Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
Squatters are scum. They add nothing of value and make a resource artificially scarce for their own profit. If domain names had no value and people could just buy another one, then squatters wouldn't be making money in the first place.
Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
91–100 of 147 posts
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#92I 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…
use this for secret info transfer if you know the right phrase. imagine the phrase being a hash itself.
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concepts that eluded you were so eloquently explained at the bottom: "This is just for fun! A proof of concept."
The concept it proves is that a string can be hashed, not the concept it presents.
put more levels?
You receive a phrase, then get its hash, enter that hash and geta hashed url?
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#94It would be really cool if a tool like this could be used to resolve TOR services' names into hidden service urls. That would make TOR more useful in general, if you could #://wikileaks, for instance.
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#95This is quite an interesting experiment, and a step in the good direction, which should and must lead us to the complete removal of domain names.
Why are domain names bad? That should be obvious.
The main symptom of domain names' inherent brokenness is that the law must patch it so that an unknown squatter cannot kidnap some domain, e.g. register "france.com" and ransom it to the people who are most qualified to claim it. This is ridiculous: the squatter should not have had the opportunity to squat this (I know it doesn't apply for "France" but it applies for many other names). Nowhere in the world we see kids grab the seat in front of the fireplace and not let their grandma have it.
Moreover, what if a single ascii string refers to two different things equally claimable by two groups of people? E.g. what about "francfort.com"? Which city would it refer to? A contrieved case: If Chinese people chose a translitteration scheme for their language so that "google" would mean China, wouldn't they have some rights over google.com?
This level of brokenness is not even because of a leaky abstraction, this is a sunken boat everyone has to use to cross the river.
On a more philosophical stance, domain names are wrong because they build a kind of universal language out of nowhere, grounded on nothing, whitout any kind of democratic digestion and acceptance by human beings. We could have a universal language shared by all humans, but it would be a very long process of slow acceptance, with a percolation through all societies all over the world. In this way, there would be many adjustments, reverts, and eventually we would come up with a set of names that is good enough, but right now domain names are just a musical chairs game that is ridiculous and must be stopped.
So I think using a string's hash is a nice step, because it starts blurring the domain name.
However, I think a much better scheme should be to use the hash of the page content as the domain name. In this case, once the hash is determined, who cares where it is, who care which domain it has? It would just be way to download the content. And the job of search engines would be to point us to these hashes.
And dynamic content you tell? Which dynamic content? Does one really care about changes in wiki pages? And for the twitter feed, each tweek is a fixed content snippet, and the javascript fetching them is also fixed, or could be a browser extension. And an up-to-date search engine would have the latest hash for a keyword such as "twitter" or "The Guradian".
A nice side-effect would be that domain name based censorship would become ineffective. And downloading content could be just some p2p checkouts.
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you mind substantiating your generalisation that investment bankers make money without creating anything useful?
What on earth do you think Investment Bankers do? build playgrounds for the local children? Creating nothing useful is in the definition of "Investment Banker".
Umm, yes actually? Where do you think the playground equipment manufacturer got their initial capital?
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, AOL Keywords.
Google Plus has the same deal now. Search for +Pepsi on Google and it takes you to Pepsi's Google Plus page. I'm certainly glad they stopped treating + as a search operator so we could get that feature in return.
Any more info? I opened a private tab, went to Google.com, searched on +Pepsi and the results look like what I'd find for Pepsi.
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#98This is quite an interesting experiment, and a step in the good direction, which should and must lead us to the complete removal of domain names. Why are domain names bad? That should be obvious. The main symptom of domain names' inherent brokenness is that the law must patch it so that an unknown squatter cannot kidnap some domain, e.g. register "france.com" and ransom it to the people who are most qualified to clai…
How does this solve anything? Instead of registering france.com, I'll register the hash of "France". Adding a level of indirection hasn't provided any benefits.
People can already register domains like "food-in-chicago.com" or "for-sale-baby-clothes.com".
Your contrived example about "Google" meaning "China" in Chinese, is irrelevant. The .CN registrar can enforce whatever rules they want. The US .COM registrar can have its own rules. There's no issue there.
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#99It would be really cool if a tool like this could be used to resolve TOR services' names into hidden service urls. That would make TOR more useful in general, if you could #://wikileaks, for instance.
Hidden service URLs are intrinsic to the security of connecting to them. That's why they're complicated. By adding a second resolution step, you introduce a lot of security issues. How is a user assured that "bla:wikileaks" is the "real" wikileaks, for whatever value of "real" you choose?
Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name
#100To 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?
Some people don't remember RealNames and other keyword systems, and thus must reinvent them to realise it's a bad idea?