3 ms·

> The ideal system, IMO, would be one where anyone can get a name, no one can "hoard" names, and all names are of equal value. I’m immediately reminded of Tor

> The ideal system, IMO, would be one where anyone can get a name, no one can "hoard" names, and all names are of equal value. I’m immediately reminded of Tor .onion names, though those aren’t exactly user-friendly…

egberts1 5y ago
Neither are telephone numbers … being exactly a user-friendly thingie but there we go.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  Vastly more user-friendly than .onion names, I'd say :P
  - egberts1 5y ago
    Only by the virtue of being a less combinatorial options of the few, 10 to 15 digit telephone number that is.
- aflag 5y ago
  That's why people have phone books and contact lists.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  Phone numbers are the IP addresses. Your contact list (or the yellow/white pages in days long past) is the DNS server for them.
aflag 5y ago
The alternative would be for people to always rely on a search engine to actually get the sites they want and never really enter URLs by hand. We are not that far from that, to be honest. There are many people who will search for the site name and click the first link rather than type in the url. Sometimes their search comes up as a suggestion before they press enter, but it's still the same idea of not relying on the actual DNS name.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  The idea I implemented as an experiment at home is DNS names that contain encoded information. For example, the TLD contains a number that represents a certain trademark class of good/services. Subcategories are encoded in domain, subdomain1, subdomain2, etc. becoming more specific as one reads from right to left. Thus one can perform searches only on the domainname (and optionally the URL). This is faster and easier than searching the contents of web pages. Another portion of the domain name is a public key. For some types of content, this works well. It is like searching a directory.
  - aflag 5y ago
    That's more or less how yahoo! directory worked (obviously not at the DNS level), however, google showed that crawling the contents and indexing everything, while certainly a lot more complex, it is a lot easier to use. So, while that idea is probably better and more discoverable than the current DNS system, it seems more likely to me that the replacement for DNS will be free text search. At some point, browsers will finally manage to get rid of the address bar and have everything working fully operated via suggestions/search. Then, DNS will become sort of irrelevant for the web.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
      Sounds plausible however I am not much of browser fan, while I really do like the speed and size of DNS software, so I will always be experimenting with different approaches. The world of the web browser is dominated by advertising and surveillance. Unless that changes, I care little about what the web browser may or may not do in the future. I am more interested in relatively small DNS software.
southerntofu 5y ago
Onions are globally unique and secure. It would be interesting to add a "social" human-meaningful layer pointing to those unique/secure names, much like the GNS project tries to do.

egberts1 5y ago

Neither are telephone numbers … being exactly a user-friendly thingie but there we go.

Tijdreiziger 5y ago
Vastly more user-friendly than .onion names, I'd say :P
- egberts1 5y ago
  Only by the virtue of being a less combinatorial options of the few, 10 to 15 digit telephone number that is.
aflag 5y ago
That's why people have phone books and contact lists.
technothrasher 5y ago
Phone numbers are the IP addresses. Your contact list (or the yellow/white pages in days long past) is the DNS server for them.

aflag 5y ago

The alternative would be for people to always rely on a search engine to actually get the sites they want and never really enter URLs by hand. We are not that far from that, to be honest. There are many people who will search for the site name and click the first link rather than type in the url. Sometimes their search comes up as a suggestion before they press enter, but it's still the same idea of not relying on the actual DNS name.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
The idea I implemented as an experiment at home is DNS names that contain encoded information. For example, the TLD contains a number that represents a certain trademark class of good/services. Subcategories are encoded in domain, subdomain1, subdomain2, etc. becoming more specific as one reads from right to left. Thus one can perform searches only on the domainname (and optionally the URL). This is faster and easier than searching the contents of web pages. Another portion of the domain name is a public key. For some types of content, this works well. It is like searching a directory.
- aflag 5y ago
  That's more or less how yahoo! directory worked (obviously not at the DNS level), however, google showed that crawling the contents and indexing everything, while certainly a lot more complex, it is a lot easier to use. So, while that idea is probably better and more discoverable than the current DNS system, it seems more likely to me that the replacement for DNS will be free text search. At some point, browsers will finally manage to get rid of the address bar and have everything working fully operated via suggestions/search. Then, DNS will become sort of irrelevant for the web.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    Sounds plausible however I am not much of browser fan, while I really do like the speed and size of DNS software, so I will always be experimenting with different approaches. The world of the web browser is dominated by advertising and surveillance. Unless that changes, I care little about what the web browser may or may not do in the future. I am more interested in relatively small DNS software.

southerntofu 5y ago

Onions are globally unique and secure. It would be interesting to add a "social" human-meaningful layer pointing to those unique/secure names, much like the GNS project tries to do.