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Skipping past the telnet bollox pointed out by others, the next paragraph is the following gem: "Browsers started using a centralized resolution system called

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.

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.