On 12/21/21 6:28 AM, Alejandro Acosta wrote:
Hello,
After reading the draft and the follow up emails I got interested in
this idea, I mean, to have a name for life sounds like a cool concept,
not sure if that's necessary but I guess it's better to have it that not
have it. I think I would like to see something around this. Regarding
the .arpa, I do not agree, I believe another tld should be used.
Thanks,
On 20/12/21 2:28 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
TL;DR; I have two ways of achieving my desired end. One of which
people are not going to like, the other of which they are totally
going to hate. I do not actually require IETF permission for either,
nor am I the only person thinking along these lines, I am merely the
person whose approach is least likely to result in collateral damage,
consider responses in those terms.
I have been following various naming proposals in the PonziCoin world
for some time. There are many companies who for a mere $10-200/year
will register a shortname for your ethereum wallet so people can give
you money. And of course, the cost of ethereum gas for making the
payments only makes the cost even stupider. But don't worry, there
will be a technical fix for that the minute they find themselves a
virgin and a unicorn.
OK, so those proposals are obvious nonsense but the notion of using a
Certificate Transparency type log to issue names for life on a first
come first served basis is not. Hence my callsign proposal:
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-hallambaker-mesh-callsign-01.html
[A very similar proposal has been made to ITU by the Chinese
delegation under their 'New Internet' scheme though I only became
aware of the details of that after I wrote my own. It is my belief
that the primary motivation behind the ITU proposal is to prevent the
abuse of DNS as a control point in the Internet infrastructure.]
Not sure if this is the appropriate document:
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/studygroups/2017-2020/13/Documents/Internet_2030%20.pdf
Running infrastructure costs real money but I see no reason for the
cost of running the infrastructure proposed to be more than a one-time
$0.10 per name. No renewal fees. Names are sold freehold, not rented.
The objective here is to give Internet users a name they can use for
life. And yes, I realize that it is impossible to collect $0.10 fees
so I plan to sell names in packs of 50 or so. So for the price of a
pint of beer you can buy a permanent callsign for yourself and pass
out the means to grab one to your friends.
There are of course many social issues to be considered, not least of
which where does the surplus go. My proposal being that the whole show
to be run by a not-for-profit and the surplus go to fund open source
development of secure Internet software, specifications and standards.
But that is not the part I want to talk about right now. What I do
want to talk about is how a new naming scheme interfaces to the DNS so
that it can be used to connect to legacy applications. Legacy in this
context meaning 'the stuff that is working'.
So Alice registers the callsign @alice and can use that in messaging
applications that understand the callsign scheme. Which is not hard,
just hook up to a callsign resolver and send over a query. As with
blockchain, the resolver maintains a complete copy of the log. Queries
go to a resolver, not the registry. This means far greater robustness
than DNS and offloads almost all the cost from the registry.
But what about that doorbell, that WiFi camera, etc. that Alice has?
To talk to them she needs to use her browser and that runs HTTP.
The obvious solution for this is to put a statement in the delegation
assertion for @alice to specify an authoritative DNS resolver for the
DNS addresses *.alice.mesh. The callsign resolver then delegates to
the authoritatives. The net result is that all Alice needs to do to
resolve these names is to use a DNS resolver that redirects requests
in .mesh to one of the callsign resolvers.
The net result is a protocol that respects the DNS data model at the
lower levels while modernizing the root level.
OK so nobody expects me to pay to register .mesh. I am not even going
to lift a finger to make a proposal to ICANN.
But I am not the only person making a proposal in this area and while
a single pirate TLD designed by someone who knows something of what
they are doing is likely to be amusing, a hundred or more is likely to
be less so.
Which has me looking at .ARPA instead.
Having Alice type http://coffee.alice.mesh.arpa/ instead of
https://coffee.alice.mesh/ is not as nice but she will live with it.
or if open callsigns win the naming game, the anybox in her browser
will probably let her type coffee@alice and route to the place she
expects to go.
Problem here is that RFC 3172 was written in a different era when
people were still frightened about the loss of control. The notion
that registries are not control points had not yet been understood.
So which would people prefer for the pseudo-delegation?
alice.mesh or alice.mesh.arpa?
This would be a reservation in .arpa, not a delegation.
PHB
(Oh and yes, I do have a browser implementation thanks to the heroes
who developed WebView2 at Microsoft. It's Windows only at the moment
but should be fixed with MAUI.)
(Oh and yes, I do understand how complex naming gets, I watched it all
happening in real time.)
