Live data from Hacker News

Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

handshake.org

81–90 of 128 posts

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#81
Seeing how Internet 1.0 is getting cannibalized by big business and governments, I'm hoping to see HS and other orgs start working on an offline mesh network and devise a completely new system of information distribution.

Humanity appears to be changing the public park infrastructure of the Internet into a paid-access theme park, with [them/someone else] writing the rules. It doesn't look like the righteous, tech illiterates, political manipulators or shareholder driven groups are going to relent.

The Internet used to be filled with raw data, but in the age of centralized, walled garden curating, the essence of the information superhighway has been lost.

It would be cool if they could pioneer a new way to replicate data in the age of autonomous vehicles or use the Internet to transfer volumes of data for offline nodes to broadcast and reimagine DNS and the other fundamental tools to make something like that resilient.

If they could remove most/all of the ads, marketing, monetization and censorship from the data, we might see another generation experience the raw data bliss many of use were raised on in the pre-dot.com era.

It was truly something special and felt like the world (of knowledge) was at your fingertips (instead of something slimey on the other end).

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#82
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The handshake namespace overlaps with the normal domain name system, but they reserve the top 100k domains for the current owners. My only concern is the long term sync between DNS and the old system. But I like the project and I think it’s a good way forward for replacing the current centralized DNS and PKI system

I'd say it extends more than overlap: If a name is not found on the Handshake chain, the resolver "falls back" to legacy ICANN DNS. Since all current gTLDs are reserved as well as the top 100k, there won't be any overlap for a while.

That's great. I didn’t know that all the gTLDs are blacklisted, I thought they only the first 100k. This should make the transition smoother

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#83

Decentralized systems generally have pretty complicated governance models and technology to support them, making it easy to get lost in the details. I've found when trying to assess things like this it's best to find a critical question and find out the details of the answer. For the case of decentralized naming, one interesting question tends to be "What happens when someone registers cocacola.com?" Usually the answ…

I think this is a great question - I'll paraphrase my interpretation: "What does enforcement look like when a big name / known trademark is registered?" - I'll answer the question again in a different way. Will return to this.

----

But first - would like to +1 troquerre's answer - the DNSSEC proofs provide some degree of long-term primacy and compatibility/transferability to Handshake - it'll help minimize conflicts/disputes.

Adding to that answer: I think something often left unsaid is how Handshake is attempting to create incentives for everyone (not just the early devs) to work together and make the internet better. The wide distribution to FOSS developers and donations have been mentioned by the team in other replies, but I'd like to add more:

From the design notes: (source: https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt)

``` ICANN has been the root namespace for the internet. ICANN (CA, US) is allocated 24,480,000 of the initial coin supply by the Handshake community.

Cloudflare, Inc. (DE, US) is a corporation doing fundamental research for naming, caching, and certificate authorities. They are allocated 6,800,000 of the initial token supply.

Namecoin is a decentralized naming blockchain. 10,200,000 of the initial supply was allocated to leading current and prior Namecoin developers.

Verisign, Inc. (VA, US) is the registrar for .com and .net. They are allocated 6,800,000 of the initial token supply. The .com and .net TLDs on Handshake will be given to Verisign with a DNSSEC proof.

Keybase has been innovating in the naming and certificate authority space. Keybase, Inc. (DE, US) are allocated 0.25% of the total token supply.

Public Internet Registry (VA, US) maintains the .org namespace. They are allocated 3,400,000 of the initial token supply. The .org TLD on Handshake will be given to PIR with a DNSSEC proof to pir.org.

Afilias plc (IE) has been the service provider for the .org namespace. They were allocated 3,400,000 of the initial supply to a DNSSEC proof of afilias.info. Note for both PIR and Afilias, this allocation was made before the proposed sale of the .org namespace. ```

These aren't trivial amounts for typical "ICO project marketing buzz / fake partnerships", they add up to percentages of total supply claimable by DNSSEC proof.

Because of this attempt to align incentives, I imagine there could be a world where community members (FOSS developers and wider mainstream 'internet' folks, not just 'crypto' folks) can get the best of both worlds, where any conflicts between ICANN and Handshake are minimized or the user pain mitigated by resolvers/other service providers.

----

*returning to the original question on cocacola -- the dnssec proof setup helps with .com domains where the holder wants to claim and use the Handshake tld there are a lot of situations where this is not enough.

What if someone registers cocacolacompany, or thecocacolacompany, or coke? It could totally happen:

Source: https://github.com/kyokan/namegrind ``` cocacolacompany,4032,2,false thecocacolacompany,22176,20,false coke,50400,48,false ``` Note: - that output is ${name},${blocknumber},${weeknumber},${reserved} - it can be generated with this tool https://github.com/kyokan/namegrind

If one puts together the pieces from some of the other posts from the team - someone can claim anonymously with GooSig and buy the above names, and the multinational that is "The Coca-Cola Company" will probably attempt to find and enforce trademark protections against the holder -- if they cannot find that person, and it is flagged as an infringing name -- resolvers or some other downstream service providers may have to block it. Of course, I am not condoning this - talk to your lawyer before you knowingly attempt to buy a name -- just pointing out that it is possible. From there, we could extrapolate various ways the legal system gets involved, or "pretty complicated governance models" attempt to protect The Company's claims, or the holder's privacy/control.

So, to answer your question: Handshake is definitely less centralized than existing systems (no entity to send a takedown request to), but it's also not clear if strictly incompatible with laws in most jurisdictions.

I don't think anything of this kind has been done before - my intent is to provide a bit of context and spark further discussion, but I'm not qualified to do more than speculate on how the legal stuff may play out.

That said, for some jurisdictions, "B)" may very well happen.

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#84
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Names have to be renewed bi-annually. You don't need to pay a fee, you just need to submit a transaction to prove you still have access to the private key. When talking about email alternatives here, I see a lot of comments strongly suggesting owning a custom domain and using it. If the domain cannot be renewed and kept alive in advance for a few years, the bus factor of being the only technical person in the famil…

I'm not affiliated with Handshake in any way. But my assumption is that there would still be registrars that can handle this sort of thing for you, in the same way that a service like Netlify can handle setting up a static site server and renewing LetsEncrypt certificates. It's just that if you wanted to do it manually, you could.

Exactly. We built a registrar for Handshake (https://namebase.io) and our service will automatically handle renewal transactions. That said, anyone can still manage their keys and submit renewal transactions on their own if they want to do that, similar to how you can use Coinbase vs a desktop wallet for Bitcoin.

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#85
post #42

> mail became Gmail, usenet became reddit, blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay. Centralization exists because there is a need to manage spam, griefing, and sockpuppet/sybil attacks. No, centralization exists because users don't care about the protocol. Users care about the brand. It's way easier to use FB than it is to say "ch…

> No, centralization exists because users don't care about the protocol. Users care about the brand. Brand is a proxy for the level of functionality delivered by that brand. People didn't switch to GMail because it was a "cool" brand, they switched because the spam filtering worked, Google gives you a ton of free space (a problem at the time), and it didn't have obtrusive banner ads. This was passed on by word of mou…

> Brand is a proxy for the level of functionality delivered by that brand.

100% agreed.

> People didn't switch to GMail because it was a "cool" brand,

Less agreed on this. Brand is also a proxy for PR, marketing, and the general image of the company. Gmail had an awesome feature set - better than its competitors at the time, but also spread wildly by word of mouth. At that time, Google was an exciting company for most people (it still is by and large, but that's another discussion). Gmail's "invite-only" onboarding was done well and made it exclusive. FB did the same thing when they rolled out to one school at a time.

Ultimately, I think we're on the same page. People want good UX; they want a product/company that their friends recommend; they want something that just works.

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handshake didn't do an ICO. They raised $10.2m from institutional investors like A16Z, Sequoia, Greylock, and Founders Fund, and then donated all the money they raised to non-profits and open-source projects. Here's a notice from the free software foundation when they received $1m from Handshake https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1...

Another: > Handshake donates $300,000 USD to Debian [0] [0]: https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329

Arch Linux also received 300k USD. We didn't publish any news about this as this was a "no-strings attached" donation.

You can however see it as part of the monthly SPI reports;

http://spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/201808/#index3h4

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at least you don't have to worry about package management, all the dependencies are built by the organization either from scratch or with vendored code. Re: JavaScript, you should take a look at the code in repo, it's excellent. There is a such thing as great Javascript code and bcoin/hsd are prime examples.

I'm very aware of bcoin. https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/bcoin Many steps of indirection away we find things like this include. https://github.com/juliangruber/isarray/blob/master/index.js module.exports = Array.isArray || function (arr) { return toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]'; }; Javascript is an absolute joke of a language.

I don't really see the problem. On any remotely modern version of Node that's just a noop. On ancient versions of Node its a very useful polyfill.

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm understanding you, the 52 week release is a one time thing, not a continual thing? So it's not that names will be continually trickle-released it's that for the next 52 (51) weeks, they'll be trickle-released, and then everything will be out there and this will work just like normal domain registration? I was under the impression that the trickle release was just how registration would work in general. That do…

Additionally to combat squatting, to register a name, one needs to go thru a Vickrey auction and bid on a name after it is released. Bidding continues for about 5 days thereafter and there are 10 days to reveal the bids. The winner pays the second highest bid.

Wait, what?

That seems like it could have a lot of unintended consequences, to the point of invalidating all of the benefits from having tons and tons of new names. I have a lot of follow questions about the potential for abuse.

From the squatter/troll angle: if I'm a troll or I'm trying to steal good names before anyone else can get them, what stops me from monitoring the current auctions and stealing domains by bidding above the statistically most likely market price for that domain? Users have to guess in advance how much a domain will cost?

From the decentralized, anti-corporate angle: if I'm Comcast, what stops me from monitoring the current auctions, and blocking anyone who tries to register any variant of `comcastsucks`? With the current system, that's prohibitively expensive since there are tons of variations that I'd need to preemptively register. With the system you're describing, it costs me nothing until someone tries to register a domain that triggers my Regex, and then I just outbid them and block any domain that criticizes me, because as a company I'll always be able to trivially and safely outbid any single person.

From a general user angle: does this mean I have to wait 5 days to register a new domain? With the current system, I can set up a brand new website in a single evening, and all I need to do is find a name that isn't taken yet -- I don't have to worry someone else will see what I'm doing and snipe my purchase. With the system you're describing, I have to wait 5 days to discover whether or not I'm actually going to be able to buy the domain I want at all, and if I don't get it, then I need to repeat the entire process?

I have so many questions about this system now. There has to be something you're leaving out here. I can't imagine using a DNS registrar that made me wait 5 days to discover whether or not I got to have the domain, or that made me guess how much it would cost at the risk of losing the entire domain. If there aren't other details you're leaving out, that's a strictly worse system than what we have right now.

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally to combat squatting, to register a name, one needs to go thru a Vickrey auction and bid on a name after it is released. Bidding continues for about 5 days thereafter and there are 10 days to reveal the bids. The winner pays the second highest bid.

Wait, what? That seems like it could have a lot of unintended consequences, to the point of invalidating all of the benefits from having tons and tons of new names. I have a lot of follow questions about the potential for abuse. From the squatter/troll angle: if I'm a troll or I'm trying to steal good names before anyone else can get them, what stops me from monitoring the current auctions and stealing domains by bid…

The auctions are semi-blind. You bid, and can optionally add a blind to your bid. The network sees your combined total bid + blind, but won't know your true bid value until the reveal period. So if you want to guarantee you win an auction, just make sure your bid is greater than the highest existing total.

Re: Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

#90
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Names are released over the course of 52 weeks. Determined by hash(name) % 52. So at worst the name you want to register will not be available until ~51 weeks from now (Handshake launched last week!). - Names have to be renewed bi-annually. You don't need to pay a fee, you just need to submit a transaction to prove you still have access to the private key. I don't think this will be any different than the existing…

> - Names are released over the course of 52 weeks. Determined by hash(name) % 52. So at worst the name you want to register will not be available until ~51 weeks from now (Handshake launched last week!). Can you clarify on what "names" means here? Common names, dictionary, every single name that exists in current DNS? If someone has a unique non-word domain right now do they have to submit that? Wait a year? > - Nam…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN