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.
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.
Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.
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.
Regulatory: Ban advertising.
All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.
I’d stop development of JavaScript.
Now VBScript would have likely become the default for Internet Explorer and would have likely won out.
Oh man, I had completely forgotten about VBScript.
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.
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.
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.
it definitely would not.
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’d have blocked steve jobs from visiting xerox PARC.
i’d have blocked steve jobs from visiting xerox PARC.
just fucking get any business major to fund Woz and call it a day. Or spike that prick’s LSD before he can do any damage
no, see the important part is to get xerox to be a major player in the graphical minicomputer industry while it was still important, so that the world of guis would all be based on their paradigm with instant editability and deep interconnection.
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
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.
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.
Publish Piefed before Lemmy ever existed to minimize the tankie influence
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.
JavaScript is a mistake, AlpineJS makes it manageable but only because html is so underwhelming
