51–60 of 94 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you haven't bought the domain from Google, the only thing that Google can do is not show the domain on google search results. Did I miss anything? I would imagine they might also show warnings in Chrome.
Pretty much all major browsers check against Google's safe browsing list so it's pretty much a death sentence to be on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you haven't bought the domain from Google, the only thing that Google can do is not show the domain on google search results. Did I miss anything? I would imagine they might also show warnings in Chrome.
Pretty much all major browsers check against Google's safe browsing list so it's pretty much a death sentence to be on it.
You can switch it off, but you probably shouldn't, even if you're sure you would spot a phishing scam, actually maybe even especially if you're sure you would spot the scam.
The service is capable of being quite nuanced since it works on (hashes of) HTTP path segments, so e.g. it can say OK this site https://some.example/ seems fine except the /cgi-bin/crapscript.php/fake-bank/ pages are clearly a fake bank, and so if your browser tries to visit those pages it gets flagged. But equally it can say OK, everything in bogus.example is bogus, fakebank.bogus.example, harrods.bogus.example, www.news.bogus.examples, it's all bogus, warn for all of it.
You can't get the actual list, because if you could of course that mostly helps bad guys. Your browser does a bunch of hash lookups, and it has a fancy tree structure, so it can rule out e.g. OK everything starting FE43 is fine, everything in FD9 is fine etc. If that tree can't rule out a hash it calls Google, who have much finer grained hash data that wouldn't fit in your browser. Also periodically the browser fetches delta updates to the tree from Google.
But I wish a service existed that made domain names easy enough to use that the average person could manage them. IMO you shouldn't have to learn DNS and TLS in order to securely use a domain name. If I want to sign up to have Fastmail host my email, why do I have to manually copy and paste a bunch of DNS records? Fastmail already knows exactly what records need to be set. I should be able to OAuth redirect over to my domain registrar and approve giving Fastmail control over a subdomain of my choosing, and Fastmail should be able to use a simple open protocol to update the records.
This is awesome. But I wish a service existed that made domain names easy enough to use that the average person could manage them. IMO you shouldn't have to learn DNS and TLS in order to securely use a domain name. If I want to sign up to have Fastmail host my email, why do I have to manually copy and paste a bunch of DNS records? Fastmail already knows exactly what records need to be set. I should be able to OAuth r…
It's obviously not as hassle-free than something like your oauth example, but it's using the infrastructure that is already there.
There's another AWS outage, & presently the top comment is talking about us as barbarians that have stumbled into fancy hot baths & are amazed but have no idea how to keep them running. And a wonderful follow-up reply[1] talking about living in an apartment in a storm versus living in a cave during a storm. It presents another severe image of how much drift there has been in the world, how much more built up, but how…
Humans individually are pretty useless. Abandon a random human in a jungle and they will likely perish soon no matter how smart and well educated they are. The strength of humanity is teamwork, working together to build things other groups can build things upon. Abandon 100 random humans in the same jungle and they will build a town.
Teamwork is still the work of many individuals, and I think a person's upbringing & disposition & the capabilities they've developed are hugely influential on what kinds of teams are possible in the world. The world of computing today gives users interesting capabilities, but only shallowly, only on the surface; it denies us the view below, denies us the freedom to see, understand & explore, and humanity always being so yolked restrains human growth, restricts what I see as one of our key better nature from getting a chance to come out & thrive.
Sure, we are not going to all learn how to build apartment buildings; we will take much for granted. But many people do learn some home repair, or try their hand at fixing appliances. Sometimes just to save some money, but sometimes because it's interesting, & because there's videos showing them how to, because they can. But computer/information tech, in my view, has created a highly resistant unrepairable unviewable digitalia that is anathematic to this basic human engagement with the world about us. It is not just a built environment, but a built environment which resists real understanding, which prevents human empowerment.
Creating an accessible world, one where human's have a strong locus of control, where they have flexibility & options to experiment, to play, to try, to explore is absolutely capital to me. Humanity loses who humanity was when/if we view the world as prebuilt, as a creation of some wider us, that we are but tiny figures upon. Yes there are many things that we have to rely on groups for, but that ability to learn about the world, to understand it, to investigate & understand & experiment in the pieces of it we so choose- that spirit is the lifeblood of this planet, and it's that attitude & disposition that produces highly functional teams & groups. Which is something we will, best I can tell, always need.
To speak to technology & it's revelatory potential, to put it in scope here, I think it's important to review Ursala Franklin's dichotomy of technology. She divides tech into work & control related, work that helps individuals do things, control that regulates systems. Going further, she divides tech into holistic & prescriptive techologies- prescriptive technologies which break down work into fixed, predictable, deliberate steps & processes, and holistic technologies, which amplify the capabilities & prowess of the tool-bearer. There's a lot of tech on this planet, but even "creative" tech like a photo-sharing sight is mechanistic in nature, follows limited & fixed flows, & affords only superficial control to it's users. Where-as tech like Mess with DNS amplifiers human understanding, gives us the power to explore & test out what is possible, lets us set our own rules. This world is in need of techno-spiritual healing- computers are widely used but rebuff understanding, they have become overwhelming elements of control rather than empowerment. I look forward eagerly to a shift, to revelatory technology that abides different ends, that seeks a holism. Mess with DNS is "just" a little playground for some tech, hardly an attractive application on it's own, but I believe that individuals everywhere would be much better off- that teams would be much richer as a result- if tech worked to open up the engine-bay & allow some monkeying around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much all major browsers check against Google's safe browsing list so it's pretty much a death sentence to be on it.
Indeed. Google basically gives this service away to browsers. It costs money if you want to build a commercial service using it, but if you give away browsers, no problem. You can switch it off, but you probably shouldn't, even if you're sure you would spot a phishing scam, actually maybe even especially if you're sure you would spot the scam. The service is capable of being quite nuanced since it works on (hashes of…
This tool is so neat! One thing I've learned from it is my ISP (sonic.net) seems to be doing queries to _.example.com. For instance: $ dig @50.0.1.1 nelson.lily6.messwithdns.com a Results in two queries being answered by the messwithdns server. One for nelson.lily6.messwithdns.com as expected, but also one for _.lily6.messwithdns.com. Any guesses what that naked underscore query is for? Not every nameserver does it (…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans individually are pretty useless. Abandon a random human in a jungle and they will likely perish soon no matter how smart and well educated they are. The strength of humanity is teamwork, working together to build things other groups can build things upon. Abandon 100 random humans in the same jungle and they will build a town.
> The strength of humanity is teamwork, working together to build things other groups can build things upon. This is why I don't trust anybody who tries to tell me that human population growth is an actual problem and not just our rulers' fear of irrelevance.
* the ability of collaborating groups of humans to achieve/produce scales super-linearly with the number of humans[1]
* the growth of human population is causing problems, and is likely to cause more problems in the future
One reason is the scarcity of resources[2]; another is that "humanity" as a whole is not collaborating with all of itself.
[1] actually, I don't even think this is true, beyond some limit - but it's true for small groups
[2] which could be mitigated somewhat by fairer allocation of resources, or by process changes to focus more on fundamental needs; but, still the fact remains that the resources that we have access to on Planet Earth are limited, and access to extraterrestrial resources are extremely expensive
This tool is so neat! One thing I've learned from it is my ISP (sonic.net) seems to be doing queries to _.example.com. For instance: $ dig @50.0.1.1 nelson.lily6.messwithdns.com a Results in two queries being answered by the messwithdns server. One for nelson.lily6.messwithdns.com as expected, but also one for _.lily6.messwithdns.com. Any guesses what that naked underscore query is for? Not every nameserver does it (…
This tool is so neat! One thing I've learned from it is my ISP (sonic.net) seems to be doing queries to _.example.com. For instance: $ dig @50.0.1.1 nelson.lily6.messwithdns.com a Results in two queries being answered by the messwithdns server. One for nelson.lily6.messwithdns.com as expected, but also one for _.lily6.messwithdns.com. Any guesses what that naked underscore query is for? Not every nameserver does it (…
I wrote the draft algorithm that appears in appendix A of the first experimental RFC describing qname minimization https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7816#appendix-A
I wrote it because I wanted more specific advice about how qname minimization should work, and I deliberately aimed it at an ideal world, ignoring obvious interoperability problems. I hoped that this would provoke discussion and get people working towards a more realistic algorithm. But that did not happen until years later.
So the early implementations of qname minimization had to invent their own ways of working around the inevitable interop problems, and some of those solutions were quite creative.
I think the bare _ version is trying to avoid querying delegation points directly, so that it still gets a referral as it would have done using the full qname. And the _ also avoids problems with negative responses, which are often implemented very badly - it is common to make a mess of the distinction between NXDOMAIN and NODATA.