Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

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> The current generation could not invent the internet. They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.

You vastly underestimate how much thought went into the internet. Look at:

- TCP delayed acks + Nagle’s algorithm

- IPv4 address size (Vincent said 32-bits was roughly as likely as 24 or 48).

- the 7 layer OSI

- class-based (A, B, C, …) routing

- most of the options in IPv4 headers

The Internet was as much hacks and a playground as other layers of the stack are today. The good stuff is still in use but there is a vast graveyard of bad ideas that didn’t pan out because they were security nightmares, couldn’t scale, etc.

The same applies to core protocols like BGP. BGP hijacking is still possible today.

> > Old thing was hard, too hard for this generation

> You're vastly underestimating how hard the old thing was

Sounds like you're agreeing with him, if anything. Where is gerbilly's 'underestimation'?

It took me a moment to get it too. I think they’re saying that the internet wasn’t a waterfall-style design. It wasn’t a one-off big thing, it was a huge collection of small projects where most of them have since died because the trade-offs didn’t work. Agile is way more work than waterfall.

Surely it takes quite a bit of perseverance to try all the things that don't work until you find the things that do work. The false starts and dead ends all count towards the process.

> BGP hijacking is still possible today.

.. in the same sense as http hijacking is possible today, i.e. without httpS. For BGP we have RPKI ROA for a quite a while, and ASPA is coming.

RPKI ROA is trivially by-passable with a path modification attack. It only helps stopping hijackings of really well connected networks. And sadly it’s still not required.

> and ASPA is coming

Yeah, but it’s not here and requires verification at each AS append, which means we’re a good 5 years before it’s really enforceable on arbitrary prefixes across transit networks.

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