A New Way to look at Networking

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] [this video]

The mainstream internet is headed for content-centric networking. [link] [this 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.

It's interesting that you mention TCP/IP, because that's the most famous example of a technology that "works in practice, but not in theory". Take a look at Van Jacobsen's presentation on the history of ARPANET: [this video] Packet switching was "utter heresy" (20m in) when it was invented. It "wasn't a network, it was an inefficient way to use an existing network". And it almost collapsed 25 years after it was invented; the presenter is famous for inventing the modern TCP/IP congestion control that saved the Internet [1]. The TCP/IP flow congestion algorithm has been redesigned several times since [2]. It works not because it was designed well, but because it wasn't designed and instead evolved over many years with many contributions from people devoted to keeping it working. Alan Kay is usually who I think of for great ideas that "work in theory, but not in practice". He's done some crucially important work in OOP, programming languages, and GUIs. But note that we don't actually use SmallTalk; instead we got C++ and Java. Nor do we use Dynabooks and Altos; instead, we got Microsoft Windows. [1] [link] [2] [link]

Fun fact: An open source[1] version of BTSync called Snakebite was introduced back in 2006, predating BTSync by 6-7 years.[2][3] These days, it's not well known at all, and the Internet seems to have mostly forgotten about it, but there it is. Van Jacobson made a couple of offhand references to Snakebite at a Google TechTalk he gave in 2006.[4] The student who created it went off to do international NGO work or something, but his co-conspirator ended up working at BitTorrent, Inc for a bit. I don't know what BTSync is like today, but a few years ago when the call for beta testers first went out, its UX as described at the time was more or less the same as the way Snakebite's web interface worked.[5] 1. [link] 2. [link] 3. [link] 4. [this video] 5. [link]