271–280 of 355 posts
Is it okay for startups not based in the `British Indian Ocean Territory` to use `.io` for their domain?
Some TLDs do indeed have stronger requirements. I remember that for a long time getting a .fr was a bit of a pain because you had to prove that you were a french citizen or a french company IIRC.
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Ah perfect, not your keys, not your domain. I mean now domain jackings can be permanent and irreversible! Apple.com can literally be stolen by Tim Apple and there’s not a thing anyone could do about it. Another clear win for the blockchain. Resolving this kind of dispute is why we have central authorities in the first place.
The dispute process is there to solve the kind of issues that do not exist in a fully automated domain name assignment systems. Fully automated system will only care about keys and cannot hand apple.com over from Apple Inc to Tim Apple because of his name.
https://www.wholewhale.com/podcast/152-why-we-should-save-or...
This of course is why ICANN was created, to bring governance of the Internet closer to the community that developed and maintained it. But now ICANN has become just as remote and unaccountable as the bureaucrats and contractors it replaced. And Postel is long gone, and the Internet community has grown so big and fragmented that no one person will ever have anywhere near the towering position he once did.
So now what do we do?
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> You should have no doubt that, for example, Facebook would make a "the internet" which was 100% Facebook-operated sites. AOL already tried that back when they were still sending floppies through the mail. They were the largest ISP on earth and couldn't keep people in their little walled off corner of the internet. I don't think anyone else is going to be more successful.
They might not have been able to keep people there forever , sure. But their walled garden was “the internet” to a major chunk of people in the US for quite a long time. Remember when TV commercials would tell you a company’s AOL keyword?
In 1998 Jon Postel briefly "hijacked" the DNS root zone. Formal control over DNS had always belonged to the US government, but Postel commanded such universal respect from the internet community that they were willing to follow him, as head of IANA, over the government contractor that "officially" ran the root at the time. This of course is why ICANN was created, to bring governance of the Internet closer to the comm…
ICANN is accountable to nobody, whatsoever, in any capacity.
In 1998 Jon Postel briefly "hijacked" the DNS root zone. Formal control over DNS had always belonged to the US government, but Postel commanded such universal respect from the internet community that they were willing to follow him, as head of IANA, over the government contractor that "officially" ran the root at the time. This of course is why ICANN was created, to bring governance of the Internet closer to the comm…
Except at least the American bureaucrats were accountable to the Department of Commerce, and ultimately elected officials. ICANN is accountable to nobody, whatsoever, in any capacity.
I've been thinking a lot about the sheer downsides of DNS overall. We need something different. Something decentralized, encrypted, something not reliant on a protocol that hasn't kept pace with security and privacy and we need something verifiable that provides accountability. As others have said TLDs have become a racket. Only the priveleged and nation states have the authority to use the system as a funnel of ridi…
We don't want DNS anymore, but we don't have a replacement. It's the same as Facebook->Diaspora, Twitter->Mastodon. The non-centralized versions are too hard to deploy to all the non-techies out there, despite being the "morally" correct architecture.
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Posting from a throwaway account. I worked at one of the main TLDs for years and was on one of the ICANN boards and got to know the industry well. It is well know amongst the domain name community that ICANN is a poorly run organization, whose directors have in recent years have used their position of leadership to lead decisions from which they are afterwards benefiting themselves economically, in many cases by rush…
The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I'd dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days. Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it's definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle th…
The blockchain idea could work. There is a coin called namecoin which attempts to do this. I think on end user devices we should still use DNS so you don't have to store a 1tb blockchain on your device but the blockchain could be what the DNS servers source their data from.
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The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I'd dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days. Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it's definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle th…
Browsers shouldn't be the entity deciding on address resolution, a domain system bound only to the web/httpx would be a huge leap backwards. This should be up to the os and whatever names resolution the os provides should be happily accepted by any network program, be it a browser, email client, ssh, irc or something completely different.