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The “rent-seeking certificate infrastructure” could be solved if web browsers used the DNS (and DNSSEC) to validate certificates. The DNS, on the other hand, i
by teddyh 4y ago
The “rent-seeking certificate infrastructure” could be solved if web browsers used the DNS (and DNSSEC) to validate certificates. The DNS, on the other hand, is more tricky. If you want human-readable and globally distinct (and stable) names, you have to have a centralized structure to keep track of who has what name. The best we could come up with was the DNS, which is at least hierarchical instead of completely monolithic. And then it becomes a question of: do you want name holders to continually pay for names in some way, or do you want a land grab model where the person who snagged a name 30 years ago now owns it forever for free? With DNS, that question is decided by each node in the tree of the hierarchy.
- zozbot234 4y agoHuman-readable names can potentially be pseudo-random, and thus securely generated. What's hard (indeed, considered largely infeasible) is meaningful, decentralized, secure names.
- gruez 4y ago>Human-readable names can potentially be pseudo-random No matter how you dice it, getting humans to remember 128 bits of entropy is going to be a non-starter. Encoding those 128 bits using words doesn't really solve the problem.
- cdev_gl 4y agoI was going to argue that remembering "CorrectBatteryHorseStaple.com" is leagues easier than remembering an 128 bit number, but then I did the math and using the 20k most common english words to encode 128bits you'd need an 8 word phrase, which pretty much solidifies the point you've made. I mean, people can recite poetry far longer, even nonsense poetry ("Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe") so it's not impossible. But generally speaking, yeah. Nobody wants to navigate to that bit of jabberwocky instead of google.com It does kind of make me long for the days of the HOSTS file, where anyone might alias a hard-to-remember address as something locally meaningful.
- px43 4y agoWhat part of ENS doesn't meet your expectations? It wasn't designed to replace DNS, but there are an increasing number of people using it for that.
- verdverm 4y agoIt is not always about what something is not doing, but rather the unintended (often malicious) use cases it enables without any way to prevent or mitigate.
- viksit 4y agocurious what “malicious” use cases a decentralized name registry enables that dns doesn’t?
- rvz 4y ago[cricket tunes intensify]
- loktarogar 4y agoyou're focusing on the first part (what it enables) and not the last part (without any way to mitigate)
- verdverm 4y agoThis, for example I lost my keys or my keys were stolen
- viksit 4y agoah interesting. won’t multi sig solve this issue? create multiple keys, and have a 2/3. if you lose one, hope you don’t lose the other. and also - there may be a way for the naming contract to use social recovery for keys.
- kragen 4y agoit was considered infeasible until bitcoin demonstrated that it was feasible, as zooko agreed: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko http://web.archive.org/web/20210118172102/https://squaretriangle.jottit.com/faq http://web.archive.org/web/20210118172102/https://squaretria...
- flir 4y agoThe problem I've got with any signed, cryptographically secure replacement for DNS (including a blockchain-backed solution) is that over time names will be lost. Just like bitcoins get lost. You need some kind of "admin access" for the system that can fix things like lost keys, at which point you might as well stick with DNS.
- kragen 4y agoor you could stick with losing the names aaronsw proposed that you could expire unrenewed names after 12 months i forget what solution namecoin and ens use
- flir 4y agoI hadn't considered expiry. That does lets lost names re-enter the pool, at least, even if not under the control of the original owner.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- politician 4y agoI think something that is overlooked in this discussion is the idea that names must be unique. If we relax this constraint, the solution space opens up significantly. I don’t believe uniqueness is a fundamental requirement of a name service because I don’t believe that a human-readable string itself carries sufficient information to be trustworthy in and of itself. (Sorry for the delayed reply, my account is heavily rate limited, so I don’t get to post more than 5 times per hour and less when someone with high karma like downvotes a post and leaves a comment.)
- Stratoscope 4y agoI wonder if you are just seeing the standard five-minute delay that everyone gets when replying inline in a thread. That delay is indeed intended to discourage too-fast back and forth comments, which sometimes lead to arguments. If that is what you've encountered, you can bypass the delay by clicking the timestamp of the comment you want to reply to. This opens the comment in its own page with a reply box.
- politician 4y agoThanks, but no, I don't think that's what's going on here. What I'm experiencing is 60+ minute rate limits after 5 comments plus maybe 5 edits ("You're posting too fast, please slow down. Thanks."), frequently coinciding with higher karma (15k+) users leaving the first reply and a -1 or -2 downvote balance that usually eventually fights its way back up to +1 or +2. When this happens, I'll try to post every 20 minutes or so to test the boundary. Of course, doing that might be tripping a sliding window, or it might be indeed a stricter rate limit. It's hard to know for sure what's going on. In any case, I don't expect an explanation, if the site is really giving super downvotes to certain users with or without their knowledge, telling people that that's the case would undermine the impact of the approach.
- webmaven 4y ago> I think something that is overlooked in this discussion is the idea that names must be unique. If we relax this constraint, the solution space opens up significantly. Hmm. At some point, a user agent would need to disambiguate between competing identical names somehow (at least for the sort of names that identify global internet resources). Are you assuming the existence of a web-of-trust of some sort as an arbiter?
- DennisP 4y ago> If you want human-readable and globally distinct (and stable) names, you have to have a centralized structure to keep track of who has what name. Apps on blockchains already play the role of that centralized structure. The most successful I'm aware of is ENS on Ethereum. Whatever economic model you prefer can be implemented this way.
- kelthuzad 4y ago>land grab model where the person who snagged a name 30 years ago now owns it forever for free? This is already the case with the current dns, since paying $10 per year is pretty much nothing to any middle class investor, so they do in fact "own" it forever for "free", relatively speaking.
- ipaddr 4y agoIf I had 10 dollars a year from everyone saying this I would be a new FAANG. Why is everything aimed at middle class Americans.. the average salary around the world is a lot smaller and many domains extensions exists which Americans can't buy. The early adopters got the first twitter names, instagram names, etc for free forever. People invested time signing up when you never thought of it and they get rewarded.. the platform gets the early adopters. We don't force users to pay and let other take the name and continue to be that person. Domains should be the same. When a domain expires someone can buy it and pretend they are the original owners. If they were free you could buy coolformatbestnamecoolformat still get the name you wanted and use a prefix postfix custom format to identify with a group. rubycooldomainruby reactcooldomainreact
- tptacek 4y agoAnybody involved in a "rent-seeking certificate infrastructure" is doing so by choice. Certificates are free. ISRG saw to that. Web browsers aren't going to use DNSSEC.