On 06/12/10 21:31, Julian Cain wrote: > This doesn't fix the problem which is the US federal government.
The problem isn't any particular government. The problem is that any global, hierarchical namespace requires global, hierarchical management. Even if the method of distributing .p2p DNS records were completely decentralised, *somebody* would still have to decide who owned which domains within the .p2p namespace, and those owners would then have to decide who owned which subdomains. > The only way to fix this permanently is to take back control, build a new DNS > infrastructure, and deploy it. It's worse than that - the only way to manage without hierarchical control is to give up one of two things: global agreement about who owns which name, or the ability to prevent name-squatting. For the sake of argument, let's imagine that we give up global agreement. Perhaps in the future a DNS lookup might work something like a web search works today: I go to a semi-trusted broker and ask that broker to resolve a name for me. The broker returns one or more results. If two or more owners claim the same name, the broker either selects one, or ranks them. I have the option of asking another broker the same question and comparing the results. Anyone can switch brokers at any time. At any given moment there's an unstable consensus among users about which brokers are usually reliable, and an unstable consensus among brokers about which names correspond to which owners. Since the lookup process is a bit fuzzy and requires human judgement, it's only be used in situations that absolutely require a human-memorable name, such as word-of-mouth recommendations. Most of the time - in links, bookmarks, configuration files, email headers - machines are referred to by unambiguous, verifiable, but unmemorable names, such as the hashes of their public keys, which can be resolved to IP addresses via decentralised infrastructure without requiring centralised control. In other words: who needs DNS if we have reliable search engines and HIP? How many domain names do you type per day anyway? Cheers, Michael _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
