4 ms·

each app having its own notification provider cones at the cost of extra cpu cycles, network calls, and interrupts. Worsening battery life. It's likely in the

each app having its own notification provider cones at the cost of extra cpu cycles, network calls, and interrupts. Worsening battery life. It's likely in the users benefit to only have 1 notification provider

EGreg 8y ago
Right. I think they should have one other mechanism “in the cloud” somewhere and no need to have too many, one for each domain. I am starting to realize that DNS is main source of problems on the Internet. We need to replace it with a DHT using something like Kademlia. It was originally designed to have human-readable domains on the Internet. But it’s become a glorified federated search engine, essentially, whereas we can have lots of different search engines, one per app or location. Today, there is very little benefit to having human-readable URLs. If it’s anything much longer than a hostname, you won’t even say it or read it. So it only works for a tiny subset of internet resources but serves to centralize control in the hands of a few large websites. It leads to centralized databases that attract the NSA and advertisers — and all the stuff from Cambridge Analytica to the Equifax breach are downstream results that can be fixed by apps switching from DNS to a DHT.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Even if we ignore the readability of URLs (which I wouldn't), DNS is a nice service discovery protocol with aligned incentives. To find out which server to contact to get hacker news, you ask the DNS server for .com, which has incentive to answer honestly because hacker news pays them to do so, and then the DNS server for ycombinator.com which has incentive to answer honestly because it's operated/payed for by the people running hacker news. Alternativly you can ask the DNS server of your ISP which has incentive to answer honestly because otherwise the ISP risks loosing customers (assuming working capitalism, i.e. competition). In a DHT, anyone with very different incentives can add as many nodes as he likes. If the node id assignment isn't designed very carefully any attacker can even dominate whatever part of the DHT he is interested in and deny or modify information or just log information. Sure, the DNS system isn't immune against state actors, especially the US. But DHT is vulnerable against everyone willing to spend some money on spinning up hosts.
  - EGreg 8y ago
    Why would you care about readability of URLs, when each client can just show the cached metadata? Which is what happens anyway, kind of, in your browser history and anywhere you share the links. Most people won’t read the url. Now, as for the incentives. In fact, DNS does get poisoned and that’s why DNSSEC was invented. The same exact thing can be done on a DHT with private keys and certificates authenticating the author of a document. Except you don’t have the kind of dynamics that lead to centralized databases and breaches. Instead, we can even have content addressing, so the same exact resource can be cached even if it would have been “on a different domain”. And you know that resource hasn’t been changes from under you. Talk about incentives — there is a huge incentive for hackers to access these giant centralized honeypots and change up what’s being returned from a URL, or do phishing based on a slightly similar domain name. Look up the MaidSAFE project and tell me, how exactly is the Kademlia DHT there vulnerable against everyone willing to spin up hosts? You can still use certificates and domains can still sign everything. The domain system is basically a search engine, which also has its own incentives. And finally, Capitalism is the 2nd best system for organizing people and information, the first being open source. The Web, Wikipedia, WebKit, MySQL, PHP and Linux have long ago beaten AOL, Britannica, MSSQL, ASP.NET and Windows NT Server.

EGreg 8y ago

Right. I think they should have one other mechanism “in the cloud” somewhere and no need to have too many, one for each domain. I am starting to realize that DNS is main source of problems on the Internet. We need to replace it with a DHT using something like Kademlia. It was originally designed to have human-readable domains on the Internet. But it’s become a glorified federated search engine, essentially, whereas we can have lots of different search engines, one per app or location. Today, there is very little benefit to having human-readable URLs. If it’s anything much longer than a hostname, you won’t even say it or read it. So it only works for a tiny subset of internet resources but serves to centralize control in the hands of a few large websites. It leads to centralized databases that attract the NSA and advertisers — and all the stuff from Cambridge Analytica to the Equifax breach are downstream results that can be fixed by apps switching from DNS to a DHT.

wongarsu 8y ago
Even if we ignore the readability of URLs (which I wouldn't), DNS is a nice service discovery protocol with aligned incentives. To find out which server to contact to get hacker news, you ask the DNS server for .com, which has incentive to answer honestly because hacker news pays them to do so, and then the DNS server for ycombinator.com which has incentive to answer honestly because it's operated/payed for by the people running hacker news. Alternativly you can ask the DNS server of your ISP which has incentive to answer honestly because otherwise the ISP risks loosing customers (assuming working capitalism, i.e. competition). In a DHT, anyone with very different incentives can add as many nodes as he likes. If the node id assignment isn't designed very carefully any attacker can even dominate whatever part of the DHT he is interested in and deny or modify information or just log information. Sure, the DNS system isn't immune against state actors, especially the US. But DHT is vulnerable against everyone willing to spend some money on spinning up hosts.
- EGreg 8y ago
  Why would you care about readability of URLs, when each client can just show the cached metadata? Which is what happens anyway, kind of, in your browser history and anywhere you share the links. Most people won’t read the url. Now, as for the incentives. In fact, DNS does get poisoned and that’s why DNSSEC was invented. The same exact thing can be done on a DHT with private keys and certificates authenticating the author of a document. Except you don’t have the kind of dynamics that lead to centralized databases and breaches. Instead, we can even have content addressing, so the same exact resource can be cached even if it would have been “on a different domain”. And you know that resource hasn’t been changes from under you. Talk about incentives — there is a huge incentive for hackers to access these giant centralized honeypots and change up what’s being returned from a URL, or do phishing based on a slightly similar domain name. Look up the MaidSAFE project and tell me, how exactly is the Kademlia DHT there vulnerable against everyone willing to spin up hosts? You can still use certificates and domains can still sign everything. The domain system is basically a search engine, which also has its own incentives. And finally, Capitalism is the 2nd best system for organizing people and information, the first being open source. The Web, Wikipedia, WebKit, MySQL, PHP and Linux have long ago beaten AOL, Britannica, MSSQL, ASP.NET and Windows NT Server.