Show HN: Use any text as a domain name • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#41

Post by coherentpony » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 9:58 PM UTC

pudquick wrote: post #39

I would be in favor of this idea if a little more thought was put into how the hashing function works. As it stands, someone typing in: food in Chicago will get a different URL than: food in Chicago And the same goes for: Chicago food, chicago food, food near Chicago, etc. Every one, with a single character difference (extra space, different word order, capitalization difference, regional spelling like theatre vs the…

>As it stands, someone typing in:

>food in Chicago

>will get a different URL than:

>food in Chicago

Why?

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#42

Post by colmmacc » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:03 PM UTC

This mechanism is half way to a suggested scheme for domains that are less vulnerable to single-actor take-downs, posted here on HN a few days ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964090 .

In short; instead of merely mapping to [hash].com the extension could map to [hash].com, [hash].se , [hash].ly, [hash].is, [hash].ch and then use a quorum consensus of whatever answer 3 or more of those names agree on. Effectively each TLD registry (and each of your registrars), along with their regulatory environment, would lose the ability to take down your name without international agreement.

For certain niches, such a feature might be a good enough value proposition to ordinary users to convince them to install an extension.

Other observation; 36-ary is probably a better encoding for the hash data than hex. DNS isn't great with lengthy answers and every byte is worth conserving. But it's cool to see something interesting like this in the form of a browser extension.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#43

Post by vezzy-fnord » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:03 PM UTC

coherentpony wrote: post #41

pudquick wrote: post #39

I would be in favor of this idea if a little more thought was put into how the hashing function works. As it stands, someone typing in: food in Chicago will get a different URL than: food in Chicago And the same goes for: Chicago food, chicago food, food near Chicago, etc. Every one, with a single character difference (extra space, different word order, capitalization difference, regional spelling like theatre vs the…

>As it stands, someone typing in: >food in Chicago >will get a different URL than: >food in Chicago Why?

IDN homograph attack.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#44

Post by Patrick_Devine » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:06 PM UTC

The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. Domain names are important because they provide a reasonable amount of trust. If I type http://apple.com, I'm 99.99999% certain that I've connected to Apple's website. This gets nasty with unicode, because a person can spam your email account and get you to click on a URL which looks very similar to something like apple.com, but really points to a malicious site (thank you cyrillic characters).

Hash based domain names would be even worse. You have no idea what site is lurking behind some big string of hex digits. You could argue that a person should just compare the hash to some known set of hashes, but that's a. cumbersome and b. unrealistic. If it's done by humans, it's error prone (a malicious site could spoof the first few chars to point to their site), and if it's done by computers, what's the point? You've now effectively created a really shitty replacement for DNS.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#45

Post by coherentpony » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:07 PM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #43

coherentpony wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As it stands, someone typing in: >food in Chicago >will get a different URL than: >food in Chicago Why?

IDN homograph attack.

Thanks.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#46

Post by mjolk » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:20 PM UTC

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #44

The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. Domain names are important because they provide a reasonable amount of trust. If I type http://apple.com , I'm 99.99999% certain that I've connected to Apple's website. This gets nasty with unicode, because a person can spam your email account and get you to click on a URL which looks very similar to something like apple…

>The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea.

So, you suggest that non english speakers should just "learn it" to use DNS?

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#47

Post by jrochkind1 » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:24 PM UTC

To the extent that TLD's are namespaces of hostnames, it's just adding the equivalent of another TLD, but implementing it as a weird proprietary extension on top of .com.

Why?

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#48

Post by Patrick_Devine » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:31 PM UTC

mjolk wrote: post #46

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #44

The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. Domain names are important because they provide a reasonable amount of trust. If I type http://apple.com , I'm 99.99999% certain that I've connected to Apple's website. This gets nasty with unicode, because a person can spam your email account and get you to click on a URL which looks very similar to something like apple…

>The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. So, you suggest that non english speakers should just "learn it" to use DNS?

Until we can figure out something that doesn't suck, yes. Look, I'm sympathetic with a huge chunk of the world's population having to deal with a (potentially) unfamiliar character set, but what can you do about it? There has to be some standard that everyone can agree to which doesn't compromise the integrity of the net.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#49

Post by gfodor » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:31 PM UTC

just think, if you add a salt that you can change to switch "virtual DNS networks" then everyone can own their own google.com!

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#50

Post by ars_technician » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 10:35 PM UTC

mjolk wrote: post #46

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #44

The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. Domain names are important because they provide a reasonable amount of trust. If I type http://apple.com , I'm 99.99999% certain that I've connected to Apple's website. This gets nasty with unicode, because a person can spam your email account and get you to click on a URL which looks very similar to something like apple…

>The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. So, you suggest that non english speakers should just "learn it" to use DNS?

The alphabet isn't restricted to English. Also, see: punycode.