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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:49
Bill Stewart (bill.stewart@pobox.com)
Tue, 02 Mar 1999 00:00:13 -0800
At 04:34 PM 2/27/99 -0800, bram wrote:
>Unfortunately, the problems of domain names are really ones of authority,
>and the best cryptography can really do is make sure that a reasonable set
>of rules are enforced smoothly, it can't fix the rules.
>
>The exception is that there might be a way of using technology to destroy
>any sort of naming authority. There are various schemes by which this
>could be done, although they all involve sacrificing human readability,
>and there are various ways they could be hacked on top of dn. WIPO might
>get really mad about screwing around with 'their' domain name system, but
>as long as all the goofing around was done beneath a single top-level
>domain which noone was ever going to use, it might be possible to win that
>battle.
Raph Levien and/or David Wagner did some interesting work on
"taz and rewebbers", for maintaining a "temporary autonomous zone"
anarchically managed .taz webspace.
You can trivially run a namespace under a 2nd-level domain name, e.g.
new-name-format.namegods.com
or foo.dyn.ml.org <- to cite a real example
without having to disrupt the worldwide naming system.
The problem is getting enough people to want to participate,
which is admittedly easier with a TLD than 2LD
(thus Turkmenistan's .tm has some extra opportunities.)
Some of the small-country name registries have used ambiguity-resolving
name-spaces, which had forms like
www.1234.interesting-name.com.zz
where multiple participants who wanted interesting-name.com.zz
each got a number, and the page www.interesting-name.com.zz
had some indication of which company named interesting-name was which.
Back when Usenet was primarily uucp-based rather than tcp/ip based,
and we all had ambiguous names, "Harris's Lament" said that
"All the good ones are taken", but nobody was commercially worried
about the problem; you just used hop-by-hop routing and it was ok.
The Plan 9 operating system from Bell Labs used a relatively-defined
naming system rather than an absolute-rooted system, and there's a
paper by (I think) Ken Thompson and Rob Pike called "The Hideous Name"
on why that's a Good Thing. I don't know if Inferno kept that or not.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:49