8 ms·

Decentralizing the Internet's Root

99 points by carride 5y ago

mettamage 5y ago
So, silly question perhaps. I genuinely don’t know. Is blockchain handy for this decentralizing part of DNS or DNS entirely? Suppose a blockchain network, or networks, knows all the TLD server IPs (I don't have DNS sharp in my mind, sorry for that). You can transfer ownership of a domain to someone else. I think conceptually it’s an NFT right? Not that it is art, but domains aren’t fungible I think. So it is non-fungible. So you could wrap each non-fungible domain in a token on a network, making it an NFT. I wonder what the actual issues will be. Striving for a decentralized DNS with whatever technique one would use seems to be a good thing IMO. The internet is for us all. Edit: Ohhh this article is actually using a blockchain solution called namebase. When I was skimming, I saw IPFS so I thought somehow IPFS was used instead. That was more subtly interwoven in the story than I thought.
- miohtama 5y ago
  The most popular decentralised domain name system is ENS. While domains are not called NFTs (ENS predates the term) it functions more or less how you described. https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/
- alfl 5y ago
  Not a silly question, I think you've described Namecoin.
- jonahbenton 5y ago
  Conceptually, there is an important distinction between "mechanism" and "policy." There are many, many mechanisms for handling legal/technical control/ownership/system of record/etc. This is a problem with solutions that date to the beginning of civilization. Whether mechanism is pieces of paper in a vault or replicated records in different jurisdictions or hashes on blockchain matters only on the margins. Policy is the hard part. What happens when mechanism fails or when the parties relying on the mechanism have disagreements about the implications. When there is disagreement about which blockchain is authoritative. (Sometimes blockchain people call this "governance" and wish to solve it also with mechanism.) Anyway, there are good reasons for human organizations to act in a policy/governance capacity. One may think of any particular organization as flawed, which is no doubt true. But in any context where people depend on the mechanism working "correctly" people are the only participants who can provide that assurance.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Of course it's not lol, like anything Blockchain it adds no value and makes everything it touches worse. If Apple loses their domain NFT should they what, just re-brand the business? There's a reason we have a chain of trust and authority leading all the way up to the supreme court and not just "yolo, SFYL." [edit] Like all the distributed identity plays, "not your keys, not your life" is such an asinine model to try and foist on people.
  - mettamage 5y ago
    Well, I agree that we put our trust in technology an awful lot when we do this. But don't we put this trust into technology already? One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to a more decentralized internet.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      > But don't we put this trust into technology already? No, that's why we have courts as the ultimate arbiters. > One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to a more decentralized internet. Anything short of "not your keys not your life" is a centralization risk and quickly, at the limit, approaches exactly what we have right now but less efficient.
      - dumbfoundded 5y ago
        The courts present a large problem though. Most digital crimes happen across borders. Courts are pretty much useless for ransomware, identity theft, and everything else online when the criminals are in an inconvenient jurisdiction. Blockchain if anything shows the failure of our judicial system. Most of the cybercrimes are enabled by cryptocurrency and our justice system is hopeless to stop these payments.
        5y ago
- evbots 5y ago
  coinbase is to namebase as bitcoin is to handshake
wrs 5y ago
“The internet was the evolution of telnet, which allowed users to connect to bulletin board systems via phone lines. However, connecting to those systems required that the user know the connection address and port.” What? This is so confused that it’s “not even wrong”. Did GPT-3 write this? :) As for the part that is just wrong, there’s never been an internet where you had to know the connection address (there were periodically updated host files) and you never needed to specify the port for telnet (it’s a “well known port”).
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  i think they meant to write 'phone number' not sure about the port, most of my modem-to-modem communication was very low-level (and did not last long :) )
  - wrs 5y ago
    Telnet is a protocol on the Internet, not a predecessor of the Internet. To connect to a BBS using phone lines, you just dialed its phone number; this has no relation to the Internet. Even if we generously consider a phone number to be a “connection address”, there’s no “port” involved and DNS has nothing to do with phone numbers.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - anonymousisme 5y ago
      You're mostly right. I believe DNS has support for VoIP "phone numbers." https://www.onsip.com/voip-resources/voip-fundamentals/dns-srv-records-sip https://www.onsip.com/voip-resources/voip-fundamentals/dns-s...
- soco 5y ago
  Am I that old that I actually know what you mean and find it funny?
- Thoreandan 5y ago
tptacek 5y ago
I am mystified by Handshake. It's not just a "protocol", as I understand it, but also a coin. In other words, this project has essentially claimed the Internet root as its own, and then securitized it, selling in effect shares. But they don't own the Internet root; it isn't theirs to securitize. I always ask: if they can do this with DNS, can I do it with ARP?
- sneak 5y ago
  That's the thing about claiming the root: anyone can try. There is no title to the root, of course, as you well know. You can certainly try to do it with anything you like, Sealand included. The real work is getting others to agree or care. Handshake has some preliminary support, and more, it seems, than any other project in recent memory. Alternic once tried, as did Namecoin. IIRC there was also an alternative PKI root that some hackers tried to get going, but no browser ever incorporated into the trust store.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Alternic and Namecoin foundered on the same issue. To me, this Handshake stuff seems like the Springfield Monorail. It makes sense as long as you don't think about it, but as soon as you do, you wonder why on Earth anyone would agree to new root that gives value to a bunch of pre-mined coins. Anyone can try! I'm not saying Handshake is, like, illegal. But it still seems like... a scam? I'm not sure what the word is.
    - ajvs 5y ago
      They've reserved the top 100k Alexa domains on HNS for the original DNS owners. They're actively thwarting ICANN's overreach and centralisation of control by redecentralising the internet again. But sure, everytime HN sees a legitimate use case for a blockchain it's a "scam".
      - tptacek 5y ago
        Is it a coin-like? Can you speculate on the coin-like? Did they pre-mine the coin-like and gift it to themselves and people they wanted favor with? If so, do I care that they've "reserved the top 100k Alex domains on HNS for the original DNS owners"? How nice of them.
arcade79 5y ago
Skipping past the telnet bollox pointed out by others, the next paragraph is the following gem: "Browsers started using a centralized resolution system called the domain name system (DNS) to make things more user-friendly when the internet became more widespread. Instead of typing 208.65.153.238 into the address bar, a user could simply type "youtube.com," and DNS would do all the work for them" Given that web browsers appeared in 1989, and DNS appeared between 1983 and 1987, we can safely say that DNS came before browsers. Before that, folks kept a 'hosts' file updated. Truly remarkable how much that page gets wrong. And to think it's just a blockchain variant of alt roots. :P You can read more about alt roots here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root The Internet Architecture Board spoke out strongly against alter roots in May 2000, in RFC 2826: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2826 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2826 It's weird how folks forget history.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  Not that I think this project will go anywhere its antecedents haven't already, but... > Given that web browsers appeared in 1989, and DNS appeared between 1983 and 1987, we can safely say that DNS came before browsers. I mean the telnet thing is really wrong but this really just seems like picking on nothing to me. I don't think the intent there was literally to say "dns came along and changed how we used browsers" but to contextualize the use of names vs. ips in terms people in a modern computing context will understand more easily. (That people had other means of managing host names before dns is a better criticism, but still kind of misses the point of what they're saying)
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Nah. It's an attempt to cast the discussion about name policy as a simple technical concern --- before we landed on this weird DNS thing, it suggests, everyone was just typing IP addresses into address bars. But of course, there's much more to it than that: the names themselves are of immense value, and there is a massive commercial and public policy debate over how they should be administered. And when you think about how central those names are to how the Internet works, you're immediately left wondering how the hell some random coin should be in the mix. I don't think it's ignorance motivating that text.
schlauerfox 5y ago
This already effectively exists. and has since early bitcoin days. https://www.namecoin.org/ https://www.namecoin.org/
beckman466 5y ago
what we need is a fully distributed (and thus democratic) content-addressable name server resolution system. that way users can decide for themselves who is @bob or me@me.com (as their hashes differ). the current industry around vanity domains and social media handles is toxic. people are being killed for them [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825 an example of a working example is the p2p Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) social network: it can work completely without name servers (you can even sync over bluetooth)
- evv 5y ago
  How does content-addressing help implement a better name server? If the system is fully distributed you're gonna have a lot more than one person deciding that they are @bob
  - beckman466 5y ago
    so you'd all have to be playing by the same id-generation algorithm/rules/'game', which will mean that no two id's can be generated (at the same time). if you don't use the same id-generation algorithm as your friends (yet you claim you did) people would be able to see that by validating your chain [1]. in other words: my main critique is that this name server system is not as distributed as it could be, for example if it was built using the holochain framework. in a holochain system if two communities get disconnected due to a natural disaster, they would still be able to continue in two (temporarily) partitioned communities. with blockchain this wouldn't be possible. [1] https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/7_validation/ https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/7_validation/
- duskwuff 5y ago
  You meet Bob at a bar. You hit it off with him, and you mutually decide to stay in touch. How do you do that when neither of you has a name you can refer to the other as yet?
- southerntofu 5y ago
  What's your take on GNU Name System? Globally-unique public keys with human-friendly nicks (hyper hyper local root) sounds like a good mix. See also, ICANN presentatin about emerging identifiers, introducing Handshake and GNS projects: https://icann.zoom.us/rec/play/QA_d2NDBBhbecI0Yg4WcEorM0DlVtGRbN9IkAp1TfgBb_fzMX1s4LHRsOl88FrPWDKnRxi3GOFPJU-Ye.xrkeC4AwxgwVLS8x https://icann.zoom.us/rec/play/QA_d2NDBBhbecI0Yg4WcEorM0DlVt...
wyager 5y ago
How is this different from namecoin? Namecoin was one of the first Bitcoin spinoffs, and it’s arguably the only other coherent known use case for “the blockchain” besides money.
- ajvs 5y ago
  It's decentralising the root zone, not just a single TLD.
  - wyager 5y ago
    That is not a meaningful technical difference.
  - rnhmjoj 5y ago
    Nothing stops you from creating others TLD besides .bit. We just have to formally agree to use, say `/something/`, for storing name records for .something.
Animats 5y ago
This is yet another NFT thing. The NFT fad seems to be reaching peak Ponzi. Axie seems to be the worst. This has become a huge fad in the Philippines. It's sort of like Pokemon, except that it costs about $1000 to get into the game. For a few months, poor people were buying into this and making enough money to quit their job. Then the supply of suckers ran out. The token is down 85% from peak. There are now metaverse NFTs with "presales". The promoters don't bother creating a virtual world; they just sell "land" in one that doesn't exist yet, with vague promises of a future implementation. That's almost certainly an illegal public offering of an security under US law. (Look up "Howey test"). Even Decentraland, the NFT-based virtual world, only has 275 people logged in right now.[1] (Compared to about 40,000 for Second Life, over a million for Roblox...) People who bought "land" in Decentraland for a "virtual store" are not getting much traffic. The SEC shut down most of the ICO scammers. NFTs were invented as an end run around securities law. Since each one is different, they're not a commodity, so the CFTC lacks jurisdiction. If they represent a real world thing, they're a collectable, not a security. But most of the newer NFTs represent nothing. Getting away from uppity domain registrars would help. Originally, you owned a domain. Now, registrars take the position that you just rent it from them. But NFTs are not the answer. Too many scams and scammers. [1] https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/ https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/
- jekkos 5y ago
  I smell a false analogy fallacy. Axie NFTs are fad so just avoid all NFTs at all cost? I think that the concept of an NFT is quite a useful one, and you should maybe not consider the value of it as a first thing. Domain names were also speculated upon in the early days. Remember people buying up 3 or 4 letter dommain just to sell them for more money? It's just a change in the trustmodel behind DNS that is really needed here. Instead of trusting a chain of certificate authorities you can trust a blockchain's consensus mechanism instead.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > I think that the concept of an NFT is quite a useful one How so? Can you name a few useful applications? From my understanding NFTs are only as useful as "property titles", which means they have exactly one and only one application: speculation, which in my book is an absolute anti-feature. > Instead of trusting a chain of certificate authorities you can trust a blockchain's consensus mechanism instead. I think you meant registries, not CAs? How is "blockchain consensus" better, given all the blockchain failures we've witnessed so far with BTC/ETH and all the related hacks, monopolistic overreach from state-sponsored hardware vendors, and lack of consensus on the software leading to hard forks? Don't you think hard-wiring monetary incentives to something as basic as a naming scheme can only lead to bad outcomes (as ICANN gTLD programme has demonstrated)? What's your take on the GNU Name System? Concerns about it being a GNU project aside ("it'll be ready when GNU/Hurd is ready"), what do you make of the features and threat model? Personal opinion: on paper, i find it's the least-worst naming system i've ever read about.
tristor 5y ago
I am sure this is not the objective here, but this article was so badly written and inaccurate that it made me lose respect for the IPFS project. There are a lot of technical assertions that aren't just wrong, they're absurdly false, within this article.
- animanoir 5y ago
  Which parts exactly?
  - tristor 5y ago
    Almost every word in this section for starters: https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/#an-internet-of-numbers https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/#an-... Did you read the article?
  - tribler 5y ago
    > Imagine if all Twitter users had 'verified' status and you could also find them across their other social apps without any risk of following fake or wrong accounts by mistake. Without any risks? Ideas from self-sovereign identity are somewhat included in this promo. Does this service include hiring notaries to check state-issued IDs to verify identities? Risk-free IDs are unsolved I believe.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > Does this service include hiring notaries to check state-issued IDs to verify identities? How would that be without risks? Corruption concerns aside, Nation-States are likely among the biggest identity fakers for their intelligence services. I think "without risk" meant that discovery of alternative accounts/URLs is signed with a public key you already know of, so impersonation risks are reduced. I don't care to know "who" this is, as long as i know it's the same person.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I was just about to submit an equivalent comment, so I'll piggyback on yours. I feel just like you, plus, I also hate to see them promoting another crypto scam attempt at taking over a piece of global infrastructure to make a quick buck. I like IPFS as protocol. I didn't mind their work on Filecoin, as it made sense in context. But every time I check, they seem to be getting more and more in bed with dubious cryptocurrency initiatives. At this point I'm no longer willing to advocate for IPFS itself.
alangibson 5y ago
HNS looks a lot like a protocol designed to make Namebase some quick cash. So it's all on the blockchain, but to get a name you have to buy it auction with tokens minted by Namebase. They've managed to make the costs of a domain uncapped, except the domain is also useless because no one but Brave respects their root. In case you have any doubts that this an NFTified pyramid scheme, check out this gem from their "Earn HNS" page: > For any HNS your friend buys, you get +20% HNS and they get +10%
- lifty 5y ago
  The tokens were not minted by Namebase. HNS can be mined and there was a wide initial distribution, many of them including to large OSS project s.
  - alangibson 5y ago
    Their giveaway didn't go to well. They planned to give away "70% of the initial supply" to developers, but... > To date, around 25 million HNS (1.83% of the initial supply, 1.23% of the fully diluted) has been claimed through the developer airdrop. They can't even give HNS away, however... > The discrepancy between the total possible number of airdrop claims and the actual number of airdrop claims can be explained by the fact that eligible developers need to have their SSH keys from 2019 in order to complete the claim. ... Without their old SSH keys, it's impossible for eligible developers to claim the airdrop. they made the extremely hard to claim?
    - lifty 5y ago
      You’re mistaken. Namebase is an independent registar for HNS domains and it’s not the same as the Handshake project, which did the actual distribution of the coins. I’m surprised people haven’t heard about this project, they have been linked on HN many times before. Edit: typo
      - alangibson 5y ago
        Seems to be a common point of confusion. So much so that it's on their FAQ: https://www.namebase.io/faq/#did-namebase-make-handshake https://www.namebase.io/faq/#did-namebase-make-handshake I'm sure I and many others have heard of it before. It's just that there are so many of these 'X but Blockchain' ideas that come and go all the time that is just turns into a blur.
dackdel 5y ago
explained-from-first-principles.com/
p2p_astroturf 5y ago
Let me think out loud for a second. Naming is solved by petname systems - just using a local address book that decides what name (if any) will be shown for what public key - it costs nothing, it doesnt need a blockchain. Unlike all other solutions, it actually _is_ secure. The only reason you'd ever arrive at something that is not petnames, after learning of the existence of cryptography, is because you are overengineering and falling for boogeyman SSL CAs want you to believe in. Commerce is not good or healthy in P2P networks, it is a last resort. Any time you hear about an economic model, incentivizations, etc, you can be 99.99% sure the company has designed it this way with money as their first interest, before utility. And not only that, but money will be practically their only interest. Thousands of P2P products and secure messaging have been astroturfed by people (corporations, and startups, which have no practical difference) "solving" Snowden's problem since the NSA revelations. Nobody actually uses blockchains. They go on whateverscan.io and lookup their transaction there to confirm they were paid. If you visit a bank and sign up, they should be giving you a public key, not a domain name. Not a name in namecoin or whatever this article is talking about that you need to download a blockchain for and have a computer fast enough to keep up with on 24/7. Also, you give them your public key. You shouldn't be giving them a TWITTER (seriously wtf, this is like using Steam for chatting with your girlfriend), no not your facebook either, not even your Google. I should give them a fresh public key I can use to authenticate myself. Any blockchain aside from a small few (like Bitcoin, early Bitcoin at least) are essentially a series of logos and nothing more. They have not contributed one thing to actual decentralization. A good giveaway would be that not a single one has a proper CLI aside from Bitcoin. Not even Ethereum does. They all want you to use a bloated, intrinsically insecure web browser for everything, which cannot even work on more than two pages without billions of man hours. Naming is NOT solved by blockchains - it is not known whether blockchains will ever be trustless. Aside from the trend towards centralization from pools, at some point the data moves too fast for an individual to run a validating node. IPFS seem to friends with Cloudflare. I don't what their relationship is (the former do truly seem to care about making something good, but are just naive on top of ignoring existing solutions), but I would not trust anything remotely related to Cloudflare ever. They have broke Tor for LITERALLY 10 years (~2011-2018, and after 2018 you still need to muck around with user agent and other headers) for no reason other than to market a snakeoil WAF (yes WAF, this is the WAF doing this shit. The Tor blocking was never about DDoS) to their users (aside from the possibility of them being NSA'd). If I was in charge of IPFS, I'd be writing blog posts explaining to Cloudflare while basic best practices for the internet include not blocking IPs for a decade. You know? You can't communicate with Cloudflare and keep a straight face when proclaiming to be making the decentralized web replacement. IPFS sucks. Multihash, multibase, multiaddr, multiwhatever is a TERRIBLE idea. So what's the alternative to IPFS? Freenet, another thing that has no use without webshit, as they forgot to implement a document format (which is also needed to implement petnames). I have no idea why one would be enthusiastic about a tech company (not IPFS, the other crap) creating a P2P product, when tech companies in America have not produced a single good piece of software in 20 years. > but bro, you are not thinking about my wallet, everything you say is bad for business No shit. I am speaking as someone who wants to have a pseudonym and exchange information online without dealing with corpocrap and webshit. I don't need my services to send someone to my house to make sure it's really me. I want actual real decentralized technology. I like exchanging information. I don't give a shit about commerece. I like what the internet is actually for: Hosting a hacking blog, talking to people far away, sharing code, sharing cracks for stupid software that wants me to buy 10 copies of the game to have a 2 hour LAN copy, etc (yes, I have made all of these). Without laws and other things that only exist to serve stupid people. I should be able to code an entire conforming implementation myself. This doesn't have to be user friendly. There needs to be something that's actually good and secure for people who know what they're doing. Handshake? WTF is this? It's named a verb. That means they have a whole actual marketer (or one of those "hackers" that is really more into fads and brand names than programming).

99 points by carride 5y ago

So, silly question perhaps. I genuinely don’t know. Is blockchain handy for this decentralizing part of DNS or DNS entirely? Suppose a blockchain network, or networks, knows all the TLD server IPs (I don't have DNS sharp in my mind, sorry for that). You can transfer ownership of a domain to someone else. I think conceptually it’s an NFT right? Not that it is art, but domains aren’t fungible I think. So it is non-fungible. So you could wrap each non-fungible domain in a token on a network, making it an NFT. I wonder what the actual issues will be. Striving for a decentralized DNS with whatever technique one would use seems to be a good thing IMO. The internet is for us all. Edit: Ohhh this article is actually using a blockchain solution called namebase. When I was skimming, I saw IPFS so I thought somehow IPFS was used instead. That was more subtly interwoven in the story than I thought.

miohtama 5y ago
The most popular decentralised domain name system is ENS. While domains are not called NFTs (ENS predates the term) it functions more or less how you described. https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/
alfl 5y ago
Not a silly question, I think you've described Namecoin.
jonahbenton 5y ago
Conceptually, there is an important distinction between "mechanism" and "policy." There are many, many mechanisms for handling legal/technical control/ownership/system of record/etc. This is a problem with solutions that date to the beginning of civilization. Whether mechanism is pieces of paper in a vault or replicated records in different jurisdictions or hashes on blockchain matters only on the margins. Policy is the hard part. What happens when mechanism fails or when the parties relying on the mechanism have disagreements about the implications. When there is disagreement about which blockchain is authoritative. (Sometimes blockchain people call this "governance" and wish to solve it also with mechanism.) Anyway, there are good reasons for human organizations to act in a policy/governance capacity. One may think of any particular organization as flawed, which is no doubt true. But in any context where people depend on the mechanism working "correctly" people are the only participants who can provide that assurance.
arcticbull 5y ago
Of course it's not lol, like anything Blockchain it adds no value and makes everything it touches worse. If Apple loses their domain NFT should they what, just re-brand the business? There's a reason we have a chain of trust and authority leading all the way up to the supreme court and not just "yolo, SFYL." [edit] Like all the distributed identity plays, "not your keys, not your life" is such an asinine model to try and foist on people.
- mettamage 5y ago
  Well, I agree that we put our trust in technology an awful lot when we do this. But don't we put this trust into technology already? One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to a more decentralized internet.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    > But don't we put this trust into technology already? No, that's why we have courts as the ultimate arbiters. > One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to a more decentralized internet. Anything short of "not your keys not your life" is a centralization risk and quickly, at the limit, approaches exactly what we have right now but less efficient.
    - dumbfoundded 5y ago
      The courts present a large problem though. Most digital crimes happen across borders. Courts are pretty much useless for ransomware, identity theft, and everything else online when the criminals are in an inconvenient jurisdiction. Blockchain if anything shows the failure of our judicial system. Most of the cybercrimes are enabled by cryptocurrency and our justice system is hopeless to stop these payments.
      - 5y ago
evbots 5y ago
coinbase is to namebase as bitcoin is to handshake

wrs 5y ago

“The internet was the evolution of telnet, which allowed users to connect to bulletin board systems via phone lines. However, connecting to those systems required that the user know the connection address and port.” What? This is so confused that it’s “not even wrong”. Did GPT-3 write this? :) As for the part that is just wrong, there’s never been an internet where you had to know the connection address (there were periodically updated host files) and you never needed to specify the port for telnet (it’s a “well known port”).

jareklupinski 5y ago
i think they meant to write 'phone number' not sure about the port, most of my modem-to-modem communication was very low-level (and did not last long :) )
- wrs 5y ago
  Telnet is a protocol on the Internet, not a predecessor of the Internet. To connect to a BBS using phone lines, you just dialed its phone number; this has no relation to the Internet. Even if we generously consider a phone number to be a “connection address”, there’s no “port” involved and DNS has nothing to do with phone numbers.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymousisme 5y ago
    You're mostly right. I believe DNS has support for VoIP "phone numbers." https://www.onsip.com/voip-resources/voip-fundamentals/dns-srv-records-sip https://www.onsip.com/voip-resources/voip-fundamentals/dns-s...
soco 5y ago
Am I that old that I actually know what you mean and find it funny?
Thoreandan 5y ago

tptacek 5y ago

I am mystified by Handshake. It's not just a "protocol", as I understand it, but also a coin. In other words, this project has essentially claimed the Internet root as its own, and then securitized it, selling in effect shares. But they don't own the Internet root; it isn't theirs to securitize. I always ask: if they can do this with DNS, can I do it with ARP?

sneak 5y ago
That's the thing about claiming the root: anyone can try. There is no title to the root, of course, as you well know. You can certainly try to do it with anything you like, Sealand included. The real work is getting others to agree or care. Handshake has some preliminary support, and more, it seems, than any other project in recent memory. Alternic once tried, as did Namecoin. IIRC there was also an alternative PKI root that some hackers tried to get going, but no browser ever incorporated into the trust store.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Alternic and Namecoin foundered on the same issue. To me, this Handshake stuff seems like the Springfield Monorail. It makes sense as long as you don't think about it, but as soon as you do, you wonder why on Earth anyone would agree to new root that gives value to a bunch of pre-mined coins. Anyone can try! I'm not saying Handshake is, like, illegal. But it still seems like... a scam? I'm not sure what the word is.
  - ajvs 5y ago
    They've reserved the top 100k Alexa domains on HNS for the original DNS owners. They're actively thwarting ICANN's overreach and centralisation of control by redecentralising the internet again. But sure, everytime HN sees a legitimate use case for a blockchain it's a "scam".
    - tptacek 5y ago
      Is it a coin-like? Can you speculate on the coin-like? Did they pre-mine the coin-like and gift it to themselves and people they wanted favor with? If so, do I care that they've "reserved the top 100k Alex domains on HNS for the original DNS owners"? How nice of them.

arcade79 5y ago

Skipping past the telnet bollox pointed out by others, the next paragraph is the following gem: "Browsers started using a centralized resolution system called the domain name system (DNS) to make things more user-friendly when the internet became more widespread. Instead of typing 208.65.153.238 into the address bar, a user could simply type "youtube.com," and DNS would do all the work for them" Given that web browsers appeared in 1989, and DNS appeared between 1983 and 1987, we can safely say that DNS came before browsers. Before that, folks kept a 'hosts' file updated. Truly remarkable how much that page gets wrong. And to think it's just a blockchain variant of alt roots. :P You can read more about alt roots here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root The Internet Architecture Board spoke out strongly against alter roots in May 2000, in RFC 2826: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2826 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2826 It's weird how folks forget history.

stormbrew 5y ago
Not that I think this project will go anywhere its antecedents haven't already, but... > Given that web browsers appeared in 1989, and DNS appeared between 1983 and 1987, we can safely say that DNS came before browsers. I mean the telnet thing is really wrong but this really just seems like picking on nothing to me. I don't think the intent there was literally to say "dns came along and changed how we used browsers" but to contextualize the use of names vs. ips in terms people in a modern computing context will understand more easily. (That people had other means of managing host names before dns is a better criticism, but still kind of misses the point of what they're saying)
- tptacek 5y ago
  Nah. It's an attempt to cast the discussion about name policy as a simple technical concern --- before we landed on this weird DNS thing, it suggests, everyone was just typing IP addresses into address bars. But of course, there's much more to it than that: the names themselves are of immense value, and there is a massive commercial and public policy debate over how they should be administered. And when you think about how central those names are to how the Internet works, you're immediately left wondering how the hell some random coin should be in the mix. I don't think it's ignorance motivating that text.

schlauerfox 5y ago

This already effectively exists. and has since early bitcoin days. https://www.namecoin.org/ https://www.namecoin.org/

beckman466 5y ago

what we need is a fully distributed (and thus democratic) content-addressable name server resolution system. that way users can decide for themselves who is @bob or me@me.com (as their hashes differ). the current industry around vanity domains and social media handles is toxic. people are being killed for them [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825 an example of a working example is the p2p Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) social network: it can work completely without name servers (you can even sync over bluetooth)

evv 5y ago
How does content-addressing help implement a better name server? If the system is fully distributed you're gonna have a lot more than one person deciding that they are @bob
- beckman466 5y ago
  so you'd all have to be playing by the same id-generation algorithm/rules/'game', which will mean that no two id's can be generated (at the same time). if you don't use the same id-generation algorithm as your friends (yet you claim you did) people would be able to see that by validating your chain [1]. in other words: my main critique is that this name server system is not as distributed as it could be, for example if it was built using the holochain framework. in a holochain system if two communities get disconnected due to a natural disaster, they would still be able to continue in two (temporarily) partitioned communities. with blockchain this wouldn't be possible. [1] https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/7_validation/ https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/7_validation/
duskwuff 5y ago
You meet Bob at a bar. You hit it off with him, and you mutually decide to stay in touch. How do you do that when neither of you has a name you can refer to the other as yet?
southerntofu 5y ago
What's your take on GNU Name System? Globally-unique public keys with human-friendly nicks (hyper hyper local root) sounds like a good mix. See also, ICANN presentatin about emerging identifiers, introducing Handshake and GNS projects: https://icann.zoom.us/rec/play/QA_d2NDBBhbecI0Yg4WcEorM0DlVtGRbN9IkAp1TfgBb_fzMX1s4LHRsOl88FrPWDKnRxi3GOFPJU-Ye.xrkeC4AwxgwVLS8x https://icann.zoom.us/rec/play/QA_d2NDBBhbecI0Yg4WcEorM0DlVt...

wyager 5y ago

How is this different from namecoin? Namecoin was one of the first Bitcoin spinoffs, and it’s arguably the only other coherent known use case for “the blockchain” besides money.

ajvs 5y ago
It's decentralising the root zone, not just a single TLD.
- wyager 5y ago
  That is not a meaningful technical difference.
- rnhmjoj 5y ago
  Nothing stops you from creating others TLD besides .bit. We just have to formally agree to use, say `/something/`, for storing name records for .something.

Animats 5y ago

This is yet another NFT thing. The NFT fad seems to be reaching peak Ponzi. Axie seems to be the worst. This has become a huge fad in the Philippines. It's sort of like Pokemon, except that it costs about $1000 to get into the game. For a few months, poor people were buying into this and making enough money to quit their job. Then the supply of suckers ran out. The token is down 85% from peak. There are now metaverse NFTs with "presales". The promoters don't bother creating a virtual world; they just sell "land" in one that doesn't exist yet, with vague promises of a future implementation. That's almost certainly an illegal public offering of an security under US law. (Look up "Howey test"). Even Decentraland, the NFT-based virtual world, only has 275 people logged in right now.[1] (Compared to about 40,000 for Second Life, over a million for Roblox...) People who bought "land" in Decentraland for a "virtual store" are not getting much traffic. The SEC shut down most of the ICO scammers. NFTs were invented as an end run around securities law. Since each one is different, they're not a commodity, so the CFTC lacks jurisdiction. If they represent a real world thing, they're a collectable, not a security. But most of the newer NFTs represent nothing. Getting away from uppity domain registrars would help. Originally, you owned a domain. Now, registrars take the position that you just rent it from them. But NFTs are not the answer. Too many scams and scammers. [1] https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/ https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/

jekkos 5y ago
I smell a false analogy fallacy. Axie NFTs are fad so just avoid all NFTs at all cost? I think that the concept of an NFT is quite a useful one, and you should maybe not consider the value of it as a first thing. Domain names were also speculated upon in the early days. Remember people buying up 3 or 4 letter dommain just to sell them for more money? It's just a change in the trustmodel behind DNS that is really needed here. Instead of trusting a chain of certificate authorities you can trust a blockchain's consensus mechanism instead.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > I think that the concept of an NFT is quite a useful one How so? Can you name a few useful applications? From my understanding NFTs are only as useful as "property titles", which means they have exactly one and only one application: speculation, which in my book is an absolute anti-feature. > Instead of trusting a chain of certificate authorities you can trust a blockchain's consensus mechanism instead. I think you meant registries, not CAs? How is "blockchain consensus" better, given all the blockchain failures we've witnessed so far with BTC/ETH and all the related hacks, monopolistic overreach from state-sponsored hardware vendors, and lack of consensus on the software leading to hard forks? Don't you think hard-wiring monetary incentives to something as basic as a naming scheme can only lead to bad outcomes (as ICANN gTLD programme has demonstrated)? What's your take on the GNU Name System? Concerns about it being a GNU project aside ("it'll be ready when GNU/Hurd is ready"), what do you make of the features and threat model? Personal opinion: on paper, i find it's the least-worst naming system i've ever read about.

tristor 5y ago

I am sure this is not the objective here, but this article was so badly written and inaccurate that it made me lose respect for the IPFS project. There are a lot of technical assertions that aren't just wrong, they're absurdly false, within this article.

animanoir 5y ago
Which parts exactly?
- tristor 5y ago
  Almost every word in this section for starters: https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/#an-internet-of-numbers https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/#an-... Did you read the article?
- tribler 5y ago
  > Imagine if all Twitter users had 'verified' status and you could also find them across their other social apps without any risk of following fake or wrong accounts by mistake. Without any risks? Ideas from self-sovereign identity are somewhat included in this promo. Does this service include hiring notaries to check state-issued IDs to verify identities? Risk-free IDs are unsolved I believe.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > Does this service include hiring notaries to check state-issued IDs to verify identities? How would that be without risks? Corruption concerns aside, Nation-States are likely among the biggest identity fakers for their intelligence services. I think "without risk" meant that discovery of alternative accounts/URLs is signed with a public key you already know of, so impersonation risks are reduced. I don't care to know "who" this is, as long as i know it's the same person.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
I was just about to submit an equivalent comment, so I'll piggyback on yours. I feel just like you, plus, I also hate to see them promoting another crypto scam attempt at taking over a piece of global infrastructure to make a quick buck. I like IPFS as protocol. I didn't mind their work on Filecoin, as it made sense in context. But every time I check, they seem to be getting more and more in bed with dubious cryptocurrency initiatives. At this point I'm no longer willing to advocate for IPFS itself.

alangibson 5y ago

HNS looks a lot like a protocol designed to make Namebase some quick cash. So it's all on the blockchain, but to get a name you have to buy it auction with tokens minted by Namebase. They've managed to make the costs of a domain uncapped, except the domain is also useless because no one but Brave respects their root. In case you have any doubts that this an NFTified pyramid scheme, check out this gem from their "Earn HNS" page: > For any HNS your friend buys, you get +20% HNS and they get +10%

lifty 5y ago
The tokens were not minted by Namebase. HNS can be mined and there was a wide initial distribution, many of them including to large OSS project s.
- alangibson 5y ago
  Their giveaway didn't go to well. They planned to give away "70% of the initial supply" to developers, but... > To date, around 25 million HNS (1.83% of the initial supply, 1.23% of the fully diluted) has been claimed through the developer airdrop. They can't even give HNS away, however... > The discrepancy between the total possible number of airdrop claims and the actual number of airdrop claims can be explained by the fact that eligible developers need to have their SSH keys from 2019 in order to complete the claim. ... Without their old SSH keys, it's impossible for eligible developers to claim the airdrop. they made the extremely hard to claim?
  - lifty 5y ago
    You’re mistaken. Namebase is an independent registar for HNS domains and it’s not the same as the Handshake project, which did the actual distribution of the coins. I’m surprised people haven’t heard about this project, they have been linked on HN many times before. Edit: typo
    - alangibson 5y ago
      Seems to be a common point of confusion. So much so that it's on their FAQ: https://www.namebase.io/faq/#did-namebase-make-handshake https://www.namebase.io/faq/#did-namebase-make-handshake I'm sure I and many others have heard of it before. It's just that there are so many of these 'X but Blockchain' ideas that come and go all the time that is just turns into a blur.

dackdel 5y ago

explained-from-first-principles.com/

p2p_astroturf 5y ago

Let me think out loud for a second. Naming is solved by petname systems - just using a local address book that decides what name (if any) will be shown for what public key - it costs nothing, it doesnt need a blockchain. Unlike all other solutions, it actually _is_ secure. The only reason you'd ever arrive at something that is not petnames, after learning of the existence of cryptography, is because you are overengineering and falling for boogeyman SSL CAs want you to believe in. Commerce is not good or healthy in P2P networks, it is a last resort. Any time you hear about an economic model, incentivizations, etc, you can be 99.99% sure the company has designed it this way with money as their first interest, before utility. And not only that, but money will be practically their only interest. Thousands of P2P products and secure messaging have been astroturfed by people (corporations, and startups, which have no practical difference) "solving" Snowden's problem since the NSA revelations. Nobody actually uses blockchains. They go on whateverscan.io and lookup their transaction there to confirm they were paid. If you visit a bank and sign up, they should be giving you a public key, not a domain name. Not a name in namecoin or whatever this article is talking about that you need to download a blockchain for and have a computer fast enough to keep up with on 24/7. Also, you give them your public key. You shouldn't be giving them a TWITTER (seriously wtf, this is like using Steam for chatting with your girlfriend), no not your facebook either, not even your Google. I should give them a fresh public key I can use to authenticate myself. Any blockchain aside from a small few (like Bitcoin, early Bitcoin at least) are essentially a series of logos and nothing more. They have not contributed one thing to actual decentralization. A good giveaway would be that not a single one has a proper CLI aside from Bitcoin. Not even Ethereum does. They all want you to use a bloated, intrinsically insecure web browser for everything, which cannot even work on more than two pages without billions of man hours. Naming is NOT solved by blockchains - it is not known whether blockchains will ever be trustless. Aside from the trend towards centralization from pools, at some point the data moves too fast for an individual to run a validating node. IPFS seem to friends with Cloudflare. I don't what their relationship is (the former do truly seem to care about making something good, but are just naive on top of ignoring existing solutions), but I would not trust anything remotely related to Cloudflare ever. They have broke Tor for LITERALLY 10 years (~2011-2018, and after 2018 you still need to muck around with user agent and other headers) for no reason other than to market a snakeoil WAF (yes WAF, this is the WAF doing this shit. The Tor blocking was never about DDoS) to their users (aside from the possibility of them being NSA'd). If I was in charge of IPFS, I'd be writing blog posts explaining to Cloudflare while basic best practices for the internet include not blocking IPs for a decade. You know? You can't communicate with Cloudflare and keep a straight face when proclaiming to be making the decentralized web replacement. IPFS sucks. Multihash, multibase, multiaddr, multiwhatever is a TERRIBLE idea. So what's the alternative to IPFS? Freenet, another thing that has no use without webshit, as they forgot to implement a document format (which is also needed to implement petnames). I have no idea why one would be enthusiastic about a tech company (not IPFS, the other crap) creating a P2P product, when tech companies in America have not produced a single good piece of software in 20 years. > but bro, you are not thinking about my wallet, everything you say is bad for business No shit. I am speaking as someone who wants to have a pseudonym and exchange information online without dealing with corpocrap and webshit. I don't need my services to send someone to my house to make sure it's really me. I want actual real decentralized technology. I like exchanging information. I don't give a shit about commerece. I like what the internet is actually for: Hosting a hacking blog, talking to people far away, sharing code, sharing cracks for stupid software that wants me to buy 10 copies of the game to have a 2 hour LAN copy, etc (yes, I have made all of these). Without laws and other things that only exist to serve stupid people. I should be able to code an entire conforming implementation myself. This doesn't have to be user friendly. There needs to be something that's actually good and secure for people who know what they're doing. Handshake? WTF is this? It's named a verb. That means they have a whole actual marketer (or one of those "hackers" that is really more into fads and brand names than programming).