DOOM Over DNS • Hacker News Board

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#41

Post by noman-land » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

kgeist wrote: post #27

I once had this silly idea to create distributed storage of arbitrary data by exploiting a range of completely unrelated sites. Say, when you want to upload your file to the System, it may store one encrypted chunk as an image on a free image hosting site, another chunk as an encoded blog post on a random forum about farming (or in the user profile?), another chunk as a youtube video, etc. Imagine having something li…

I've had this exact idea. Would need to be error encoded to account for chubks disappearing. There would be a rot rate as sites die or change.

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#42

Post by nimbius » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

blech...too much windows. bring me the Linux version and i might care ;)

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#43

Post by deathanatos » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

drob518 wrote: post #11

ktpsns wrote: post #5

To clarify, a good title would be "Loading Doom entirely from DNS records" Neither one plays Doom over DNS nor is the first paragraph in the README correct, because DNS is only abused for storage, not for computing/processing/executing instructions: > At some point, a reasonable person asked "DNS resolves names to IP addresses, what else can it do?" The answer, apparently, is run DOOM.

Yup. A better title might be “Author discovers data can be stored in DNS TXT records which were created to store data.”

Data can be stored in A records, too, just less efficiently.

(Or AAAA, or CNAME, or…)

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#44

Post by deathanatos » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

mistyvales wrote: post #8

sssilver wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Run” is doing a lot of heavy lifting at this point.

I remember the pregnancy test Doom. Wasn't it "running" on the display only?

Yes, I think it was, but that was also b/c, IIRC, the pregnancy tester had a CPU, too. A CPU can actually run things.

DNS … cannot, and that's why the person upthread is criticizing the use of the word "run" here. DNS ran nothing.

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#45

Post by cwnyth » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

gnabgib wrote: post #40

lthi747 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still waiting someone to port Doom on CSS

Someone delivered that 2 years ago: https://codepen.io/cobra_winfrey/pen/oNOMRav

Oddly, it doesn't work on my browser (Firefox on Gnome).

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#46

Post by ethin » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #39

ethin wrote: post #29

I read this title, did a double-take, then had to go look at the git hub because it still didn't click for me. Because this sounds absolutely amazing, and absurd, and weird, all at the same time. Like..... Wow? Talk about turning protocols into pretzels...

> had to go look at the git hub because it still didn't click for me Obviously it still didn't click for you or you're lying about looking at the GitHub, because if you did, you'd have learned that it's not using DNS to run DOOM, only to store it. Which...shouldn't really be a surprise to anybody who knows that DNS TXT records exist.

And obviously your forgetting that doing this is from my perspective a very novel idea and I didn't consider a TXT record as a data storage system. Good grief.

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#47

Post by Waterluvian » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #4

This novel form of data storage reminds of me of this classic YouTube video, Harder Drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

Harder Drives is such a great watch. It's also the source of a personal epiphany over the idea that you can store data in the space between you and a reflective surface or retransmittor or whatnot.

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#48

Post by jjlane » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC

thank you for doing god’s work my friend.

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#49

Post by jjlane » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

thanks for doing god’s work my friend.

Re: DOOM Over DNS

#50

Post by umvi » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

> Cloudflare will serve them globally, for free, cached at the edge, to anyone who asks. They are not a file storage system. They were not designed to be a file storage system. Nobody at the IETF was thinking about them being used as a file storage system when they wrote RFC 1035. And yet here we are.

Yeah these types of hacker stories kind of bug me. They are sort of in the same vein as "you can eat for free by going to McDonald's and eating a pint of ketchup without ordering anything" or "How I drank and showered for a year using public water fountains" . Or put another way "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Trustless societies kind of suck and forcing society to lower trust by abusing trust kind of makes things incrementally suckier ("trust" here being "it's on the honor system to not abuse DNS to serve static content").