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Ask HN: What are the biggest missing features on the internet?

3 points by harwoodleon ↗ HN
What does the internet not do out of the box (think EMAIL, DNS, HTTPS) that is perhaps should do?

I'll chime in with one feature I think is missing to kick this off:

- Distributed Search (Basically, Google in open web standards)

3 comments

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baystep
Email is one actually. Notoriously hard to work with from a systems point of view, and based on a protocol that's been minimally updated since it's conception in the early 90's. It's essentially been 25 years of the same old crappy standards that have been duck-taped to hell to try and fix security vulnerabilities. I always meant to re-write a version of email that works better with servers and API's. Such as JSON message formats, async key handling natively (no need for PGP anymore), sender identification and authoring, etc. But it's a massive undertaking, and I can't do it alone with my work schedule.
harwoodleon
It is a feature that needs improving, but it's not one that is missing :) Totally agree though - it's such a pain to handle it.

Although - I would argue that spam management is probably one such missing feature.

A lot of work is done at a high level, but there is no real effective standard to spam management.

baystep
Right, which I figured if there was any viable way to get sender-identification working then that would be solved at the initial point. Like HTTPS requiring a Certificate Authority to vouch for you. With out the certificate, the receiving server could effectively reject it. Should stop all those pesky SMTP senders claiming to be X website as well. You know, since for some brilliant reason the "from" field is just taken from input, you can type anything you want in there.