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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Full documentation and second sourcing of all hardware.
This restores the right of ownership and destroys the current dystopian nightmare world of lost citizenship and democracy. It is closely tied to google winning the right to digital slavery and the buying and selling of your digital person to exploit and manipulate you.
Regulatory: Ban advertising.
All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.
I've said this for years, but not about technology. Just a complete worldwide ban.
Provide a yellow pages type of thing you can look up businesses in, companies can "advertise" on their entry, with a separate resource to look up information and data about them.
Throw in word of mouth, and that's it. Free market determines everything else. Also, no logos on any product. The products can't become the advertisement either.
But take this rule back to like the (19)00s, so we just head off radio and TV commercials before the get go.
Maybe this prevents capitalism from becoming what it is in the first place. The main thing is presenting objective facts alongside the ads, so people don't just buy something because "it said it was the best". (Maybe that could extend to preventing people from believing something because "it said it was true" as well >_>)
Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.
Stop IPv6 from existing.
Make IPv5, add a fifth number to the address, and improve NAT.
Not every particle in the universe needs a publicly routable address.
That's interesting - I hadn't heard too much dissatisfaction with IPv6 before, except for the slow adoption, and the not-as-nice looking addresses. Is it an aesthetic preference or just that IPv6 is overkill? Or any other advantages to doing it the "IPv5" way?
This is a pretty good takedown of IPv6 but I think the biggest problem with its adoption is the addresses. They look like gobbledygook just so we can give everything a public address and it made it a lot more fiddly to configure.
just so we can give everything a public address
Giving everything a public address was the original intent! NAT didn't even exist prior to '94 and it was (and is) a massive kludge.
Although not adopted, but ipv5 was mainly a proposal for streaming. https://itsfoss.com/what-happened-to-ipv5/
IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn't necessarily imply a ~~ninth chevron~~ fifth octet.
But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet.
I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system... although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.
Upvoting, not because I necessarily agree but because its a good discussion.
I'd like to know how things would've turned out if they hadn't made the decision to start allowing commercial traffic on the Internet.
We would have never had all of the money blown on the infra that actually enabled the explosive growth after the dotcom bust. Probably would require a university account to access. And you'd probably be billed for all the bits
It'd still get there, probably; technologies tend to arise over and over again. But much more slowly.
Maybe illegal, small-scale commercial activity would fill the space until they're forced to open it up. Maybe it would develop first in a non-Western nation with lax regulations.
I'd stop development of JavaScript.
Now VBScript would have likely become the default for Internet Explorer and would have likely won out.
Oh man, I had completely forgotten about VBScript.
And Microsoft would be in control of the web
I wonder if Gates would still go along the personality trajectory he's had if he was even more powerful.
One? Tie between redoing CFAA, DMCA, and privacy regulations before they became problems.
I think web 2.0 (ie. the internet after standards bodies had congealed around the browser stack of tech) would have been better off as a complete redesign. Sure we made SPAs work on top of the hodge-podge of shit that is HTML/CSS/JS, but at what cost? Before React and it's ilk, there were many attempts to bring desktop GUI-like toolkits to the web which imo was a superior paradigm. Now, a browser is basically a shitty VM with horrible abstractions for web applications. If only we'd stopped and rethought that. WASM was also a chance for that to happen, but 1.0 is so limited (can't challenge the browser too much! it makes google money!). And the fractured WASI nonsense that exists now means we'll never get to the point where it could replace it.
Nothing, i'd just buy all the GPUs and mine all the bitcoin.
But more seriously, if I had somehow the power to make hardware open, I would.
Make it so that security is a priority when developing a standard, protocol, or specification. Even at present, new stuff is developed for functionality first, with security coming in later. IMO they should be developed in tandem, secure by design.
I would make the default home router ip a human recognizable number like 123456 or something.
I would make it so complex software has an accessible console for commands and readouts/logs of previous commands like AutoCAD.
I would make it so mouse driven UIs were designed from the bottom up to be tightly integrate with command line views. This would make tutorials, learning and utilization of commands so much more efficient.
I also would make it so every UI element/window/toolbar of complex software had a specific ID number you could use to put into a search engine, search documentation or ask for help with.
I'll just go with introducing IPv6 from the very start
I wonder what impact that would have had on early hardware because it would require more memory for the TCP stack
That's good one, a world where NAT never has to exist.
Can I get a ELI5 on why IPv6 is bad or not very good?
ipv4 is a 32-bit number, which means the total number of possible addresses are 2^32^ = 4 294 967 296, which is waaaaay less than the amount of computers we have today. ipv6 is a 128-bit number, so the total is 2^128^ = 340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768 211 456, which is more than all the grains of sand on earth.
the only thing i've heard people don't like about ipv6 is that the addresses are longer and have letters in them.
This.
Everyone is directly connected to the network.
Everyone can host anything we want. No centralisation.
Trivial peer to peer.
A whole ecosystem of worms infesting every computer.
...
Wait, no, not that last one.
Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.
Hard to say, but we needed to leave a minimum level of a learning curve to using any computer, not a PHD required, but enough to bore the red hats. As soon as Apple's toddlerfication of smashing BIG, bright, colorful, soft shapes made it so everyone in the world could gold the history of humanity's knowledge in their pocket... They started confusing their pocket with their brains. Holding knowledge doesn't mean HAVING knowledge.
The instant and infinite false confidence that magic slab gives hateful idiots was our downfall as a species.
i'd have blocked steve jobs from visiting xerox PARC.
i’d have blocked steve jobs from visiting xerox PARC.
just fucking get any business major to fund Woz and call it a day. Or spike that prick's LSD before he can do any damage
This one will be super controversial, but I'd say get rid of mobile internet. I think it was a huge turning point for society, and not in a good way.
It's tough because it actually does a lot of really good, useful things. But it also has a ton of negative effects. We seemed to do ok before it, and cell phones would still function as phones for calls and texting.
Ban UDP. Illegalize the formation of UDP. I hate UDP. TCP is God's transport layer protocol. Everything successful uses TCP. Minecraft, best selling game in the world? Guess what, TCP. UDP fans will really send their packet into the void praying for a response that will never arrive, for their packet was completely ignored by the receiver and will never see the light of day again until a stupid 60 second timeout. I Refuse to use udp. DNS? tcp only. HTTP/3 is disabled everywhere, as QUIC is an unholy bastard born from the wrath of UDP and the comparably great TCP. Even my VPN over wire guard (mullvad) uses the UDP over TCP bridge so that I am not required to come into physical contact with the hell that is UDP. I hate the stupid uncancellable timeouts that every software waits a full minute for, even though I know the request has failed. Everything that has failed uses UDP.
UDP has uses beyond internet and PCs. The embedded world makes extensive use of it.
The internet would be free, operated and maintained by the postal service.
IDK how I'd do it, but I'd absolutely try to find a way to ensure Amiga wins out compared to windows worldwide.
Either that, or, if legal, making a very vague patent/trademark/whatever on things like tracking pixels/cookies and implementing them on a dummy site for a "totally not a patent/trademark/whatever hold" type site to at least ensure privacy is at least a little better for the average person not using chrome, edge, Firefox, etcetera.
I'm not really that smart when it comes to protocols but I would go to Stanford University and guard the IT cabinet and tell Aaron Schwarz to stay the fuck out and go do something else.
Forums and YouTube remain the main forms of social media. No Facebook or anything of the like.
Here's an esoteric one: Kill the internet (as we know it) before it begins.
Okay, hear me out. Internetworking existed before HTTP and websites, and once the system of routing was there it was inevitable it would be used for all the things it is today. Email came first, and what is the Fediverse but an automated, abstracted-from-the-user email system?
With no HTTP, somebody comes up with the idea of an application that formats your mailing lists into one navigable page, and then somebody else starts caching mailing list emails at the server until requested by a user (like an instance). SMTP directly transitions into ActivityPub, and there's no need to build platforms overtop which can be monopolised. We might get to skip the Zuckerbergs and surveillance capitalism entirely.
Publish Piefed before Lemmy ever existed to minimize the tankie influence
