8 ms·

What I wonder about, is they should be the "creators" and steering committee for the worlds own PnP DNS servers... I would gladly host a small portion of DNS s

What I wonder about, is they should be the "creators" and steering committee for the worlds own PnP DNS servers... I would gladly host a small portion of DNS spaces on my machines running at home...

livnev 13y ago
I know nothing about this but given that DNS is quite low volume, distributed peer-to-peer DNS services sound really promising. It would definitely be interesting to hear someone with knowledge in this to chime in. TPB could (inadvertently) change the structure of the internet.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Hosting DNS is already mostly distributed; that's not the hard part. The difficulty is setting up a distributed system that can allocate domains and prevent others from tampering with the records (e.g., what if I reply to a query for gmail.com with my own IP, pointing to a phishing site?) One possible solution is namecoin[1], which is based on bitcoin's proof-of-work protocol. But TPB's influence is not so inadvertent: http://digitizor.com/2010/12/01/the-pirate-bay-co-founder-starting-a-p2p-based-dns-to-take-on-icann/ http://digitizor.com/2010/12/01/the-pirate-bay-co-founder-st... [1]: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page
  - vy8vWJlco 13y ago
    You're right, it doesn't look like the project advertised 2 years ago got past the idea stage. Assuming someone actually tried, however, I don't think I'd be as worried about tampering as you have suggested... Firstly, SSL and whatever certification system used in the future will still exist to prevent man-in-the-middle hijacking, meaning even if trivial to do (like defacing Wikipedia), I do not think it will occur substantially unless as a form of DDoS (as in defacing Wikipedia), and second... by implementing something like the possibility of manual pinning and upstream authority/record-source blacklisting (a common technique in P2P apps, with an anology in Wikipedia to marking a page/record "frozen" for a period due to contention), it would be possible to preserve consensus, overriding/responding to the current level of state censorship for the forseeable future. If governments more broadly dictate filters, that will change the nature of things (and of Wikipedia... They will be able to change history), but we are not there yet nor do I think we will be there on the order of 5-10 years (and something like this might slow that timeframe). I also think people are getting more vocal about the negative aspect of imaginary property enforcement. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5606921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5606921 )
  - Kequc 13y ago
    Forgive my ignorance, but how did they secure the .bit TLD in the first place? Is this part of the whole slew of new TLDs that are coming out? They must have had a benefactor to make this happen. Er no it doesn't even seem to be on the list. http://www.newtlds.com/applications http://www.newtlds.com/applications
    - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
      Namecoin isn't ICANN. You install the software and whenever your machine does a lookup for the .bit TLD it uses their lookup system instead of sending it to the DNS resolver.
  - livnev 13y ago
    I haven't though about this carefully but I wonder what the shortcomings of the following would be: when a domain 'owner' wants to update their DNS entry, they just push out a PGP-signed (or similar) message of their new IP onto a P2P swarm, which will only propagate your message if their message verifies with their public key, from which you can then grab the entry (and verify it again for extra security). Then, registering your domain would just consist of getting the swarm to accept your public key. Of course, this could be first-come first-serve, or it could be regulated in some way. This way you could have multiple swarms, and each swarm is only governed by their own decisions. And I suppose on a smaller scale, TPB could create their own swarm right away, and have people use it parallel to existing DNS infrastructure. Then other censored domains could jump onto their swarm.
  - jacoblyles 13y ago
    Namecoin is a very interesting project, but I prefer PPC coin's proof-of-stake algorithm to bitcoin's proof-of-work for long-term stability and robustness.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
fghh45sdfhr3 13y ago
I knew AlterNIC would be back some day.
zimbatm 13y ago
In the UK Virgin Media goes further and blocks the IP address of the black-listed domains. Distributing the DNS wouldn't help. Btw implementations of distributed DNS already exist, eg: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page
AnthonyMouse 13y ago
DNS is probably the wrong word. You want some new method of name resolution, not DNS. The thing with DNS is that it actually works pretty well as a distributed system. There are a bunch of different people responsible for different TLDs. If the operator of one TLD is censoring you, you can use a different one. There are really two primary concerns with DNS. The first is that even if you have a domain using a TLD whose operators are unwilling to censor it, local DNS resolvers can still try to block it. This is not that hard to fix; either use a DNS server in a different country or (if your network blocking non-local DNS) do your DNS queries over Tor or some other secure proxy. It's also one of the things that DNSSEC or DNSCurve are supposed to prevent, if anyone would ever get around to implementing either of them. So this is solvable but non-ideal because it requires all the individual end-users to do something. The second problem is that ICANN doesn't allow just anyone to operate a TLD, which means that the TLD operators themselves become choke points. Then censorial entities who see a TLD operator refusing to censor can put pressure on them (or their home country's government) to try to force the censorship. So what you want is really to replace ICANN and the TLD operators with something more distributed, but the question is, with what? If you want a memorable but globally unique name then you need some method for everyone in the world to agree who it is that name should refer to. Right now the method is "if the name ends in .com, it refers to who Verisign says it does" and so on for other TLDs. You have trusted entities who can authoritatively determine who controls the domain. I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that namecoin is trying to fix this with something along the lines of bitcoin, where whoever uses a name first gets to keep it. The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment. Just thinking out loud here, but how about this: Create a version of ICANN that works like IETF. No relationship to ICANN other than to refuse to issue TLDs that have already been issued by ICANN (and hopefully vice versa). Then, if you want a TLD, you can go to this group of people (who are maybe people like EFF members or well-known security researchers or activists) and they come to a consensus about whether you should get the TLD. So if EFF asks for ".eff" they get it. If ACLU asks for ".aclu" they get it. If La Quadrature du Net asks for ".lqdn" they get it. If Debian Foundation asks for ".debian" they get it. FSF gets ".fsf" on and on. But if some scammer asks for ".bank" they can go pound sand. Maybe make them sub-domains, so you end up with ".eff.foo" and they all end in ".foo" (insert whatever you like) to reduce possible collisions with ICANN. The idea will be to have domains outside the control of ICANN or anyone in particular and issue several hundred to generally well-known and trustworthy entities who are likely to resist censorship efforts. Then those entities can issue "wikileaks.aclu" and "wikileaks.eff" to wikileaks etc., so censoring them requires censoring all the anti-censorship organizations. Once the working group assigns a TLD, they no longer have any involvement. They don't operate any technical infrastructure. All they do is publish the name of the domain and the public key of the entity it's assigned to (which can be used to sign domains in the TLD), to serve as the authority for resolving namespace collisions. Once an assignment is made it's permanent and irrevocable. The assigned organization's public key gets published and browser and OS vendors start including it and using it to authenticate domains in the TLD, resolved using whatever distributed system you like (that part is basically a solved problem) to map names to addresses.

What I wonder about, is they should be the "creators" and steering committee for the worlds own PnP DNS servers... I would gladly host a small portion of DNS spaces on my machines running at home...

livnev 13y ago

I know nothing about this but given that DNS is quite low volume, distributed peer-to-peer DNS services sound really promising. It would definitely be interesting to hear someone with knowledge in this to chime in. TPB could (inadvertently) change the structure of the internet.

icebraining 13y ago
Hosting DNS is already mostly distributed; that's not the hard part. The difficulty is setting up a distributed system that can allocate domains and prevent others from tampering with the records (e.g., what if I reply to a query for gmail.com with my own IP, pointing to a phishing site?) One possible solution is namecoin[1], which is based on bitcoin's proof-of-work protocol. But TPB's influence is not so inadvertent: http://digitizor.com/2010/12/01/the-pirate-bay-co-founder-starting-a-p2p-based-dns-to-take-on-icann/ http://digitizor.com/2010/12/01/the-pirate-bay-co-founder-st... [1]: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page
- vy8vWJlco 13y ago
  You're right, it doesn't look like the project advertised 2 years ago got past the idea stage. Assuming someone actually tried, however, I don't think I'd be as worried about tampering as you have suggested... Firstly, SSL and whatever certification system used in the future will still exist to prevent man-in-the-middle hijacking, meaning even if trivial to do (like defacing Wikipedia), I do not think it will occur substantially unless as a form of DDoS (as in defacing Wikipedia), and second... by implementing something like the possibility of manual pinning and upstream authority/record-source blacklisting (a common technique in P2P apps, with an anology in Wikipedia to marking a page/record "frozen" for a period due to contention), it would be possible to preserve consensus, overriding/responding to the current level of state censorship for the forseeable future. If governments more broadly dictate filters, that will change the nature of things (and of Wikipedia... They will be able to change history), but we are not there yet nor do I think we will be there on the order of 5-10 years (and something like this might slow that timeframe). I also think people are getting more vocal about the negative aspect of imaginary property enforcement. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5606921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5606921 )
- Kequc 13y ago
  Forgive my ignorance, but how did they secure the .bit TLD in the first place? Is this part of the whole slew of new TLDs that are coming out? They must have had a benefactor to make this happen. Er no it doesn't even seem to be on the list. http://www.newtlds.com/applications http://www.newtlds.com/applications
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    Namecoin isn't ICANN. You install the software and whenever your machine does a lookup for the .bit TLD it uses their lookup system instead of sending it to the DNS resolver.
- livnev 13y ago
  I haven't though about this carefully but I wonder what the shortcomings of the following would be: when a domain 'owner' wants to update their DNS entry, they just push out a PGP-signed (or similar) message of their new IP onto a P2P swarm, which will only propagate your message if their message verifies with their public key, from which you can then grab the entry (and verify it again for extra security). Then, registering your domain would just consist of getting the swarm to accept your public key. Of course, this could be first-come first-serve, or it could be regulated in some way. This way you could have multiple swarms, and each swarm is only governed by their own decisions. And I suppose on a smaller scale, TPB could create their own swarm right away, and have people use it parallel to existing DNS infrastructure. Then other censored domains could jump onto their swarm.
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  Namecoin is a very interesting project, but I prefer PPC coin's proof-of-stake algorithm to bitcoin's proof-of-work for long-term stability and robustness.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

fghh45sdfhr3 13y ago

I knew AlterNIC would be back some day.

zimbatm 13y ago

In the UK Virgin Media goes further and blocks the IP address of the black-listed domains. Distributing the DNS wouldn't help. Btw implementations of distributed DNS already exist, eg: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

DNS is probably the wrong word. You want some new method of name resolution, not DNS. The thing with DNS is that it actually works pretty well as a distributed system. There are a bunch of different people responsible for different TLDs. If the operator of one TLD is censoring you, you can use a different one. There are really two primary concerns with DNS. The first is that even if you have a domain using a TLD whose operators are unwilling to censor it, local DNS resolvers can still try to block it. This is not that hard to fix; either use a DNS server in a different country or (if your network blocking non-local DNS) do your DNS queries over Tor or some other secure proxy. It's also one of the things that DNSSEC or DNSCurve are supposed to prevent, if anyone would ever get around to implementing either of them. So this is solvable but non-ideal because it requires all the individual end-users to do something. The second problem is that ICANN doesn't allow just anyone to operate a TLD, which means that the TLD operators themselves become choke points. Then censorial entities who see a TLD operator refusing to censor can put pressure on them (or their home country's government) to try to force the censorship. So what you want is really to replace ICANN and the TLD operators with something more distributed, but the question is, with what? If you want a memorable but globally unique name then you need some method for everyone in the world to agree who it is that name should refer to. Right now the method is "if the name ends in .com, it refers to who Verisign says it does" and so on for other TLDs. You have trusted entities who can authoritatively determine who controls the domain. I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that namecoin is trying to fix this with something along the lines of bitcoin, where whoever uses a name first gets to keep it. The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment. Just thinking out loud here, but how about this: Create a version of ICANN that works like IETF. No relationship to ICANN other than to refuse to issue TLDs that have already been issued by ICANN (and hopefully vice versa). Then, if you want a TLD, you can go to this group of people (who are maybe people like EFF members or well-known security researchers or activists) and they come to a consensus about whether you should get the TLD. So if EFF asks for ".eff" they get it. If ACLU asks for ".aclu" they get it. If La Quadrature du Net asks for ".lqdn" they get it. If Debian Foundation asks for ".debian" they get it. FSF gets ".fsf" on and on. But if some scammer asks for ".bank" they can go pound sand. Maybe make them sub-domains, so you end up with ".eff.foo" and they all end in ".foo" (insert whatever you like) to reduce possible collisions with ICANN. The idea will be to have domains outside the control of ICANN or anyone in particular and issue several hundred to generally well-known and trustworthy entities who are likely to resist censorship efforts. Then those entities can issue "wikileaks.aclu" and "wikileaks.eff" to wikileaks etc., so censoring them requires censoring all the anti-censorship organizations. Once the working group assigns a TLD, they no longer have any involvement. They don't operate any technical infrastructure. All they do is publish the name of the domain and the public key of the entity it's assigned to (which can be used to sign domains in the TLD), to serve as the authority for resolving namespace collisions. Once an assignment is made it's permanent and irrevocable. The assigned organization's public key gets published and browser and OS vendors start including it and using it to authenticate domains in the TLD, resolved using whatever distributed system you like (that part is basically a solved problem) to map names to addresses.