The Internet has become increasingly essential to human activity- from reading the news and buying stocks to communicating and researching flu symptoms. However, it still has some problems; namely, its plumbing, according to Edmund Yeh, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University. "If you've got a lot of demand for a particular data type, it's like water building up," Yeh explained. That water, he said, can be managed in two ways - one is by getting it to its destination drain (i.e., the data server), the other is to drill a new drain somewhere along its journey (i.e., a caching point that temporarily stores the data)
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How to Fix the Internet's Plumbing Problem
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(Score: 4, Funny) by Tork on Sunday April 27 2014, @04:18AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday April 27 2014, @06:40PM
Yes, instead of connecting to the internet, you pay to connect to Comcast, which also happens to have a variety of web sites that have paid to join the Comcast network.
(Score: 1) by meisterister on Sunday April 27 2014, @08:39PM
I'm not sure whether to mod this insightful, interesting, or depressing.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 1) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday April 28 2014, @02:32AM
Depressing? I don't get all this "plumbing" and "water" and "drain" talk.
Can someone familiar with these abstractions restate the proposal in terms of a car analogy?
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Sunday April 27 2014, @05:11AM
Do not touch anything, data is already cached by whoever decides to in a free way. Cache the data at your proxy if you want to reduce your bandwidth cost, don't if you don't. DNS already uses anycast. Akamai does something similar for its clients streaming video or high bandwidth payloads. Multicast is already there although not supported or used that much.
Of course, things could be made better but all in all the Internet was pretty well designed from the start. It took a while, but say since around year 2000, governments, banks, advertising companies and others have jumped into the ban wagon.
Version 2.0 of the Internet would have too many chances to be manipulated by forces we don't want. So, stick with version 1.0 as long as we can please, for ever if possible.
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2) by lennier on Sunday April 27 2014, @09:56AM
"and others have jumped into the ban wagon."
Does that mean they need to be hit with the band hammer?
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27 2014, @05:51AM
(Score: 1) by unauthorized on Sunday April 27 2014, @12:22PM
American problems. That's fine through, keeping you out of the new Internet is a plus!
Seriously through, all of your points are not inherent problem with the idea of standardized Internet caching, but rather with your own society. You are addressing the wrong problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27 2014, @07:00AM
Bufferbloat is a huge drag on Internet performance created, ironically, by previous attempts to make it work better. The one-sentence summary is "Bloated buffers lead to network-crippling latency spikes."
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/In troduction [bufferbloat.net]
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Sunday April 27 2014, @11:26AM
First place to eliminate buffer bloat is at your cable modem/dsl/router, just limit the amount of packets sent to the modem so its buffers stay empty, works well for VOIP:
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 1) by cafebabe on Sunday April 27 2014, @09:00AM
So, the Internet is like a series of tubes? Ted Stevens was ahead of his time.
1702845791×2
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Sunday April 27 2014, @09:06AM
Water's for Fighting. Internet's for spying. Yes, the old West, where clarity is brought to bullshit, mostly because there is so much of it an it is so common.
Now let me get this right: We have a limited resource. Obviously, it is efficient to let a market allocate this resource in the most efficient manner with a price mechanism that will leave out all the people with, how shall we put it, less than effective demand! Of course, speech is not like water, and ability to pay for speech is not a market. If corporations can favor their own messages over that of the common citizen, how will we ever find out, at long last and with Charleston Heston, that Soylent Green is made of People? (Not a rhetorical, or fictional, question).
(Score: 1) by ObsessiveMathsFreak on Sunday April 27 2014, @02:05PM
What? Data like what? Zip files? "Video" Files? Pictures of cats?
This statement is ridiculous. Data is just data. It's up to the application to interpret those 1s and 0s. The network equipment is blissfully ignorant of the payload and just needs to ship the packets from A to B.
I appreciate that so called "Deep packet Inspection" does result in routers taking a peek, and hence increases their "required" effort for certain data types. But ISPs are not in fact being paid to deep packet inspect. They are being paid to transmit packets. Any additional effort they've made for themselves is not our problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rogueippacket on Sunday April 27 2014, @05:13PM
Half-correct.
Moving packets was only a profitable business model when not everybody had the ability to move packets, so at most, about a decade ago. The proof is in the pudding - if it were still a profitable model, we would still have CLEC's popping up all over the block and FTTH would be as ubiquitous as . Instead, what you have now is a bunch of ILEC's being run by an aging group of halfwits who truly believe they can milk their customers for an extra buck by adding questionable "value" to existing services (all while avoiding the inevitable capital spend on upgrades), backed by an ever larger group of halfwitted shareholders screaming for better profit margins year over year. The result? Technologies like DPI become tools for profitability. If they see 50% of their users streaming Netflix, they begin to tell themselves they should be in the content business.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Sunday April 27 2014, @02:21PM
We need to rethink the whole Internet. In the beginning they said "no central point of control". Except root DNS. And certificate "authorities".
And then we invited the masses into our garden of eden, and they crapped all over it. Because the masses didn't understand that web pages and email are good (everyone can talk to everyone) but facebook is bad (you can't talk to me unless we both turn our lives over to the same central system).
We need a new network that is impossible to centrally control, regulate, or spy upon. Not a collection of on ramps to a single freeway. More like a neighbor-to-neighbor, I dunno, weblike thingy perhaps? And it's OK if it has a teeny tiny barrier to entry to keep the 5-year-olds out.
(Score: 1) by kevinl on Sunday April 27 2014, @04:58PM
You're asking for RetroShare-over-darknet or RetroShare-over-meshnet.