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
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Dunbal on Monday May 04 2015, @08:47PM
Now, hands up who wants to pay to a) cache the data b) allow access bandwidth to the data and c) verify the data to prevent corruption (unintentional) and forgery (intentional because people are evil and like to share malware in a non consensual manner). No takers? Oh, I didn't think so.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday May 04 2015, @08:59PM
Right, and cloud CDNs like Amazon already seem like this to both end users and developers not concerned with the nitty-gritty of the data. On the poor put upon IT staff at your ISP and at Amazon need to worry about the boring numbers.
It's resolving a problem by burning everything down first. It's silly.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Monday May 04 2015, @09:03PM
Theoretically this could be done with something like DNS, (prehaps DNS itself could be hacked to do this), rather than a totally new internet. Each person could have an index that holds only the things they are interested in.
The problem is, of course that names like motherboard/stories/NDN/photo1 are not more useful to anyone (other than the owner).
Nor are names unique, and having an index of every inedx.html in the world is not useful either.
Without location you have a heap. And a heap is the least useful filing system around, and the hardest to find anything in.
Nor do you commonly want some random "closest" index.html, you almost always want a specific one.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @04:01PM
This seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Sadly true... like so many solutions these days
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:17AM
> Now, hands up who wants to...
Anyone who is running a bittorrent client today.
(Score: 3, Touché) by VLM on Monday May 04 2015, @08:50PM
I rooted around and found
http://named-data.net/doc/ndn-tlv/name.html#ndn-name-format [named-data.net]
which lists RFC 3986 encoding for names (like internationalized URLs)
So its not quite raw utf8, but workable. So thats interesting.
Regardless of the format the paths of this AOL 2.0 walled garden silo are all going to look like:
/usa/only_mega_corps_allowed/DRMed_to_hell_and_back/Paid_transit_non-network-neutrality_to_keep_the_net_corporate_only/NSA_WAS_HERE/some_kinda_thing
So that kinda sucks.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @08:50PM
Their idea sounds simple: instead of numbers, use names. Focus not on the locations of things, but on the things themselves.
So you've invented... magnet [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @08:54PM
so it basically becomes impossible to figure out the real location of a data item ... it will quietly migrate to some utah desert place where data item access will be logged?
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday May 04 2015, @09:39PM
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
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
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
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
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...
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @08:58PM
get your free unlimited domain name today!
no name registration or money need!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @04:03PM
This is most certainly not spam... It's a 'woosh' and a 'touche' at least...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Monday May 04 2015, @09:03PM
Who the heck looks up their photos using dotted quads?
(Score: 5, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday May 04 2015, @09:06PM
Wow, seeing "something like motherboard/stories/NDN/photo1" takes me back to IMS, the non-relational, hierarchical database that predates relational databases. You do not want to go back to that mess. It's hard to mentally process these paths through data. You also don't always want to take the same path to a node, which leads to alternate indexes and other horrors. There's a reason why everyone on the planet moved to SQL databases as soon as they could and left this stuff behind. (IMS is still very widely used because of its historical installed base, which can't justify migrating off of it.) That's one of the big troubles with age discrimination. Anyone who has ever seen IMS would tell you this hierarchical structure is not a good idea. This is a wheel you don't want to reinvent.
No matter how you organize your data, you always want to access it another way.
internet://anger/hate/fear
internet://hate/anger/fear
internet://fear/anger/hate
internet://anger/fear/hate
etc
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 05 2015, @07:57AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @09:39PM
Since every chunk of data is uniquely named, an NDN data packet is meaningful independent of where it comes from or where it may be forwarded to, thus it can be cached inside the network to satisfy future requests
copyright law be looking at you funny.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday May 04 2015, @10:11PM
"Save the internet" ... from what?
Sure, if you have a single cloud containing all the planet's data, you don't need to know where it is externally.
But there's a bit too much data for that, and addressing it by physical vs logical location DOESN'T MATTER!
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday May 04 2015, @11:06PM
""Save the internet" ... from what?"
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." - H. L. Mencken
(Score: 5, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Monday May 04 2015, @10:12PM
So they reinvented namespaces [wikipedia.org] and the 9P protocol [wikipedia.org]. Now lets watch them rewrite everything from the ground up ignoring the work people already did to fix problems like this. NIH syndrome.
Or maybe I'm missing something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @10:14PM
The routing tables would have to be huge. Summary routes would simply not work anymore. Does everyone really want to have a multi-terrabyte drive on every router just to move packets?
If it ends up being a request system, as in if your router does not know where to go it asks something else, then it just turns into DNS, which does in fact already exist.
There just is no upside. It reminds me of Apple solutions to usability problems the years Jobs wasn't running the show.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @11:04PM
> There just is no upside. It reminds me of Apple solutions to usability problems the years Jobs wasn't running the show.
Since Van Jacobson is involved, I'm willing to give it the benefit the doubt.
Anyone who knows how the internet works knows Van. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @05:25AM
His career peaked a quarter of a century ago. Since then he has mostly sat around talking about what he did or being given awards for what he did.
If he has something new, which this is not, then he will have to prove how it is so much better that we should throw away the largest and most complex system of communication in the history of man in favour of it.
Oh, and my dosage of snark: Anyone who knows how logic works knows not to make assumptions.
(Score: 1) by SanityCheck on Tuesday May 05 2015, @02:07AM
And for my next trick I'll reinvent the motherfuckin wheel.