51–60 of 147 posts
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this: hash collisions. Could problems arise from two keywords that hit the same domain? Really cool idea, though.
One of my favorite analogies for SHA collisions: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4014407/690258
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
I might be missing something, but I completely don't get this idea, especially with the examples provided by the author. I have two major concerns: > Bind searches to domain names, eg "food in chicago" => f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com This IMO is bad, and goes in completely wrong direction. We've invented search engines to have such phrases not bound to a particular domain. Who would handle the "#://fo…
"Scums of the Internet"? Oh please.
Where are you getting this all from exactly? You've just decided that since you weren't able to buy a domain [1] that you wanted at a price that you could afford to pay that all domains "are mostly taken by various squatters and other scum of the Internet".
I mean "scum"? How unfair that something that you want isn't available at a price YOU can pay. And if that price was affordable that someone else wouldn't have beaten you to buying it (which is already what happened, right?). I mean it would just be sitting there because nobody else ever thought of using or buying, say "hackernews.com" until PG decided to start Hacker news.
Or perhaps you think that domains are a "public trust" and that there should be some official board designated that decides who is worthy of a particular domain and whether they are "using" that particular domain "the right way". You know to make things fair.
Is that it? Further you are talking about .com because in general and with maybe a few exceptions, you can find many names in other TLD's (you just don't want them) or make a slight modification and have the domain you want in .com.
By the way are you aware that google owns duck.com and refuses to sell it [2] at any price at all? (And has turned down $500,000 for it iim.) Of course they aren't "using it" [3] and only have it because they bought the company that previously owned it
At least if it was owned by a person such as you refer to it would be available for sale at some price.
[1] Or perhaps that wasn't even the case maybe you have just read about other people or know someone that this was the "aggrieved" party?
[2] I was involved in trying to do this. And I communicated and had back and forth with high level people at google who in the end simply said "sorry not interested at any price". And this isn't the first time this has happened with a company either.
[3] It redirects to google.com as if they need that traffic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
It is important to be first, because those who are first define the market. The market was defined in English, and what Patrick is saying, unfortunately for non-native English character set readers, is true.
They would need to invent their own separate internet, as your rebuttal suggests.
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…
Is it impossible to overcome the flaws you pointed out? Is there a way to abstract away the risk from the end user? Are there other applications for this where trust is not an issue? At risk of sounding like an idiot, could some sort of distributed proof-of-work/proof-of-stake protocol alleviate some of the trust problem?
This reminds me about how many people don't use domain names at all anymore. Many people probably type the name of their bank into the search bar and visit the first result. I've seen people literally pull up google to search for yahoo mail or ebay. Domain names are still useful, for a start they provide some level of authentication when mixed with cryptography. (If you visit https://news.ycombinator.com , you can be…
--2014-01-01 16:45:59-- https://news.ycombinator.com/
Resolving news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)... 198.41.191.47, 198.41.190.47
Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|198.41.191.47|:443... connected.
ERROR: The certificate of `news.ycombinator.com' is not trusted.
ERROR: The certificate of `news.ycombinator.com' hasn't got a known issuer.Reminds me of "RealNames". Dot-com era company. $130 million in funding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet that would translate keywords typed into the address bar of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to Uniform Resource Identifiers, based on the existing Domain Name…
Perhaps enabling spaces in domain names is possible? Since spaces in filenames are allowed I don't see why spaces in names shouldn't be allowed. And then you could have a default root domain for natural language names - .nlp, for instance, and then just assume that name when someone types in a natural language URI with no tld.
We could use something like NameCoin for this TLD to avoid collisions.
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. Effect…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This might at first sound like a xenophobic, anglocentric position, but it actually makes quite a bit of sense. There are a number of instances in which it is advantageous / critical to adopt a lingua franca -- that is, a single language that everyone in the world agrees to use for a particular purpose. In the case of domain names, Patrick is right: If we allow characters that appear to be one thing but are actually…
It seems that generally a subset of sufficiently distinct characters should mostly suffice. I don't think e.g. Latin, Hebrew and Chinese have much visual overlap.