I recently moved house and organised an Internet connection and was reminded of the litany of associated protocols. The phone/internet system is a botch of systems all working together. Think ADSL1/2+, Naked DSL, VOIP, Fibre, Cable, etc. Another example of this protocol mess is the internet. We have HTTP, FTP, SSL, DNS, TLS etc. and on the p2p side: BitTorrent. Delve deeper you get thousands of old protocols. If you go and look at the Wikipedia page for
Push technology, there are about twenty different ways to longpoll.
The point I am trying to make is that computers are becoming increasingly complex and maybe it is time to rebuild from a clean slate. Vint Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist for Google) proposes something like this in an article
here, where he suggests an "InterPlanetary Internet", a delay-and-disruption-tolerant network.
I'm starting a new project, a new operating system that will attempt to standardize all aspects of computers, and be adaptable to any device. Specifically, I'm interested in:
* More Secure DNS (maybe based on NameCoin)
* Standardised Protocols for Voice, IM and Email communication
* All communication is encrypted.
* Etc.
If you want to look at this another way, there have always been those who have stayed two steps ahead of the authorities. A few years ago, those users were Tor users. Now it is time to move on and
pioneer a new network.
Comments, criticism, assistance and suggestions needed. I also need developers. The purpose of this post is to attract such help.
EDIT:After some thinking I've decided to try and re-explain what I'm aiming for.
Design a new internet that has a emphasis:
on P2P technologies; including an inbuilt DHT system and P2P DNS system (NameCoin maybe?)
end to end encryption for all connections
P2P email, IM, VoIP and video conferencing (all encrypted)
I've also had an idea for a new type of login system:
Step 1: The service signs your PGP (for example) key with a special signature that contains your username.
Step 2: You can authenticate in a similar way to client side certificates.
We may be able to use plain IPv6 for this, can somebody think about this?
The end product I'm thinking of is a modified version of Linux that supports this. Eventually, we may want to create a new operation system for this.