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Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

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

#61

Post by jessedhillon »

jawns wrote: post #52
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #48

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…

Couldn't this also be mitigated by making all domains mandatorily delegated from a national ccTLD? Eliminate/redirect apple.com to apple.com.us, then make sure it conforms to the rules for US domains (Latin character set only, etc) whereas apple.com.ru comes under the rules of the Russian registrar?

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

#62

Post by lovemenot »

GSimon wrote: post #35
rjknight wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are entirely wrong. It is a good idea that will never work.

Wrong again! It's an interesting concept but only an ok idea that has no real world application given its limitations.

It need demonstrate only one useful real world application for you to be wrong. It does not need to become universal. As others have said, a web site that validates the consistency of its own content seems to have potential. I would also consider the Internet of Things; a Thing having its own IPv6 address and its own domain name. QR Codes can help take care of the intractability of long hashes.

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

#63

Post by lessnonymous »

I don't get the benefit .. the only 'pro' I can think of (spaces in domain names) would be better answered by allowing a space-to-double-hyphen transcoding so

hxxp://food in chicago.com/ encodes to hxxp://food--in--chicago.com

Pros: * Domains can now have spaces

Cons: * Domains are now case sensitive * You visit a domain and it isn't reversible * The google-juice assigned to domain names is gone

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

#64

Post by b3n »

mtrimpe wrote: post #60
jawns wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is some middle ground between opening up all of UniCode and just Latin characters. 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.

This is already a solved problem in every major browser. They will show mixed script domains as punycode instead of their unicode equivalent[1][2]. ICANN does not even allow all unicode characters[3]. There's so much FUD going around.

[1] http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/idn-in-g...

[2] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secur...

[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5892

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

#65

Post by memracom »

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?

I hate to break it to you but Unicode domain names are here and have been for a while. For instance this English language page has a couple of graphs about registrations in the .РФ domain. http://кто.рф

Note that you can't just type it in because kto.p? is not the right letters and that last one is obviously not on your keyboard. But cut and paste should work fine.

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

#67

Post by Patrick_Devine »

b3n wrote: post #64
mtrimpe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some middle ground between opening up all of UniCode and just Latin characters. 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.

This is already a solved problem in every major browser. They will show mixed script domains as punycode instead of their unicode equivalent[1][2]. ICANN does not even allow all unicode characters[3]. There's so much FUD going around. [1] http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/idn-in-g... [2] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secur... [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5892

Great links. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's a "solved problem" when there are four different behaviours from four separate browsers, but I'm glad each browser is taking homograph attacks seriously. In the first link, I compared Chrome and Firefox and they do work differently.

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

#68

Post by dionyziz »

EvanHahn wrote: post #24

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.

If you find a hash collision, let us know. As security people, we'd be very, very concerned if you can find even one collision or even engineer a collision in SHA1 or especially SHA256.

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

#69

Post by null_ptr »

larrys wrote: post #53
TeMPOraL wrote: post #31

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…

"and the primary source of frustration is that they are mostly taken by various squatters and other scums of the Internet" "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 m…

Domain squatters are no better than investment bankers. They really do the same thing, they make money without creating anything useful.

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

#70

Post by squeakynick »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #31

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…

Some light-hearted stats on domain names

(characters used, length, common sub-strings ...)

http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march22012/index.html

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