178850)

      You can download the hashsum of the file from a credible source and use that to check the file's integrity. Then again that requires more work for your computer.

      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday May 05 2015, @05:22PM

        by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday May 05 2015, @05:22PM (#179164) Journal

        There are systems already that just use the hash as the URL (Freenet has used such a system for many years)...so you might as well just use that. I mean if you have to have the hash to verify that you're getting the right file, you might as well just use the hash to retrieve it in the first place...