Arpanet pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/01/the_internet_is_so_hard/

by onei • 4 years ago

134 46 4 years ago

themerone• 4 years ago

It would be nice to have more details than,"I didn't think TCP was finished"

wyldfire• 4 years ago

One of the biggest bummers is how much the Internet has mostly collapsed to TCP and of that a very large share is http/https. UDP is still going strong for a handful of important applications. But if it's not one of those two -- good luck getting end-to-end transit.

alar44• 4 years ago

What exactly is your complaint?

Karrot_Kream6• 4 years ago

That middleboxes constantly stymie innovation through ossification. At least that's what I would think and I was going to post something very similar. At least we can just put overlay networks up and ignore most of the middleboxes out there.

malwarebytess• 4 years ago

I thought he was pretty clear. The internet itself shouldn't be limited to merely TCP et al. It's just wires.

icedchai• 4 years ago

Residential ISP policies on port filtering, NAT, and lack of IPv6 uptake are also to blame. The average consumer doesn’t care about any of that though, as long as FB, Netflix, and a handful of other sites load. Today’s internet may as well be interactive TV.

Karrot_Kream6• 4 years ago

At least HTTP2, HTTP3, and overlay networks (like ZeroTier or Wireguard) are opening up ways to have actual peers on the internet behind NAT4.

grishka• 4 years ago

UDP has always been used in at least VoIP and games. Basically any application where data is time-sensitive, and you'd rather not get a packet at all than have it retransmitted a bunch of times before it comes through. Also DNS.

But then there's QUIC, which is a better TCP built on top of UDP. It's new, but there's already some adoption.

good luck getting end-to-end transit

This isn't a TCP/UDP problem, you need to go down a level. This is because of NATs, which exist because the IPv4 address space can't possibly fit all those networked devices people use these days. IPv6 solves that. Why is its adoption so slow despite widespread support? I have no idea.

Terry_Roll• 4 years ago

Could you imagine an internet that was Token Ring ethernet then?

richardfey2• 4 years ago

The article fails to mention what are these planned improvements that he had; does he mention them in the video?

unnouinceput• 4 years ago

Yes, he kind of does. The article was exactly like that for me: "What things needed to be implemented to mark TCP done?" And in video he mention that they split TCP and UDP and he talks about audio needs where if you don't get the packet in time for the speaker you might not send it at all. And he mention this as just only one out of several in the list they had on a board.

Watch the video, it's more complete than the article. After watching it I came to the conclusion the article is cherry-picking stuff from the video to make a click-bait-ish kind of stuff.

richardfey2• 4 years ago

After watching it I came to the conclusion the article is cherry-picking stuff from the video to make a click-bait-ish kind of stuff

That was exactly my fear, thanks! Didn't have time to watch it yesterday.

Taniwha• 4 years ago

Way back then there were competing visions of what the internet might be - some were corporate (and somewhat based around corporate lock-in) DNA/BNA/SNA/etc others were more com ing from a postal/telegraph sort of world X.25/OSI - in many ways TCP/IP was an outlier, the fact that it didn't really belong to anyone had a lot to do with why it succeeded (also they understood datagrams, and weren't really worried about how to charge for dropped packets).

I suspect (I wasn't even close to being in the room) that freezing TCP was likely a very pragmatic thing, if you wanted to be accepted as THE internet you had to be perceived as finished, otherwise someone else's many 1000 person-year project would have won.

One of the great things about IP is that it's extensible, there's still room for protocols other than UDP/TCP, you can still write something new and better, or a fixed TCP, and install it along side the existing protocols - of course getting everyone to accept it and use it will be difficult

corford• 4 years ago

The chicken/egg problem is a hard one to solve. Looking at quic and noise, the future seems to lie in extending on top of UDP as a way of sidestepping the adoption problem.

johannes1234321• 4 years ago

Which in turn means that all those firewalls and related things will take deeper look at UDP packages and mess with them. :)

jeroenhd2• 4 years ago

One of the great things about IP is that it's extensible, there's still room for protocols other than UDP/TCP, you can still write something new and better, or a fixed TCP, and install it along side the existing protocols - of course getting everyone to accept it and use it will be difficult

Sadly, this isn't the case anymore since shitty middleboxes have taken over the internet. Using extensibility features in all kinds of protocols (be it TCP, TLS, UDP, or any other three letter protocol, really) causes middleboxes to drop traffic. Since we've all decided that shitty middleboxes are the protocol's problem to solve (because end users usually can't decide whether or not they're behind shitty middleboxes) all attempts at a new protocol are big puzzle pieces now.

Even existing protocols like MTCP and SCTP are dropped in favour of UDP because shitty firewalls can't deal with anything that's not TCP or UDP anymore. TLS 1.3 looks like TLS 1.2 packets because shitty middleboxes will just terminate your connection if they see TLS with an unknown version number.

It's quite depressing, really. I'm sort of hoping that at some point some weird proprietary or open source product with a fancy protocol comes out and becomes a hit, forcing shitty middlebox manufacturers to get their shit together (or tell the end user that the product won't work right because of shitty middleboxes and that they should complain to their service provider about it).

I'm all for backwards compatibility, but I'm sick and tired of MitM protocol parsers that refuse to follow spec being respected and worked around when it comes to new protocols. If you can't read the RFC, get out of the network protocol space.

dharmab• 4 years ago

Related reading on why HTTP/3 uses UDP rather than a new protocol: https://lwn.net/Articles/745590/

tialaramex• 4 years ago

As a silver lining to that particular cloud the shitty middleboxes made the case for work resulting from BCP #188 (Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack) very easy.

It wouldn't be difficult to find engineers at an IETF meeting who aren't very interested in whether Fatemah can send messages to her mother without them being read by her husband - that's a policy problem, not their business. But once they realise the shitty middleboxes to prevent Fatemah from evading her husband's surveillance make their beautiful new protocol design undeployable they're on board with encrypting absolutely everything everywhere all the time.

colordrops• 4 years ago

I've had it with these mother fucking gates on this mother fucking backplane.

teleforce• 4 years ago

Truth be told, those who do not understand Internet are condemned to reinvent it, poorly [1]. Remember ATM? (hint: it's not the machine you withdraw the money from).

Internet is specifically designed with a narrow waist, as most things in nature as posted in HN recently [2].

I think the latest and most promising Internet protocol is Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE) protocol that can hopefully generalized tunneling for the Internet and it's probably as simple as it can get [3].

[1]The Twelve Networking Truths:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1925

[2]The internet was designed with a narrow waist:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30483914

[3]All Tunnels Lead to GENEVE:

https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/all-tunnels-lead-to-genev...

tonymet2• 4 years ago

For one we’re limited to TCP and UDP– without a better protocol for media streaming .

authentication was omitted , resulting in horrifying UX and security holes

and the omission of encryption led to sloppy tunneling solutions that are still being reworked 50 years later

Karrot_Kream6• 4 years ago

For one we’re limited to TCP and UDP– without a better protocol for media streaming .

What's wrong with UDP for media? Is it the lack of multicast?

authentication was omitted , resulting in horrifying UX and security holes

While this is painfully obvious now I don't think the original Internet pioneers have ever really thought of the need for authentication as the ubiquity and threat landscape was very different. Regardless, we're all paying the price now.

tonymet2• 4 years ago

that’s like saying addresses are enough to deliver mail. there’s still flow control , error correction , buffering , authentication , stream multiplexing, compression, encoding etc etc

streaming protocols handle this at the app layer but it would have been nice to have a protocol between reliable tcp and wild west udp

kragen• 4 years ago

UDP supports multicast

convolvatron2• 4 years ago

that's not quite right. Bellovin et al in the late 80s early 90s really made a big push for authentication infrastructure (SPKI). but at the time PKI was being held hostage by ITAR (I remember sending off to get permission to use the RSA library, and getting something back several months later.

so yes, many of the people working on these things didn't have a security mindset (I had unix accounts at all kinds of random places), but some did...and the US DoD really threw cold water on the whole business

yardstick• 4 years ago

Authentication and encryption- I believe we would be in the same place we are today, with these responsibilities being delegated to the application layer, as the features of auth&enc changed faster than OS vendors are prepared to support.

Eg how much longer would we have had to wait for ChaCha20-Poly1305 in web traffic if we had to wait for the major OS vendors to upgrade? And would they have backported this support to earlier OS versions? Probably not.

tomcam• 4 years ago

That's always been obvious to me. The Web & Net are built on RFCs: Requests for Comment. They aren't called PRD's (protocol requirement documents) or something along those lines. Kind of beautiful actually, that it wasn't as top down as I would have expected.

carapace• 4 years ago

Reminds me of RINA (Recursive Internetwork Architecture):

RINA's fundamental principles are that computer networking is just Inter-Process Communication or IPC, and that layering should be done based on scope/scale, with a single recurring set of protocols, rather than based on function, with specialized protocols. The protocol instances in one layer interface with the protocol instances on higher and lower layers via new concepts and entities that effectively reify networking functions currently specific to protocols like BGP, OSPF and ARP. In this way, RINA claims to support features like mobility, multihoming and quality of service without the need for additional specialized protocols like RTP and UDP, as well as to allow simplified network administration without the need for concepts like autonomous systems and NAT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_InterNetwork_Archite...

gz5• 4 years ago

TCP/IP as we know it today was an ARPANET compromise between various views. A great first-party account of it (assume the RINA views carry some bias, but the paper is a first principles type look at networking):

https://netfoundry.io/whitepapers/Post-IP-RINA-Advances.pdf

Architecturally, speed prevailed over security and control. This was great for web evolution of the past 20 years.

Now is the time to assess if alternative architectures are better fits for use cases which could benefit from recursive architectures (and likely with different business models than today's commercial web) such as RINA, including use cases in which security, control and quality are of the highest value.

sn41• 4 years ago

Just a minor gripe, perhaps. Where does it say that Haverty is an original person behind FTP? RFC 959 seems to give most of the credit to Abhay Bhushan [1] from one of the older RFCs, 114 [2].

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc959

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc114

Arpanet pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

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