
Why the internet only just works (2006) - llamport
http://fermatslibrary.com/s/why-the-internet-only-just-works
======
Animats
As one of the early workers on network congestion, much of what he says is
right. We really have no idea how to deal with congestion in the middle of the
network. The best we can do is have more bandwidth in the middle than at the
edges. Fortunately, the fiber optic and hardware router people have done so
well at providing bandwidth that the backbone has mostly been able to keep
ahead of the edges.

We never dreamed of a connection with over 10,000 packets in flight. Cutting
the congestion window in half on a packet loss and ramping it back up one
packet at a time was something I came up with around 1984. That does need to
be rethought, and it has been.

~~~
schoen
Hopefully HN readers know that Animats is the inventor of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm)

~~~
matt_wulfeck
Every time he posts we identify him as the author of Nagle's and someone
that's done pioneering research in TCP/IP.

It would be great if HN had some sort of annotation for distinguished
commentators.

~~~
msie
We would have the same problem as the black bar. But this is a great(?) idea
for a browser extension...

~~~
dredmorbius
I like the extension idea. Actually, I'd really like to see reading tools
which addressed a number of end-user needs:

1\. Tracking content stats: how much have I read today, how does this compare
to trend, what is my trend?

2\. Some sort of "spendable ratings currency" that would indicate quality of
an item. Ideally that would be some sort of compound metric. Time, commentary,
re-shares, multiple re-visits over time, references in other items (from
others, from you) as part of that. Also perhaps a specific metric of how good
or bad something was (probably on a 5 or 7 point scale), though I'd tend to
discount that. Flags for problematic content (bullshit, clickbait, etc.)
_These are only personal interest metrics._ At best they'd be shared with a
few trusted friends.

3\. Attribution _and reputation tracking_ by both author and publisher. Find
someone whose stuff is really, really good, though they publish rarely? Note
that. Find someone who couldn't tell a black eye if you gave them one? Note
that. You'd end up with a set of ranked sources by quality and credibility.

4\. Filters / indicators to note content's likely quality. Based on previous
reputation.

5\. A tagging / classification system. Having thought about this a lot, I'm
inclined to go with an extant ontology, probably the USLOCCS, as that's been
developed, is widely used, and isn't constained by IP restrictions as Dewey
Decimal is. (USLOCCS: U.S. Library of Congress Catalog Classification System).

6\. Uniform presentation + user editing. A Readability / Pocket like standard
page presentation model. The ability to edit that (either in stock ways or
specific elements) to further clean it up. Export to other formats (ePub, PDF,
text).

7\. Page annotations. I want to be able to keep notes on things.

I find it curious that the Web today is so metrics driven, _but nobody has saw
fit to provide metrics to end users themselves._

~~~
TeMPOraL
One thing I always wanted for HN extension (and regularly think about writing)
is notes attached to users. I'd like to be able to note down stuff about a
particular user (like, "that Cloudflare guy; knows a lot about DNSSEC", or
"that rocket scientist from NASA with interest in birds", etc.), and have them
easily viewed later by e.g. hovering over their name.

~~~
dredmorbius
G+ in one of its many failed implementations had something vaguely like that.
It was overloaded with Gmail contacts, and resulted in G+ profiles being added
to your mail-related address book.

Since I was using this in large part (though not exclusively) to keep tabs on
annoying gits online, this was a less than salubrious "feature". Sigh.

Reddit + RES offers tags. I'll note specific individuals, here usually
focusing on clueful. Though it's limited to a word or two, and isn't
inherently shared across systems (RES uses local storage).

But yes, generally, this is another of those "why aren't Web developers
providing users with a pretty obviously useful tool". It's more than clear
who's paying the piper here, and it ain't us.

------
mhandley
Interesting to see this paper making HN. I think it has stood the test of time
reasonably well - it was written in about four hours one morning under rather
unfortunate circumstances - I was stuck on a train that hit a vehicle at a
crossing.

I'm interested in what HN folks think has changed. What are today's urgent
problems, and what are just annoying ones that will cost time and money to
work around, but aren't critical? How do they differ from those of 10 years
ago? Arguably, some I discussed back then have only grown in importance, with
no solution in sight - for example, DDoS attacks. Whereas some, like address
space exhaustion, look like being adequately addressed, as IPv6 is finally
rolling out (only took 20 years!).

~~~
quanticle
I'm wondering if your opinions on the difficulty of introducing new protocols
have changed over the past decade. For example, Bittorrent has taken off, and
while I used to have to manually configure ports on my NAT to allow Bittorrent
to pass through, I no longer need to do so. Universal PnP seems to have taken
care of that (at the cost of some security).

~~~
mhandley
STUN/TURN/ICE have enabled NAT hole-punching to become fairly reliable, but
the complexity involved is horrible. Try reading RFC 5245 and its companions -
this isn't a sane way to design an Internet. It does work though.

New protocols are still an issue, but the problems differ depending on whether
we're taking about the transport layer or the application layer. We've tried
and largely failed to deploy alternatives to TCP and UDP. My effort, DCCP, for
multimedia traffic is dead in the water due in part to NAT/Firewall traversal
problems, and is now essentially tunneled over UDP. SCTP is successful in some
limited circles, but you're very unlikely to see it end-to-end across the
Internet for the same reasons.

Even TCP is really hard to extend. If you're interested, we did some work on
this a few years ago: [http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Handley/papers/extend-
tcp.p...](http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Handley/papers/extend-tcp.pdf) It's
amazing what some middleboxes do to TCP.

At the application layer, it's somewhat easier. You can deploy new protocols
over UDP, as BitTorrent did and as Google has done with QUIC, and they'll work
in most places, but you'll still need a fallback. The universal fallback these
days seems to be to tunnel over TLS on TCP port 443, because that's rarely
blocked. The fact that we need to do this is an admission of failure on the
part of the Internet architecture. The fact that it just about works is the
reason we've not needed to address the underlying problem, which is the
tension between security and extensibility.

------
jstimpfle
Thanks, for me this was mostly another illustration how to make a website that
doesn't.

Please give me at least a chance to get a plain pdf (or html) that I can read
(and click into) without content bumping forth and back and my computer
grinding to a halt.

~~~
van_gaal
This seems a bit harsh. As far as I understand the purpose of this website is
to make papers easier to understand. I think it accomplishes that. They are
not even trying to show you ads. how are you helping?...

Also, they might have restrictions about distribution of papers. Youtube also
doesn't have a download link next to every video.

~~~
jstimpfle
It might sound harsh to you, but you'd feel differently if you sat in front of
my computer. Each misclick costs me 1-2 seconds of layout recalculation (100%
on 1 core). For reference, my computer is AMD X250 from ~2011, 4GB RAM
(enough), and running Firefox on Debian 8.

Using chromium it's a tiny little quicker, but still annoying. They could
easily stop the content bumping and the darkening "please subscribe" overlays.

~~~
van_gaal
sure. talking to people on the internet only just works...

~~~
jstimpfle
This was probably a witty reference to the article. Can't appreciate it since
I can't bring myself to suffer the website...

------
canada_dry
The author (Mark Handley)'s other publications:

[http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Handley/papers/](http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Handley/papers/)

Some very good reading.

------
walrus01
Looking at it from a network protocol level is one view. From another
perspective the internet (whether ipv4 or v6) is a complicated set of peering
relationships between ASes and business entities. It takes clueful and
experienced people with "enable" on the core and agg routers who also
understand the economics of transit, peering, IXes, transport, dark and WDM
systems to build a proper ISP.

The internet is only as fragile as you build it. I have seen too many ISPs
running really important stuff through POPs where everything is 1+0.

------
powera
Article is from 2006.

~~~
56245623456
And? It's still a very good paper. Age doesn't change that.

~~~
powera
First of all, the internet has changed in the past 10 years.

Second, it's best practice here to put the date in the title for old articles.

~~~
jamez1
If you think the internet is the world wide web as well, then sure, it's
changed a lot.

But the actual internet infrastructure is still the same, this paper discusses
the protocols and architectural problems. I challenge you to name something
that has changed. Even IPv6 was formalized 15 years ago.

~~~
tzakrajs
One of the WWW things that has changed, maybe not Internet technology
specifically: if you are a business that moves very large volumes of packets,
it doesn't matter that you have plenty of upstream bandwidth because the
residential ISPs will refuse to upgrade their equipment on behalf of their
customers. See: [http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-comcast-deal-
explaine...](http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-comcast-deal-
explained-2014-2)

------
peter303
In the early web days (mid-1990s) Bob Metcalfe(invertor of Ethernet)
humorously the internet would collapse any day from increasing traffic. Aint
happened yet.

~~~
walrus01
Despite recent best efforts to the contrary by level3...

------
hNewsLover99
Wow! 42 comments on an article titled, "Why the internet ONLY JUST works"
(emphasis added), and the word "security" occurs once, and the words
"malware", "privacy", "malicious", "ransomware", "hack" and "cybercrime" don't
show up at all.

Is there another internet out there that I don't know about? If not maybe the
title should be "Why the internet only just stinks"!

