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Re: Fundamental changes to Internet architecture

  • From: John Dupuy
  • Date: Fri Jul 01 11:45:50 2005

At 06:29 AM 7/1/2005, you wrote:

On Friday 01 Jul 2005 11:28 am, [email protected] wrote:
>
> I guess I'm not the only one who thinks that we could benefit from some
> fundamental changes to Internet architecture.
>
> http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,68004,00.html?tw=wn_6techhea
>d
>
> Dave Clark is proposing that the NSF should fund a new demonstration
> network that implements a fundamentally new architecture at many levels.

'"Look at phishing and spam, and zombies, and all this crap," said Clark.
"Show me how six incremental changes are going to make them go away."'

Well I suppose it is a good sales pitch, but I'm not terribly sure that these
are a network layer problems.

We could move to a network layer with more security that makes it impossible
for network carriers to identify or intercept such dross, which might at
least deal with the crowd who think "filter port 25 outgoing" is the solution
to all the Internets woes ;)
Raw research often produces rewards and unexpected results, so I applaud and encourage work in this direction.

However, philosophically: security=less trust vs. scalability=more trust. intelligent=smart-enough-to-confuse vs. simple=predictable. Thus, a very Intelligent Secure network is usually a nightmare of unexplained failures and limited scope.

This is why researchers should sometimes ignore experience-hardened network technicians :)

I look forward to seeing what he comes up with.

John