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From Spiked:
If life ever returns to normal, one thing no one will miss from the lockdown era is the 'TV goldfish'. For over a year, we've watched the disembodied, pixelated faces of contributors to live TV mouth their words out of sync with their audio, gulping away as if in a private fish tank. This isn't the exception for internet video, it's the norm.
John Day is one of the internet's greybeard founding fathers. For a decade he has been advancing a set of improvements to the current mainstream internet protocols. His proposals – called RINA (Recursive Internetwork Architecture) – revisit and build on Louis Pouzin's founding concept of datagrams (data packets). Simplifying these features allowed the original inter-networking protocols (IP) to get out of the door in the 1980s and 1990s, and allowed for the rapid growth of the internet. But the current system we have – TCP/IP – is holding back new innovation.
See also: Internet outage illustrates lack of resilience at heart of critical services
The Guardian view on the internet outage: we need resilience, not just efficiency
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dltaylor on Thursday June 10 2021, @07:04PM (3 children)
The summary is mostly false; that issue is rare. TCP/IP is not broken, if used for its intended purpose. The issue is the proliferation of "stick everything in HTML", even when it is the wrong tool for the job (which is most of them). Before HTML started being used for video there was already a working protocol for streaming video: RTSP and RTP. File transfers, upload and download, predate HTML, and often still work using FTP; I used to use Microsoft's FTP server back when their web site had only a fraction of their available downloads.
Seems to me that this is a BS propaganda push for Google's (mostly) new protocol QUIC.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 10 2021, @07:45PM (1 child)
I too thought of QUIC as the answer to complaints about TCP. The headline is bad and wrong clickbait melodrama. (I didn't click on it and RTFA.) The Internet is most decidedly not broken. IP is okay, though it'd likely be better if everything finally moved to IPv6. If the Internet really was broken, audio and video merely being out of sync would be the least of the problems.
What's next? Headlines screaming that a new mutant fungus is eating silicon chips and all our computers will soon cease to function? Unless... you spray Dow Chemical Silicon Shield Fungicide on the chips! Or, or ... fire ants, yeah, that's it. Fire ants are eating the network cables! And ... because the sun was so quiet the past solar minimum, it's going to have one heck of a wild solar maximum like hasn't been seen in millions of years, and is going to knock out all our networks and the electricity grid too. We're doomed!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @10:15PM
Day's solution isn't QUIC either. In fact, he hates QUIC too precisely because it is a kludge around a broken system that creates yet another stack issue.
His objection to the Internet technology is much more fundamental because his model of what the Internet should be is different than what the OSI eventually went with. I'd highly suggest reading his book or at least a summary of RINA. It has the potential to fix a number of problems with the Internet and reduce complexity, beyond just the relatable AV issues to stuff like BGP, buffer bloat, and other underlying problems while decentralizing it and increasing privacy. In fact, this article and summary are so badly written that I almost wonder if it is on purpose to make him sound like a kook or big tech shill.
(Score: 1) by rickatech on Friday June 11 2021, @09:09AM
I think many of the articles concerns are genuine, just there are already solutions in the works to address them.
Buffer bloat [wikipedia.org], address it in the router
QUIC [wikipedia.org], client and server push flow control into higher layers of network stack
Nuff said,