The ITU made a high frontier claim that was their core mission in the 10-20 year window. They made this claim 10 years ago. I'm not seeing strong evidence its being solved, aside from trickle down re-purposing of old 3G systems and Chinese investment in not-very-good infra to offset their coltan mining in Africa.

An accquaintance lives 10km outside metro Bangkok. It's an amazing city and its as plugged in and switched on as anywhere else in Asia, the rats nest of wires is a testament to ad-hock hackery. 10km outside the city margins, its a dead zone for high speed service. And Thailand has a huge rural population.

Rinse and repeat for Africa.

I agree that the 50% of the population with even less need things too, but it's myopic to think that we're even as good as the rosy outlook. Help to raise the local industrial and civil capacity in other nations, in my mind and opinion, would also make them nicer places to live and thus more likely to have happy citizens with a stable and responsible government who can help make the world a better place overall. (Surely there's been no study on this, but I also theorize this would be the most net cost effective way of battling terrorism; since if there's something positive to live for you're less likely to be angry and hateful towards others.)

Too many people are stuck with slow, expensive, and unreliable cable and/or DSL ISPs. Some have no choice whatsoever. Some others get to choose only from two equally awful options. We need legally available competition EVERYWHERE.

I can only imagine how fucked rural America is.

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

Here are the economics for a fiber optics deployment in 2021 for a rural town of ~800 premises, where about 60% got service. They charge customers about $100/month for symmetric 75/75mbps internet plus phone.

It costs about $40K per mile to run the fiber down the road on existing utility poles. It costs between $2K and $4K to run the drop from the utility pole to the home.

Those two numbers (miles of road, number of premises) get you in the ballpark of the cost of deployment in a town/county. More premises per mile obviously decreases the cost per premise - that's why utilities prefer dense areas (cities).

In the scale of the US, that's a blatantly false statement.

It's < 50,000 people out of 330 million. Or less than 0.02% of the population. Most of that is because they're living in quite isolated locations far from any population.

The figure is so high the WorldBank lists the US at 100% access to electricity with all the other affluent nations. Brazil is at 99.8% for reference, Vietnam is 99.4%, India is 97.8%.

Areas, as in places you can live.

I wasn’t saying it was whole chunks of the country. Just that there are many places, not necessarily in the same place and not necessarily enough for anyone to care about. The latter kind of being the problem…

Contrast that to the reaction to Tesla's autopilot that will happily drive you into an embankment at fatal speeds.

https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/ala...

This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.

Opera gave it a go more than a decade ago with Opera Unite, but that went nowhere. Like a sibling comment mentioned, Sandstorm was a push in the right direction, but it also eventually failed. Docker and current container solutions are still way too complicated for the average user.

The fact web founders focused so much on making the consumption of web content easy rather than producing/serving it is partly the reason why the web is so centralized today.

The first ever web browser written by Tim Berners Lee at CERN on a NeXt computer was a web editor as well.

He envisioned that every web user would be a web creator. He is quoted many times as saying this.

Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and forward the ports on your router. Unless you’re behind a carrier grade NAT (as those are becoming much more common now that IPv4 is exhausted).

The browser-as-editor didn’t even survive into the next generation of web software — Mosaic already was read-only. And that’s because Berners-Lee’s vision lacked any unified solution to hosting the web creations.

I've used that until about 2010 for clicking together concepts of pages, to refine them manually, if at all.

And you just lost 97%+ of the Internet userbase. They have no idea what you just said.

I feel like at the very least it should be possible to make tutorials for how to make and seed torrents (and why you might want to), and people can send or post torrent files or at least magnet links in places that already exist, like telegram (the app, not telegraphs from before phones were common) or email or sms text messages or forums or qr codes or anywhere that you can post at least a magnet link.

I feel like if people want bad enough to share and receive large files they can learn the basics of using torrent programs (and I've also seen more than one Android app (Libretorrent being one of them, and you can get it on the free/libre/open source Fdroid store if you want to))

Another thing to consider is that irc and matrix exist and I think they claim to be peer-to-peer, but I'd suggest taking a good look at whether that's true and what their limitations are, with irc seeming particularly limited when I tried it years ago (what do you mean it doesn't keep any history? I can't see what the convo was right before I showed up? That's dumb. Oh, and I can't see any messages somebody was trying to send me if I wasn't online and in that irc room at the time? That's super dumb. And where's the edit button? You mean I can't edit what I sent if I did a typo or sent a message before it was ready or something? And I can't even delete a sent message so I can redo it and replace the messed up message? What decade was this written in? Oh, like decades ago? Ok, maybe that makes some sense, but we have standards for our communication apps today) Oh, and it was very obviously made by people with a commandline-first mentality, and you either know what command to tell it or you don't, and if you don't and you don't understand any help text there may or may not be, you're at the mercy of whoever introduced you to irc, especially if you're not used to thinking the way hardcore/old programmers think (which makes help text less than helpful).

No, I think those aren't exactly what I'd be looking for

Another idea that comes to mind is that the server side could be somehow run by the connected users. Users have storage + cpu cycles. Similar to torrent as long there's enough users (seeders) the game server will continue to work. Lichess for instance has tens of thousands players online 24/7.

It's like the permissions problem (really easy to prompt, really annoying to do so, really really bad to just assume yes or no all the time) except worse.

In regards to distributed serving using the client endpoints it has a strong tendency to be more work, less reliable, and not as scalable (see peertube). What has seemed to work is offloading as much of the functionality for that user as you possibly can to that user's device. E.g. want to play a game against the computer? Run the chess engine WASM bundle on your device instead of the server (lichess does this).

With the cut payment providers currently keep it still seems like an unsolved problem for micropayments

This revenue model has turned out to be quite profitable in gaming and creates an experience where most people can use the software for free but a long tail of users spend lots of money to have icons next to their name or elsewhere on the site.

For chess you can imagine how this might work, for other software it is not always as clear.

still has a 5.5 cent overhead but that's a lot better than whats currently on offer

It's still in somewhat unstable test versions, but I think there's hope it can be out within the next year or so.

HN doesn't seem to like web3 very much yet, but one of the most positive innovations it brings is giving open-source apps a direct business model (instead of the usual "pro" and service org or hosted-version model). There are plenty of open-source apps making hundreds of millions or billions in revenue in this space!

Even utility open-source projects receive significant funding through projects like Gitcoin (https://gitcoin.co/).

I'm not sure what you mean? It literally makes the cost to the developer 0 per user.

And the original developer can absolutely earn money this way. In fact, in web3 it's possible for frontend devs to earn money by creating better frontends to existing protocols utilizing referral fees that can be specified in calls to the protocol!

You've got public docker repositories, terraform, aws service catalog (or cloudformation), all of which could fill this gap directly or via their own services if they had a slightly more beginner-accessible workflow...

"docker repositories, terraform, aws service catalog (or cloudformation)"

These are all part of the problem, and can never be the solution.

Layers need to be collapsed

If you write it in Go and package it as a single binary.

You can't if you write it in a scripting language that requires tons of programs to already exist on the system (a specific version of the language interpreter + a database server + other servers like redis and memcache etc etc etc).

This is a problem with programming languages, not with computer systems.

Computer systems already allow you to package and ship programs as self-contained units. That's their default mode of operation.

The prolifiration of scripting languages that require an entire environment to be configured before it can a program is something that programmers have done to themselves.

You are close, but you are not exactly right.

If consider real case of application, which create some value (I don't mean just money, may be for example community value or scientific), you will need to depend on some libraries or tools.

This is how our civilization works, we don't create all things from scratch every time, but instead, we take ready parts and construct something new from them, possibly adding our new parts.

Some parts could been compiled/linked statically inside your big one file package, some only dynamically.

Scripting languages difference is just that they usually shipped with rich development library, and in many cases it is possible to cut unused parts of these libraries.

For example, Python now shipped even with sqlite database included, sure this is not tiny package, but it is used in many applications.

To be more precise, python for android (p4a), when compiled as helloworld, results in approximately 6mbytes .apk. As I said before, there all python standard library compiled with cython.

Sure, if you will compile helloworld native, will got something within 200k, but if add any library, it will grow, and for real application, 6mb is not to much currently.

If add functionality to p4a helloworld, it grow very slowly, because compiled Python representation is relatively compact.

BTW it could be interesting project, to add to Python/Cython possibility, to create single binary package, so it will not decompressed to fs hierarchy, but read all from those binary as need.

> This is how our civilization works, we don't create all things from scratch every time, but instead, we take ready parts and construct something new from them, possibly adding our new parts.

This is very dubious.

If all you do is compose parts that already exist, then anyone can do it and your value add is almost nothing.

Sure, if you try to build everything from zero, it will take you forever.

But obviously, if you do what I said (what you quoted me), you are not building from scratch.

First of all, you are using the Go language and compiler. Second, you are relying on existing operating systems (likely linux) to run your program. Third, you are relying on the internet to exist so that your program can reliably serve content to users. Forth, you rely on the fact that your users have a reliable web browser that can display this content. Fifth, you are free to use any library in your source code.

Looks like you believe to Marx theories, that anybody could JUST make value. I mean, on such markets, you really could start sells from zero or with very limited resources.

But this is true only for very early stages of market, when competition does not matter. - On developed markets, competition is very significant, so to make moderate success, you have to use external resources - grants, credits, crowdfunding, etc.

What Marx don't said, that people divided to two big groups - passionaries (mostly entrepreneurs), and ordinary humans. They different in very important thing - passionaries have from nature need to change world (ordinary does not have such need at all), and on some moment of passionary life, earlier better, he switches to famous circle: 1. accumulate resources. 2. invest resources to some project to change environment. 3. when project on 2 approaches to some endpoint, have strong signs of success or failure, return to 1.

Ordinary people just satisfy their needs of mostly lowest levels of Maslow pyramid, they don't accumulate resources, they don't try to invest, and so they have not any success in projects, even when I agree, that many projects need very little resources to start profitable business.

Only exception, when ordinary human face some very easy to enter and extremely profitable opportunity, which does not include any risks or responsibility, than greed could defeat laziness.

But such things don't happen frequently. As I said before, most real opportunities include risks, include need to build circle of trust (so people will give their resources for free), or just get somewhere resources with conditions, like credits from financial entities.

So, return to our technical things, you are right, that exist totally free things, which could use anybody, but in most cases, they are not enough to make value, in many cases they are useless or they used to create barrier to enter this business.

I even must accent, I've been involved in few opensource projects, and in near all successful projects, their lead constantly made decisions, which features will not include in free version, to motivate people pay for them.

Most known example of free project, created as barrier - Eclipse IDE, which destroyed really big markets where lived lot of businesses - Borland, Watcom, Tiny C, etc, and when appear Eclipse, they become unprofitable.

So, life is struggle, but I repeat - technically you are absoultely right, in that near anything possible, if somebody else pay for it :)

Or to take it further, the same thing running in the cloud, but costs could pretty easily blow out of proportion with end-users not being fully aware of the costs of their actions.

Ads can be blocked, reduces the value of your service and do not pay enough to cover infra cost unless you have many users.

In comparison - the resources needed to run a desktop app is 100% provided by the user.

Akamai solved POPs (point of presence). Equinix solved DC. Both are matching towards table stakes in the context of internet infrastructural. (Not business models). We have lots of under-sea cables / international expansions on-going and planned. And it is now more of a cost efficiency problem, not an infrastructural problem.

We have a decent Ethernet roadmap [1], Terabit Ethernet, Petabit under-sea cable by 2030. If anything I see the only internet's infrastructural problems being closer to the consumer / client side of things where Fibre Cables are not being deployed. But I sense the pandemic has changed a lot of perspective on fast internet and Government are now willing to put more pressure into making FTTH as requirement.

If we look at Mobile, even carriers were a little too optimistic in Data usage projection. 5G proved to be sufficient enough in terms of Tower capacity with enough headroom for expansion without requiring Small / Nano Cells.

It might be different set of infrastructural problems, but more regulations on internet in a per country / jurisdictions basis, which would require Internet infrastructure to adapt to these scenario.

[1] https://ethernetalliance.org/technology/roadmap/

That blog post was released on April 1, but it isn't a joke (Cloudflare announces things that seem crazy but are real on April 1 instead of doing a joke)

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Cloudflare, but not on a team related to this.

30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives

I want that, but for the masses of tech-illiterate Average Joes out there, it's tough to compete against the sheer convenience of "tap next to trust big tech with all your private data and sync it all in the cloud" that you get when you unbox your iPhone/Android. And for most people their phone is their primary computing device now so their lives are tied to those ecosystems and we've been conditioned for over a decade now to just give our private data to the phones' ecosystems without asking questions because everting is so convenient and ignorance is bliss.

Trying to get average consumers off the big-tech ecosystems at this point is like trying to unplug people from the matrix. It's nearly impossible, unless some new EU-style regulations break up these monopolies first so that third party alternatives can compete on feature parity.

Consumer NAS management should be way easier. Why can't I tap my phone to my NAS to pair and then go anywhere in the world with a network connection?

1) most consumers have no idea what a NAS is, and even when they do, consumers have been conditioned that all their data is automagically beamed to the Apple/Google cloud at any and all time there's an internet connection without any user involvement beyond entering their ID when they unbox their phone for the first time, so it's impossible for a third party device or service to compete with this level of out of the box integration and convenience

2) NAS devices aren't made by Apple and Google so NAS integration into these ecosystems is a second class experience at best, and Apple and Google will never make NAS devices as they're incentivized to get you to pay for their cloud storage subscriptions for your data. Plus, as a a cherry on top, this way they can silently data-mine you as well.

Basically the industry is moving, or we can argue that it has moved already, towards subscriptions, where you never really own your music/movies/data but have access to it as long as you pay your monthly/yearly fee, because this is so much more lucrative for big-tech than getting you to buy commodity HW like a NAS and physically owning your data.

I fully appreciate owning your own data and hosting it somewhere, but no idea why we need to host anywhere but hyper-connected data centers.

I’d like to own my social graph, my profile, my permissions for who can contact me and read my data. But no reason for that to execute on my phone or home server. Have service providers do it, compete, scale and specialise. Let me host at home if I want to, but that doesn’t feel like the default we need.

But prove me wrong. I like learning!

The focus for the past 30 years has been on simplifying web content consumption. Everyone knows how to use a web browser. Why hasn't there been a similar push to make serving web content easier? There have been some attempts (Opera Unite, Sandstorm, Docker... web3?), but none have prevailed.

A possible answer could be because it has created a huge market for 3rd party services to step in and make things easier for web users. And now it's probably too late to stop the train. But there's no reason this couldn't work while empowering the user.

Sadly publishing goes towards the lowest friction service. Was websites, then blogs, now Twitter. The backgrounds and themes weren’t as important as simple content. I’m not sure home hosting has any chance to beat that trend.

* Most personal devices are battery powered and intermittently operated.

* Many are mobile in terms of physical location and logical network (home WiFi, work/school WiFi, cellular).

Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins because it is a genuinely effective solution to problems inherent in sharing data between end users.

There's no technical reason for this to be the case. ISPs adapted to the needs of the web, not the other way around.

> lack upload bandwidth

This is relative to each user. The vast majority wouldn't require much upload bandwidth, and there could be technical solutions to address this (caching nodes, data expiration, P2P, etc.).

The biggest technical challenges of large web services are because of the scale needed to support the large amount of users. If we had built services and tools around the inherent distributed nature of the web, centralization and all the problems caused by scale wouldn't be an issue.

> battery powered and intermittently operated

> mobile

Why should user data be highly available? If I'm physically unreachable or just want to be offline, shouldn't my data be unreachable as well? Besides, all of these can have technical solutions as well.

> Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins

I'm not disagreeing, but a) this wouldn't be required by most users, and b) why couldn't this be under control of users as well? The fact no such (simple) solution exists today doesn't mean that it couldn't have gained traction back when browsers were getting adopted, and today we would've had a completely different web. Unfortunately incentives are turned on its head, users aren't educated about the harms of giving their data away because they've learned that it's the way the web works, we have to pass laws to protect user data, and a vocal minority of web developers have been swimming upstream and trying to undo the harms of centralization for decades with lackluster results.

One of the main reasons we “hire” the platform companies to convey our data to other people rather than opening TCP sockets to each other directly is precisely async delivery. No one wants to use a social network where we can only see each other’s content if we’re using our laptops at the same time. Just make a phone call at that point.

Now maybe you could ask for federated, open standard queueing mechanisms. But we have one of those! It’s called SMTP, and it’s not really up to the needs of modern social applications. And maybe we could do something about that. But it’s also in the nature of federated open standards that are widely deployed to ossify. The other service that Facebook and Twitter are doing for you besides pub/sub is having the coordination and agency to update their own deployments over time, something that e.g. the set of all relevant email operators does not have.

It's not just the data you obviously fill in yourself

and that's before considering cookies other than letting you auto login to a specific site you already logged in to before

Also, isn't Whatsapp owned by facebook now? Don't trust facebook or anything they own

Beyond that, if someone owns your data they can simply decide what you pay tomorrow and its burn it or pay.

The mx records could point to this homeserver box and you would fetch your messages from there. It would be the norm that your graph, photos, whatever would be stored there and you would have to allow access to share them out with others. That would have lead to a very different internet than today.

But the main thing I'm thinking of is having a physical, secure enclave protected, device that allows all internet users to u2f to their ISP in order to have the option for an "ip permitted from" protocol for registration on websites. Something that can ensure that when grandmas pc gets hacked, it's not used to create 100 Twitter accounts to pump some crypto scam.

Today even if we could get ISPs to setup such a system, people wouldn't use such a system as they are already use to easy sign ups, and companies love their growth metrics

I wish for a world where battery tech wasn’t so limited. Imagine if everyone could just run a full-fledged server 24/7 on their phone, as a simple app, with a reasonable data plan.

This is the obvious and simplest solution. A built-in self-hosting platform right in the router, extensible with an external USB drive if the user needs it. But ISP's are notoriously terrible at everything and certainly can't be trusted with something like this.

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

Edité: Liberté, égalité, cyberité!

(Did you notice the source in my link?(at all?))

I did. It has its own slew of problems.

> Or another ISP.

ISPs hold monopolies in many areas of the US.

> Or get a bizniz line

Not always available. Too expensive when it is.

> Or move?

Is this a joke?

> Or use StarLink?

Waiting list. Expensive. Latency.

> Did you notice the source in my link?(at all?)

Did you really expect me to read the source code from a bunch of patches for a french modem and gain some kind of magical insight?

Err, nope? I just posted that link to show you that it doesn't have to be like you said, especially not for the device in question.

> ISPs hold monopolies...

They did, and sometimes still do elsewhere too.

I don't give a shit, since I don't live in "free 3rd-worldistan with nukez, carz, and screaming lunatics on crack, or whatever else".

> Is this a joke?

Not at all. Totally serious. It's the thing to do, to escape learned helplessness.

https://thehelm.com/

It's great that you don't have to start rolling your own cloud, but it would be a better offering for me if you could decide to tinker with it.

I'm only half joking. I was just fantasizing about this the other day. I'd love this to become reality but I'm worried reality diverges from this idea further with each passing day. People produce more and more data that's useless outside of a closed platform. Nobody owns media to host.

A lot of non-techy people already have NAS, external hard drives, and things like that. I don't know how ISPs haven't done already this.

Around 37 percent of the world's population (2.9 billion people) have never used the Internet (1 in 3 people), per the UN’s 2021 report on the topic.

https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2021-11-29-Facts...

The great firewall is the prototype, but as the world becomes multipolar again, regional powers will want to control what kinds of data is imported/exported

So in terms of infrastructure, I think a way to tap into and share information regardless of restraint will be the end result. It would need to be cheap, impossible to censor, searchable and able to easily hide access devices / methods. to said system.

I see crypto currencies as the initial stages of this.

The reality is people seek the truth when they know they’re being lied to. Very few people in the west trust news

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

Part of the issue with Google, etc has to do with the “Trusted News Initiative”.

I definitely agree the trend will continue. However, once an innovation with then properties I described can occur it will dominate.

I can't help but feel distributed computation is a really really fascinating problem and if the socioeconomic wave we're going through now sustains even a fraction of this current moment it'll be a longterm engineering focus.

It's impossible for me to not recognize that the diff blockchains mirror that of different database designs as the web scaled from nineties. First read capacity was needed to support e-commerce. Followed by social platforms where read/write needed to scale and adopt distributed models and eventual consistency.

Now we're scaling distributed computation and all sorts of interesting problems emerge. If things are gonna turn out to be even remotely what an idealist might lead you to believe we're at the cusp of rearchitecting every single layer of computation. Networking. Machine code compilation and execution. File storage.

PS I did a couple of cmd+f for keywords to find someone answering with this context and didn't find any. That seems crazy.

Digital notary. So a third person (digitally) signing a transaction or other document exchange.

It should be possible for you, the receiver of the email, to check if the email originated at company X.

Digital Notary: this came up in several data privacy discussions. You (A) are in contact with B, but you don't want to send B something like a scan of your passport (e.g. for age restricted services). So you disclose the passport scan to Notary and he sends B the message, the passport was disclosed to me and the person is >21.

[0]: https://www.personalausweisportal.de/Webs/PA/EN/home/home-no...

You could check the DKIM signature of the email.

The point being that Company X does not have a copy of the sensitive information (and neither the liability of losing it) and the Digital Notary would (in theory) have better procedures for properly deleting or storing the data as needed.

(See: that time that a bunch of Google traffic started getting routed through Russia. Or the time that YouTube became inaccessible to the entire world)

Yet BGP injection attacks (ASN or prefix theft) happen regularly. The reason is that not everybody follows the best practice here. It may well take a massively disruptive attack before this gets any better.

This could be set to only be enabled if load is approaching a certain percent of capacity that the servers/CDN are able to handle.

Once reaching that threshold, P2P would kick in, and existing visitors could serve static content to newer visitors using something like the WebRTC + Service Worker + IndexedDB combo that www.arc.io uses for their P2P CDN.

Thoughts?

Cloudflare has absolutely no reason to invest in solving DDoS because the existence of them is one of your best sales leads. DDoSes are cancer and you run a cancer treatment center. Gotta make sure you can treat cancer well but you wouldn’t want people to avoid it in the first place.

Imagine if Cloudflare stubbornly stuck to providing DDoS services and never considered the idea that there might be a solution to DDoS at the protocol level. We'd die if someone else came up with the technical solution to DDoS. So, it would both be better for the Internet and better for us if we were involved in killing off DDoS at whatever level possible.

For example, on the network level we've pushed for BCP-38 over and over again to deal with spoofing. RFC 2267 is 24 years old (https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2267)! But, yeah, sure, Cloudflare that is half that age is keeping all those DDoS attacks happening because they love the smell of $$$. Give me a fucking break.

We also solved the bcp38-like problem ipv6 had by using source specific routing throughout openwrt. A lot of other router makers are still not doing this right. Turris gets it right, I know.

It would be good to know what else cloudflare thinks would be a good set of DDOS protection features (route 666) home routers should have? Please add requests here: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/cerowrt-ii-would-anyone-care/110...

This reasoning does not prevent Google from slowly making itself irrelevant by changing the web to such an extent as to make its search algorithm impossible to get any useful results from.

> For example, on the network level we've pushed for BCP-38 over and over again to deal with spoofing.

That is a point in your favor, I will concede.

> Give me a fucking break.

Cloudflare is a huge company with more and more power over the entire internet, and it is constantly urging people to only use the internet through Cloudflare, in numerous ways. You do not get a “fucking break”.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...

Even if you properly implement this system, network operators will expose themselves to firewall DDoS attacks by malicious actors that are trying to fill the firewall blacklists with garbage.

We've reached counter counter DDoS warfare. What do you do now?

1. IPv4 will persist, possibly forever. There's really no compelling reason to migrate to IPv6 other than address space and we've had decades at this point of getting around this problem with various flavours of NAT.

2. Ossification. We've taken the quite reasonable step of discarding any packets or traffic we don't understand from a POV of minimizing threats. For example, there were cases of bypassing security using packet fragmentation. But this makes it increasingly difficult to extend the protocols (eg reliable connectionless messaging aka a reliable UDP).

3. We don't really have a good solution for roaming. If you switch hotspot and get a new external IP it'll typically break your connections. A lot of work has been done to workaround this (eg carrier-grade NAT for mobile IPs) but identifying an endpoint with (address,port) (or just (address) for IPv6) is less than ideal.

A message in Netflix/Google/Facebook home telling “we see your network is blocking X, that may result in a not optimal experience”

Ability to do SDR for wireless networks with smarphones. 5G is not a good solution.

Better security for routers, and generally better software security regulations, which are almost non existent right now. If cars have security regulations, software should, too.

My gut tells me it's fairly low per person served, and it'll only improve over time as more renewable electric sources come online.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y

Compare that to https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

I don't know if it takes the lifecycle of hardware into account.

Interesting viewpoint. Care to expand on your thoughts? To me, 5G seems like a stepping stone to UWB communication

- The design seems to mandate source routing, where the entire path needs to be known by the sender. This is much less resilient than the current internet where each hop decides how to best get a packet to its route.

Apparently people mail each other save games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play-by-mail_game

0: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/

This is one of the no-go theorems of quantum information: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem>

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41534-018-0090-2

But you can't send information through quantum entanglement itself without rewriting a significant chunk of physics as we know it. If you're going to do that, all bets are off and you should be consulting with wizards and not physicists.

A bit like games need complicated netcode to compensate for latency.

I think the most practical and affordable way of connecting people in the remote and rural areas is by wireless via terrestrial rather than satellite. Regardless of satellite or terrestrial, apparently wireless transmission itself need to be reliable in the face of interference, multi-path and physical obstructions (tree, foliage, building, limited groud clearance, etc).

Most of the efforts for improving wireless technology have been focusing on the urban settings not rural or remote areas for obvious reasons. Ironically the areas where there are less money to be made and there are the places where most of the digital divide are happening.

Personally currently I'm working on a next generation reliable wireless connection technology and the initial results are very encouraging. Hopefully this promising technology can significantly contribute to the improvement of connectivity to reduce digital divide worldwide in affordable manner. Please contact me if you are interested to collaborate on this new technology.

For global initiatives focusing on improving telecom and Internet infrastructure there is Telecom Infrastructure Project supported by the major players including Facebook, Intel, Nokia, NTT, etc:

https://telecominfraproject.com/

I don't know in the US, but in most parts of Europe we have reached such levels of speed and low ping that in not too much time it would be more clever and cheaper to ISPs to have more towers than wired solutions.

I think we need DNS for all.

A "secrets service" where people can put a short encrypted message - big enough for an IPv6 address + future extendability - for all to see.

Then users can swap keys, agree on a "secrets service" (or many of them) to store their secret/IP address, and skip any other centralisation altogether.

Apps (open source or otherwise) can then leverage this service to let users simply talk directly to each other.

That's not the only thing peer-to-peer could be good for, nor is it the only implementation possible, but I'm using torrenting as an example because it's a good peer-to-peer technology that works and has been working well for at least 10 years (whenever trackerless torrents and less reliance on trackers became standardized into the standard)

I am biased in this answer because I am building https://hotg.ai/ but I see the world going towards a more fragmented ecosystem. So:

- Portable computations - sending your workloads to any place where the data is

- Good local storage that keeps you compliant with local laws

(edited for format)

Some background maybe first.

There is a massive Global Internet Distribution challenge which works around the cost/bit equation. They are:

1. Undersea cable networks - USD 0.5-1B to deploy over a multi-year project. 10s of millions to maintain with regular cable cuts. Typically now only deployed through consortiums of Internet and Telecom companies. Carry 99% of world’s international data.

2. Inter-City Distribution - National Fiber and Copper networks which connect tier 1-3 cities, towns and villages with a backbone to the nearest Internet Exchange OR telco data center (which in-turn would have a hard line back to Undersea landing stations).

3. Last Mile or within city/urban connectivity - last & middle mile within a city/town connecting homes, offices, towers and DCs.

IMHO the challenges still remain but get worse from top to bottom, costs and complexity often jumping in orders of magnitude from one to the other, with Last mile obv being the craziest.

Telcos nationally in most countries still own most of inter-city distribution and tier 2/3/4 POPs (point of presence), leasing out capacity from POPs to ISPs and Enterprises. The investment in laying these cables is EXTREMELY prohibitive and is the main cause for high Mbps rates, high latency and onerous terms when it comes to in-country network distribution (big e.g. is South Africa). Numbers range from orders of magnitude more expensive (e.g. $1.6B for Telstra Australia in Phase 1, $130-150B for US) than Undersea cables primarily due to Right of Way and operational costs of deployment.

People are now moving from Rural to Tier2-3 cities/towns and also there is reverse-migration from megacities like Manila to Tier2-3 cities/towns (as evidenced by rising cities like Cebu, Bali, Miami, Austin, Pune, etc where housing is more affordable and earning potential remotely is nearly the same). Bandwidth and latency demands are going up 100% Y-on-Y in Tier1-3 cities, especially in WFH COVID times. Starlink & others in LEO wil definitely help with most rural unconnected places (<1-2% of total bulk). Telcos will eventually build out Tier1 cities with fiber more robustly (since they have to deliver on 5G small cell and potentially 6G).

Mid-tier cities & towns where by far the larger total bulk is accumulation will need a LOT of attention and more latency optimized, cost/bit minimized backbones.

Finally, humanity's push to get into deep space in the next decade will require building out infra to support robotic and autonomous missions. Thinking of deep space objects as islands or continents is a helpful model and tightbeaming laser comms to them as "undersea cables but in space" could help address some bandwidth allocation problems in the early days (but local distribution will again have challenges)

It is all a steaming pile of garbage.

We're in the middle of a SW quality crisis, because a lot of people have not the slightest idea what they are doing, but they are encouraged by their managers to ship immediately.

Comments, build configuration, platform specific implementations, alternate implementations (e.g. (re)implementations of an interface used by an application), tests, and etc. could all be part of the "program". In many ways we try to do this already by hacking together git repos with everything stored in there as text and then require very particular versions of programs to run everything in there anyways.

I think it's all sufficiently powerful already to build awesome things, but I do not doubt that in the next 10 years something will be built that realizes the ideas which have been kicked around since Smalltalk/Self and raises the bar of productivity.