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.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    1·
    6 days ago

    Hmmm, I got a few ideas, not necessarily to make a “better now”.

    One is for Unix’s initial development to only begin in the mid 1980s, instead of the 1970s, which would hopefully result in some of its more obnoxious “features” not existing. rm -rf / - No asking for confirmation, because that will certainly not have any undesired consequences! The main downside is that we wouldn’t have the Unix-Haters Handbook

    Another is making RISC style CPUs the default for desktop computers, whether the originals by Acorn or even with Intel deciding to make their own ARM x86 series all the way back in the 80s. I’d pick this one.

  • √𝛂𝛋𝛆@piefed.worldEnglish
    45·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • Sunsofold@lemmings.world
    25·
    8 days ago

    Regulatory: Ban advertising.

    All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.

    • oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip
      5·
      1 day ago

      I’ve said this for years, but not about technology. Just a complete worldwide ban.

      Provide a yellow pages type of thing you can look up businesses in, companies can “advertise” on their entry, with a separate resource to look up information and data about them.

      Throw in word of mouth, and that’s it. Free market determines everything else. Also, no logos on any product. The products can’t become the advertisement either.

      But take this rule back to like the (19)00s, so we just head off radio and TV commercials before the get go.

      Maybe this prevents capitalism from becoming what it is in the first place. The main thing is presenting objective facts alongside the ads, so people don’t just buy something because “it said it was the best”. (Maybe that could extend to preventing people from believing something because “it said it was true” as well >_>)

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      7 days ago

      You’d need to still have a whitelist, so putting the name of your store on the front of the store or telling a friend about a cool new thing you bought is allowed. But yes.

      In a similar vein, letting websites render whatever they can imagine has proven ripe for abuse. Basic HTML is a kind of whitelist of it’s own.

      • Sunsofold@lemmings.world
        1·
        7 days ago

        The best definition I have come up with so far is to ban ‘Party A compensating party B via money, goods, or services for displaying and/or broadcasting media to party C, in particular and/or in general, without party C’s specific consent and request.’ The only exception might be to allow it for companies that both A. have an annualized revenue less than 10x the median wage, and B. are not making a profit. That would be just to allow small businesses to get the word out at the start but would cut off anything getting to the point where it should be self-sustaining.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
          2·
          5 days ago

          So you could advertise on your own platform as much as you want? Billboards, sign spinners, flyers, door-to-door sales.

          It would kill surveillance capitalism as we know it, I guess, but it seems like if you’re killing advertising you might as well go all the way.

          The small business carveout is nice, though.

          • Sunsofold@lemmings.world
            1·
            6 days ago

            Sort of.

            Billboards are not owned by stores. They are owned by marketers and rented to advertisers. An additional element may be needed to require ‘own space’ advertising to only advertise products and/or services available at that location. (i.e. within ~100meters)

            Sign spinners are being paid to display their sign. They’re gone.

            Flyers are not delivered with explicit consent and request. They’re gone.

            Door-to-door is tougher to classify because it has variance in form, but probably would be allowed on the condition that the first thing the potential customer sees is a person requesting consent and not some piece of media.

            Also, I think I’d have to simplify the start to ‘issuing or accepting payment’ rather than targeting a single party. Advertisers and marketers should both face punishment.

  • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.worldEnglish
    193·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • ambitiousslab@feddit.ukEnglish
      11·
      8 days ago

      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?

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      5·
      8 days ago

      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 chevron fifth 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.

        • palordrolap@fedia.io
          2·
          7 days ago

          They weren’t thinking big enough. They’ve only doubled the address space. I say this at least half seriously, well aware that mine is far more ridiculous the other way.

          … but I probably should have tried searching for “IPv4+” before using it as a generic term. At least one other proposal shows up when I search for that, and one of them is a proposal that adds a couple more octets.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    16·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      8 days ago

      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

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        3·
        7 days ago

        It’d still get there, probably; technologies tend to arise over and over again. But much more slowly.

        Maybe illegal, small-scale commercial activity would fill the space until they’re forced to open it up. Maybe it would develop first in a non-Western nation with lax regulations.

  • scytale@piefed.zipEnglish
    10·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      Definitely. Insecure protocols linger on for ages even after we have better options. The internet used to run on unsecured HTTP, FTP, and Telnet, and it took decades for their encrypted successors to make headway and become the default.

      I think email is the last major old protocol that’s still blatantly terrible, but it’s too deeply entrenched/too decentralized to do anything about.

  • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    8 days ago

    I think web 2.0 (ie. the internet after standards bodies had congealed around the browser stack of tech) would have been better off as a complete redesign. Sure we made SPAs work on top of the hodge-podge of shit that is HTML/CSS/JS, but at what cost? Before React and it’s ilk, there were many attempts to bring desktop GUI-like toolkits to the web which imo was a superior paradigm. Now, a browser is basically a shitty VM with horrible abstractions for web applications. If only we’d stopped and rethought that. WASM was also a chance for that to happen, but 1.0 is so limited (can’t challenge the browser too much! it makes google money!). And the fractured WASI nonsense that exists now means we’ll never get to the point where it could replace it.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    10·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • northernlights@lemmy.today
    10·
    8 days ago

    Nothing, i’d just buy all the GPUs and mine all the bitcoin.

    But more seriously, if I had somehow the power to make hardware open, I would.