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DNS over Wikipedia

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Re: DNS over Wikipedia

#32
Wikipedia editors have noticed that people use wikipedia for this purpose (finding the current location of sites) and so they have started to censor links for sites they don't want to encourage people to access. Right now this mostly impacts sites few would condone, like 8chan or kiwifarms. But in theory the policy applies to any site with illegal material so places like the pirate bay or scihub could have their links removed at any time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kiwi_Farms#URL

Re: DNS over Wikipedia

#33

If the point is to get to the site faster, why is the TLD "idk"? Couldn't it be 1 letter or at least the same three letters? On a separate note, someone could actually make a website do this without any extension. It would need to use wikipedia dumps and has the advantage it can't be suddenly edited by a malicious actor.

I assume idk means I don’t know. As in, get me to this website for which I don’t know the domain name.

Re: DNS over Wikipedia

#35
post #2

Is it actually DNS, or is there a custom name-to-IP lookup process going on? Also, am I just needlessly splitting hairs?

It's not 'actually' DNS, no, but it's sort of like CNAME redirection, except Wikipedia's the authority instead of the (first) domain name.

Re: DNS over Wikipedia

#36

> Instead of googling for the site, I google for the site's Wikipedia article ("schihub wiki") which usually has an up-to-date link to the site in the sidebar, whereas Google is forced to censor their results. In the video, it doesn’t show this. It shows going to the scihub.idk domain. And then a redirect happens. So does this tool just host a local a domain resolver (and HTTP redirect server) for all .idk domains th…

The comment is context for what inspired the tool. The functionality is about 40 lines of pretty readable Rust: https://github.com/aaronjanse/dns-over-wikipedia/blob/master... 1. Make a Wikipedia search API request for the .idk domain, using the name as the article name. 2. Retrieve the rendered page contents if found. 3. Find the first Wikipedia infobox table on the page. 4. Extract the first "URL" or "Website" entr…

The extension could also use Wikidata [1] entries – which (AFAIK almost always) hold the data that is displayed in Wikipedia article's infobox – because then it wouldn't have to resort to parsing HTML.

Specifically, Wikidata has a "official website" property [2] that seems to be used. If there are multiple extensions, like in Sci-Hub's case [3], it could pick one based on user preferences.

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/ [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P856 [3] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21980377

Re: DNS over Wikipedia

#37
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, am I just needlessly splitting hairs? Since the linked README doesn't even mention "IP", I suspect the author misunderstands what "DNS" is about, and this is actually a search tool, and the headline is bad.

DNS is for associating various information with domain names, and looking that information up. Yes, the most popular information to associate with a domain name is IPv4- and IPv6-addresses via A and AAAA fields; but CNAME records exist as well, you know.

This is not even CNAME, more like a Redirect header in DNS (if this was actually a thing, that is).

Still, this is arguably a domain name system, just one that isn't compatible with the DNS as we know it.

Re: DNS over Wikipedia

#38
post #32

Wikipedia editors have noticed that people use wikipedia for this purpose (finding the current location of sites) and so they have started to censor links for sites they don't want to encourage people to access. Right now this mostly impacts sites few would condone, like 8chan or kiwifarms. But in theory the policy applies to any site with illegal material so places like the pirate bay or scihub could have their link…

so it's just matter of time, and wikipedia is no better than google

Re: DNS over Wikipedia

#39
We live in a distopia where one of the last search engines that returns real results related to anything the western mainstream "hidden forces" do not want you to be able to see is Yandex, a company located under a dictatorship. In 2022, the only way for a regular citizen to approximate what is reality, what is the "truth", is to look for information provided from the opposite side of any argument you're trying to understand more of. Everything is fake or hidden from you. It's the stable diffusion distopia.

Re: DNS over Wikipedia

#40
DNS is a good name to help understand what it does but I am perturbed at the misappropriation. If it ramifies to calling everything DNS, search for real dns services will be cluttered with irrelevant results.

This a redirect to the right domain. It is not an IP address lookup. This could have just as well been an “I feel lucky” search box using Wikipedia as the source. Or a Duck !bang.

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