Enabling a permanent revolution in internet architecture | Hacker News Reader

Enabling a permanent revolution in internet architecture

dl.acm.org

57 pointsakshayn28 comments

As far as I'm concerned this paper more or less describes HTTP(S) fairly well. The "3.5" address is the domain name that resolves to a meaningful IP address for the L3 domain you are in.

Folks are already using disjoint L3 address spaces with elements like load balancers providing the bridge between the public IP space and their own private IP space. I don't know if you could ever sell me on having more than one "main" IP space though, as I don't entirely understand what purpose that would serve, other than massively complicating the process of understanding what it is you are purchasing connectivity to.

See also RFC 1925, particularly sections 2.6a, and perhaps 2.11 :p

> As far as I'm concerned this paper more or less describes HTTP(S) fairly well.

Sure, but only if you ignore the specifics and over generalize. As overlaying is fundamental to all client server communications.

dmytri kleiner gave a great talk about doing this at a little bit of higher level back at SIGINT10.

https://media.ccc.de/v/sigint10_3821_en_peer_to_peer_communi...

%s/a permanent revolution/evolution/g

That's... sort of the reason the term is evocative.

Setting aside the cultural baggage of its authorship and nomenclature, from a purely objective standpoint I could not pass Introduction / Motivation without attempting to elucidate the objections I felt to its generalizations.

The most frequently cited architectural flaw is the lack of a coherent security design: The success of IP is simplicity/general utility - the ability of the system to support different use cases as a packet-switched alternative to previously dominant circuit-switched telephony systems. This is precisely the capacity of the system to vary service types and levels based upon application requirements. Viewed in this lens, not having a 'coherent security design' is the core feature, not a bug.

many question whether the basic service model of the Internet (point-to-point packet delivery) is appropriate now that the current usage model is so heavily dominated by content-oriented activities: CDNs, content-addressable P2P networks (torrents), and multi-mirror package management databases are all excellent, broadly deployed counter-examples. The fact is, by normalizing packet-switching, IP has made bandwidth so cheap that inefficient distribution becomes a trivialized cost. Again, this is a core feature.

A system cannot switch the service type to "prevent DDoS from spoofed IP packets" though.

The authors are not arguing against packet switching; they're questioning whether point-to-point still applies when a majority of the Internet is used for accessing content. CDNs aren't cheap, a content-centric network (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking) could substantially increase efficiency.

There are many effective DDoS resistance strategies. However, if you had to build those costs in to the core of the internet, then there is a fair argument that it may never have taken off as overheads would have been too high.

For the NDN concept, again the whole point of IP is that you can implement it on the same base: Upgrade cost of network complexity: The Internet has smart edges ... and a simple core. Adding an new Internet service is just a matter of distributing an application ... Compare this to voice, where one has to upgrade the entire core. - RFC3439 (2002)

Between the name, the acronym TP, the tagline, and the fact that it was a paper co-authored by A Panda whilst presented in Beijing, all led me to assume it was an elaborate setup for a joke for at least half the paper.

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~apanda/

> In this paper, we try to reconcile these two perspectives by proposing a backwards-compatible architectural framework called Trotsky in which one can incrementally deploy radically new designs. We show how this can lead to a permanent revolution in Internet architecture by (i) easing the deployment of new architectures and (ii) allowing multiple coexisting architectures to be used simultaneously by applications

In Trotskyist theory, permanent revolution has a specific meaning. There are two main components:

1. A socialist, proletarian revolution has to occur in a pre-capitalist society (such as Czarist Russia), bypassing the step of a bourgeois, capitalist revolution (such as the French Revolution), which Orthodox Marxism expected to be necessary in such countries.

2. The revolution has to be global, in contrast with eg. Stalin's theory of Socialism in One Country.

Seeing as permanent revolution is 1. not incremental and 2. does not allow for co-existence with capitalism, it seems sort of strange to name this approach after it.

> it seems sort of strange to name this approach after it.

many people wearing che guevarra t-shirts are neither marxist nor especially bolshevik. but they are 'cool' and 'edgy' (supposedly).

Why Trotsky? Because "permanent revolution"? sigh.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is it considered appropriate to name this project Trotsky? Would they name a project Goebbels or Himmler?

Are you seriously equating a Russian revolutionary and the German Third Reich?

Trotsky was a deeply violent, cruel and evil progenitor of the most murderous regime in human history so yes.

He was of the same caliber of mass murder. He was one of the main architects of the red terror that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The whitewashing of Trotsky and of Lenin does nobody any favors. They were mass murdereres not whitstanding whatever utopia they were dreaming off.

To be fair, I don't think they believed in anything they were selling to the masses. They just used it to get enough power to establish themselves as stable as absolute monarchs(the end of the great terror was the moment when elites realized that they actually already that) Which is exactly why no one should have as much power. The only question how to make it impossible?

Do you have any evidence for this? If Trotsky didn't believe in Marxism, why did he spend most of his time in exile writing Marxist theory?

In OPs defence, Winston Churchill, a European hero, is dispised by some in India for having no regard for his British East Indian subjects. Rewriting of history by the victors has, allegedly, untarnished his name significantly, even in the Indian subcontinent.

Exhibit A: 3 million people died of man-made famine in 1943 for which Churchill is widely held accountable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

Similarly, not all Third Reich officers are demonized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz#Later_years and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel#Posthumous_honour...

Don't know about him, but I would, Trotsky is one of those people who are responsible for creation of concentration camps in soviet russia on scaling it(among other horrible things). The only reason you don't think about him the same way you think about Stalin or Hitler is because he lost internal competition to Stalin an flew the country.

Please do not take HN threads further into political or ideological flamewar. This leads nowhere interesting. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214343

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is hilarious and previous HN commenters are in sore need of political reeducation to free them from the bourgeois counter-revolutionary ideology clouding their senses of humor.

What? There must be some context I'm missing. What this on HN before, and you're responding to people in the last thread?

Huh, when I responded to that comment it was a root comment at the top of the page. Now I see what it's replying to. Did someone move it?

Please let's not get into a tedious meta-discussion of a tedious meta-discussion.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

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