
Ask HN: What are the biggest missing features on the internet? - harwoodleon
What does the internet not do out of the box (think EMAIL, DNS, HTTPS) that is perhaps should do?<p>I&#x27;ll chime in with one feature I think is missing to kick this off:<p>- Distributed Search (Basically, Google in open web standards)
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baystep
Email is one actually. Notoriously hard to work with from a systems point of
view, and based on a protocol that's been minimally updated since it's
conception in the early 90's. It's essentially been 25 years of the same old
crappy standards that have been duck-taped to hell to try and fix security
vulnerabilities. I always meant to re-write a version of email that works
better with servers and API's. Such as JSON message formats, async key
handling natively (no need for PGP anymore), sender identification and
authoring, etc. But it's a massive undertaking, and I can't do it alone with
my work schedule.

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harwoodleon
It is a feature that needs improving, but it's not one that is missing :)
Totally agree though - it's such a pain to handle it.

Although - I would argue that spam management is probably one such missing
feature.

A lot of work is done at a high level, but there is no real effective standard
to spam management.

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baystep
Right, which I figured if there was any viable way to get sender-
identification working then that would be solved at the initial point. Like
HTTPS requiring a Certificate Authority to vouch for you. With out the
certificate, the receiving server could effectively reject it. Should stop all
those pesky SMTP senders claiming to be X website as well. You know, since for
some brilliant reason the "from" field is just taken from input, you can type
anything you want in there.

