Changes Required In Internet To Better Protect Free SpeechJanuary 19, 2017
The internet has taken technology way ahead and changed the world drastically, but all’s not well and fine. The need for making changes to the internet to make it a safer place for users is obvious, and we must work to that end.
The internet has come a long way from what it was when it began. No one could have predicted this unprecedented growth of the internet. While the connectivity it provides everyone, there are many areas that need working upon. Most notable of these areas are free speech and online privacy. An alternative approach to the internet as we know it could be the solution to this problem. That alternative approach is named data networking (NDN).
Internet, as of now, uses IP addresses to identify systems connected to the network. NDN can replace IP addresses as the former approach can form a system that is basically a massive file system. NDN could change the way the internet works because the locations, or IP addresses, would be replaced by things and entities, or named data.
Units of data can be identified like you located a file in your system, using its path. So what this does is that your system is the most specific file path, while the internet is the root directory. You traverse up from the bottom, accessing more data as and when you require it.
The internet of IP addresses works by connecting two endpoints to facilitate communication between them. The internet of NDN would change this underlying approach of facilitating communication.
It would simply form a system where anyone requesting information receives it by taking them to a particular directory that has that information. The system has been tested and proven to work by a team of researchers at UCLA, who used this approach on a network of IoT devices.
IoT is touted to be the technology of the future, but it suffers from the problem of the present, which is lack of security and privacy. The NDN approach used by the UCLA computer scientists worked on this technology.
The team wrote in their paper that the devices don’t need to be connected to a global network to know which devices are present nearby. They need only look into a general namespace, like /local/appliances. This way, devices can discover and interact with other devices, without all of them connected to the same network.
Speaking of privacy and free speech, NDN allows bridging of different networks to get to a destination directory. This allows one to bypass restrictions imposed on them to get to information stored in a location through the bridge made by connecting different networks, thereby allowing for free speech.
Privacy is ensured similarly, for there won’t be any way to track where the information is coming from and which device is accessing it through which path. The paper concludes by saying that privacy and free speech can be ensured by diversifying the nodes that provide data.