A New Way to look at Networking
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it as an inspiring talk behind content-addressed designs like IPFS, Urbit and immutable URLs.
What it is
Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk on rethinking networking around named content instead of host-to-host conversations. He recounts packet-networking history and lays out the content-centric networking idea that later became NDN.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2012 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec samatman · 2013-04 · on “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”
I was surprised to command-F for Van Jacobson and not find this lecture, "A New Way to Look at Networking". [this video] Van Jacobson was the major architect of TCP/IP; here is how the Internet would work if he were in charge. If this is ever implemented it will change everything.
Strong rec ned · 2014-07 · on “IPFS: The Permanent Web”
Yes! Ted Nelson talks about this in this amazing and inspiring Google Talk video from 2006. He talks about the rise of packet-based networking, and how the future will be content-centric. [this video]
Recommends barrkel · 2012-10 · on “Naming Things with Hashes”
You may be interested in this Google Tech Talk from 2006 - [this video] . I found it interesting at the time it came out.
Recommends mbrubeck · 2013-09 · on “Urbit: The Internet failed (slides and video)”
The thing that got me interested in Urbit when it was first announced back in 2010 was reading Van Jacobson's "Networking Named Content" paper [1] and related work from PARC, referenced in this blog post [2]. As someone who has spent 15 years now working on web development, browser development, and web standards, I feel the Internet really needs some form of "named data" networking as its next big step. I don't know if Urbit is the way it's going to happen, but it'll happen somehow. Maybe we'll evolve browsers and HTTP into a named data network instead. (On the one hand, it would be orders of magnitude easier than building an entire new model of computing from scratch... on the other hand, y
Cites ilaksh · 2012-09 · on “Tent v0.1”
The mainstream internet is headed for content-centric networking. [LINK] [this video] That is what all of these ideas (like Tent) are moving towards (gradually). All it takes is for everyone to run a client that can do UDP and speaks a content-centric protocol. That could be an app, or built into Firefox & WebKit (the ideal route), or a browser extension. Doesn't require any servers. Actually after reading the content-centric Wikipedia article again, one related approach which isn't emphasized in that article are application-level distribution systems built on top of things like UDP and Kademlia (and its successors). The fundamental way that data layer is organized intersects with the way social
Cites dvanduzer · 2013-04 · on “Immutable URLs”
This reminds me of Van Jacobson's Google Talk several years ago: [this video] Basically a sketch of if the entire HTTP-based web worked like bittorrent.
Cites allengeorge · 2014-09 · on “UCLA, Cisco and more join forces to replace TCP/IP”
Isn't this identical in spirit to Content-Centric Networking (CCN) as espoused by Van Jacobsen? I distinctly remember watching his Google Tech Talk on the idea ( [this video] ) when I first joined AeroFS.
Cites seagreen · 2015-03 · on “Bidding farewell to Google Code”
These migrations would be much easier if we specified dependencies by content, not location. Obviously not Google's fault, just something to think about as we build future systems. [this video]