In elaborate terms: you have the ability to change any one of the protocols, specifications, designs or standards of the above at their proposal stage or before their mass adoption. You may choose to modify or reject an existing one or create one by yourself.
Some users and I would have common ideas in mind, however I would love to see some esoteric ideas as well.
Hard to say, but we needed to leave a minimum level of a learning curve to using any computer, not a PHD required, but enough to bore the red hats. As soon as Apple’s toddlerfication of smashing BIG, bright, colorful, soft shapes made it so everyone in the world could gold the history of humanity’s knowledge in their pocket… They started confusing their pocket with their brains. Holding knowledge doesn’t mean HAVING knowledge.
The instant and infinite false confidence that magic slab gives hateful idiots was our downfall as a species.
Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.
Ban UDP. Illegalize the formation of UDP. I hate UDP. TCP is God’s transport layer protocol. Everything successful uses TCP. Minecraft, best selling game in the world? Guess what, TCP. UDP fans will really send their packet into the void praying for a response that will never arrive, for their packet was completely ignored by the receiver and will never see the light of day again until a stupid 60 second timeout. I Refuse to use udp. DNS? tcp only. HTTP/3 is disabled everywhere, as QUIC is an unholy bastard born from the wrath of UDP and the comparably great TCP. Even my VPN over wire guard (mullvad) uses the UDP over TCP bridge so that I am not required to come into physical contact with the hell that is UDP. I hate the stupid uncancellable timeouts that every software waits a full minute for, even though I know the request has failed. Everything that has failed uses UDP.
This one will be super controversial, but I’d say get rid of mobile internet. I think it was a huge turning point for society, and not in a good way.
It’s tough because it actually does a lot of really good, useful things. But it also has a ton of negative effects. We seemed to do ok before it, and cell phones would still function as phones for calls and texting.
Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.
IDK how I’d do it, but I’d absolutely try to find a way to ensure Amiga wins out compared to windows worldwide.
Either that, or, if legal, making a very vague patent/trademark/whatever on things like tracking pixels/cookies and implementing them on a dummy site for a “totally not a patent/trademark/whatever hold” type site to at least ensure privacy is at least a little better for the average person not using chrome, edge, Firefox, etcetera.
Regulatory: Ban advertising.
All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.
In the context of changing the course of things early on, I’d make everyone post under their real name in any context. To be clear, I DO NOT support that today. The cat’s already out of the bag and pseudonymous communities are the norm now, I don’t think we can unscramble that egg.
But if somehow, from day one, you needed to attach your own name to everything posted online, I feel like we’d have ended up with a less toxic internet than we have in many places today.
Full documentation and second sourcing of all hardware.
This restores the right of ownership and destroys the current dystopian nightmare world of lost citizenship and democracy. It is closely tied to google winning the right to digital slavery and the buying and selling of your digital person to exploit and manipulate you.
I’d stop development of JavaScript.
Now VBScript would have likely become the default for Internet Explorer and would have likely won out.
And Microsoft would be in control of the web
Oh man, I had completely forgotten about VBScript.
One? Tie between redoing CFAA, DMCA, and privacy regulations before they became problems.
Stop IPv6 from existing.
Make IPv5, add a fifth number to the address, and improve NAT.
Not every particle in the universe needs a publicly routable address.
Upvoting, not because I necessarily agree but because its a good discussion.
That’s interesting - I hadn’t heard too much dissatisfaction with IPv6 before, except for the slow adoption, and the not-as-nice looking addresses. Is it an aesthetic preference or just that IPv6 is overkill? Or any other advantages to doing it the “IPv5” way?
This is a pretty good takedown of IPv6 but I think the biggest problem with its adoption is the addresses. They look like gobbledygook just so we can give everything a public address and it made it a lot more fiddly to configure.
just so we can give everything a public address
Giving everything a public address was the original intent! NAT didn’t even exist prior to '94 and it was (and is) a massive kludge.
Although not adopted, but ipv5 was mainly a proposal for streaming. https://itsfoss.com/what-happened-to-ipv5/
IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn’t necessarily imply a
ninth chevronfifth octet.But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet.
I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system… although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.
They should make the next IP standard spin. Spinning is so much cooler than not spinning.
oh god, the nightmare that “adding a fifth number” would be
It would be less of a nightmare than changing all our addresses to add four more sets, be alphanumeric, and to change the separator.
The design team flew too close to the sun with that.
That’s not how ip addressing works.
it definitely would not.
I’d like to know how things would’ve turned out if they hadn’t made the decision to start allowing commercial traffic on the Internet.
We would have never had all of the money blown on the infra that actually enabled the explosive growth after the dotcom bust. Probably would require a university account to access. And you’d probably be billed for all the bits
Make it so that security is a priority when developing a standard, protocol, or specification. Even at present, new stuff is developed for functionality first, with security coming in later. IMO they should be developed in tandem, secure by design.
I would make the default home router ip a human recognizable number like 123456 or something.
I would make it so complex software has an accessible console for commands and readouts/logs of previous commands like AutoCAD.
I would make it so mouse driven UIs were designed from the bottom up to be tightly integrate with command line views. This would make tutorials, learning and utilization of commands so much more efficient.
I also would make it so every UI element/window/toolbar of complex software had a specific ID number you could use to put into a search engine, search documentation or ask for help with.
