  The fragmented nature and asymmetry of local and remote file access and
network access, combined with the current lack of robust authenticity and
privacy, hamstrings the current internet. The collection of disjoint and often
ad-hoc technologies currently in use are at least partially responsible for the
magnitude and potency of the plagues besetting the information economy, of
which spam and email borne virii are canonical examples. The proposed
replacement for the internet, Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), does little
to tackle these underlying issues, instead concentrating on addressing the
technical issues of a decade ago.
  This paper introduces CANE, a Content Addressed Network Environment, and
compares it against current internet and related technologies. Specifically,
CANE presents a simple computing environment in which location is abstracted
away in favour of identity, and trust is explicitly defined. Identity is
cryptographically verified and yet remains pervasively open in nature. It is
argued that this approach is capable of being generalised such that file
storage and network access can be unified and subsequently combined with human
interfaces to result in a Unified Theory of Access, which addresses many of the
significant problems besetting the internet community of the early 21st
century.

Networking and Internet Architecture;Cryptography and Security;Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing