A New Way to look at Networking

I was surprised to command-F for Van Jacobson and not find this lecture, "A New Way to Look at Networking". [VIDEO] Van Jacobson was the major architect of TCP/IP; here is how the Internet would work if he were in charge. If this is ever implemented it will change everything.

Yes! Ted Nelson talks about this in this amazing and inspiring Google Talk video from 2006. He talks about the rise of packet-based networking, and how the future will be content-centric. [VIDEO]

You may be interested in this Google Tech Talk from 2006 - [VIDEO] . I found it interesting at the time it came out.

The thing that got me interested in Urbit when it was first announced back in 2010 was reading Van Jacobson's "Networking Named Content" paper [1] and related work from PARC, referenced in this blog post [2]. As someone who has spent 15 years now working on web development, browser development, and web standards, I feel the Internet really needs some form of "named data" networking as its next big step. I don't know if Urbit is the way it's going to happen, but it'll happen somehow. Maybe we'll evolve browsers and HTTP into a named data network instead. (On the one hand, it would be orders of magnitude easier than building an entire new model of computing from scratch... on the other hand, you don't get to throw out the whole ball of mud if you just keep building on top of it.) Anyway, I encourage everyone to read the Van Jacobson paper or watch the tech talk. It points out some assumptions that are so baked into our network architectures that I had never really thought about them. And it gives some context for these slides' claim that "the internet has failed," by pointing to a working alternate system that's a better fit for some common cases. The link from the Urbit blog to the Van Jacobson talk is broken since Google Video was shut down, but you can now find it on YouTube [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]

The mainstream internet is headed for content-centric networking. [LINK] [VIDEO] That is what all of these ideas (like Tent) are moving towards (gradually). All it takes is for everyone to run a client that can do UDP and speaks a content-centric protocol. That could be an app, or built into Firefox & WebKit (the ideal route), or a browser extension. Doesn't require any servers. Actually after reading the content-centric Wikipedia article again, one related approach which isn't emphasized in that article are application-level distribution systems built on top of things like UDP and Kademlia (and its successors). The fundamental way that data layer is organized intersects with the way social information is distributed.

This reminds me of Van Jacobson's Google Talk several years ago: [VIDEO] Basically a sketch of if the entire HTTP-based web worked like bittorrent.

Isn't this identical in spirit to Content-Centric Networking (CCN) as espoused by Van Jacobsen? I distinctly remember watching his Google Tech Talk on the idea ( [VIDEO] ) when I first joined AeroFS.

These migrations would be much easier if we specified dependencies by content, not location. Obviously not Google's fault, just something to think about as we build future systems. [VIDEO]