3 ms·

Who decides I can or cannot get foobar.tld?

by pbalau 8y ago

Tecuane 8y ago
That would probably be ICANN[1], and most authoritative name servers follow the policies set out there as the guiding committee is part of ICANN[2]. There are alternative DNS roots, though. I participated in running one myself for a time. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server#Root_server_supervision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server#Root_server_s...
- pbalau 8y ago
  Thanks, I was thinking about ICANN, but i'm a bit tipsy and didn't want to discredit my point by misspelling an organization. Yet, this still proves my point, the internet, as we are experiencing it today, is based on different orgs simply playing nice by some rules established by a central authority. What if they stop doing that? What if the central auth is going to have something against you?
amiga-workbench 8y ago
You are perfectly free to run your own nameserver, nobody has to use it though.
- troquerre 8y ago
  This means that in practice, DNS is not decentralized.
- pbalau 8y ago
  Yes I can run my own top level dns. Yes, people can chose to use my dns or they can chose to use the google one. The question is why would they do either, why would they pick mine over the google one, or the google one, over mine. You can argue that the google dns can sign the answer with a cert you trust, thus you know you got the right answer. And then, when you get the address of the service you want to talk to, you can check their cert and know for sure you are again talking to the thing you want to talk to. And here lies the problem, how are you going to check those certs? Are you going to queue at a google office and obtain a cert on a usb stick, then import that in you environment, then do the same for all other services you want to talk to? Or are you going to trust a central authority? What if this central authority is messing with you? What if someone up the chain is messing with your central? Let's not talk about how your router might send your dns request to some guy's home server that answers to 8.8.8.8, instead of google and you can't do shit about it... Everything we know about internet works the way it works, because everybody involved agrees to do the right thing, from ip routing, to dns resolving, to certs verifying. All of this is based on a set of rules set by a central authority, that everybody choses to follow. You can't speak about web decentralization as long as proving who you are is a very centralized system.

Who decides I can or cannot get foobar.tld?

by pbalau 8y ago

Who decides I can or cannot get foobar.tld?

That would probably be ICANN[1], and most authoritative name servers follow the policies set out there as the guiding committee is part of ICANN[2]. There are alternative DNS roots, though. I participated in running one myself for a time. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server#Root_server_supervision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server#Root_server_s...

pbalau 8y ago
Thanks, I was thinking about ICANN, but i'm a bit tipsy and didn't want to discredit my point by misspelling an organization. Yet, this still proves my point, the internet, as we are experiencing it today, is based on different orgs simply playing nice by some rules established by a central authority. What if they stop doing that? What if the central auth is going to have something against you?

amiga-workbench 8y ago

You are perfectly free to run your own nameserver, nobody has to use it though.

troquerre 8y ago
This means that in practice, DNS is not decentralized.
pbalau 8y ago
Yes I can run my own top level dns. Yes, people can chose to use my dns or they can chose to use the google one. The question is why would they do either, why would they pick mine over the google one, or the google one, over mine. You can argue that the google dns can sign the answer with a cert you trust, thus you know you got the right answer. And then, when you get the address of the service you want to talk to, you can check their cert and know for sure you are again talking to the thing you want to talk to. And here lies the problem, how are you going to check those certs? Are you going to queue at a google office and obtain a cert on a usb stick, then import that in you environment, then do the same for all other services you want to talk to? Or are you going to trust a central authority? What if this central authority is messing with you? What if someone up the chain is messing with your central? Let's not talk about how your router might send your dns request to some guy's home server that answers to 8.8.8.8, instead of google and you can't do shit about it... Everything we know about internet works the way it works, because everybody involved agrees to do the right thing, from ip routing, to dns resolving, to certs verifying. All of this is based on a set of rules set by a central authority, that everybody choses to follow. You can't speak about web decentralization as long as proving who you are is a very centralized system.