On 10/12/10 14:14, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote: > DNS is not a discovery service (search engines are better for > that). It is a naming and mapping service, with stable names.
I'd argue that in its current form, DNS is both a discovery service and a stable naming service. If someone tells me "I think you'd enjoy wasting countless hours of your life on slashdot.org", and I type slashdot.org into my browser, DNS is being used as a discovery service, and that's the function I'm saying could be replaced with search engines. On the other hand if someone sends me a link to slashdot.org and I click on it, DNS is being used as a stable naming service, and that's the function I'm saying could be replaced with a decentralised public-key-to-IP-address mapping service (where each mapping would be timestamped and signed with the corresponding private key). The reason for separating these two functions is that a discovery service requires human-memorable names, and therefore requires trust in the party who provides the mapping, whereas a stable naming service doesn't require any trust (because everything's cryptographically verifiable) and can therefore be implemented in a decentralised way. Fortunately the discovery function of DNS is only used rarely, so I'm arguing that it's alright to ask the user to make a judgement call in such cases, whereas the stable naming function is used very frequently and needs to be automatic. > The fact that you type names or not is irrelevant. To send this > message, I did not type '[email protected]', I just replied > to your email. Nevertheless, I relied on the DNS to be sure it is sent > to the proper machine, without fuzzy matching and without long > explorations of possible results (and subsequent questions to the > sender). Yes, absolutely, search engines should only be used in rare cases like word-of-mouth recommendations where DNS is currently used as a discovery service - in all other cases we should use a decentralised system that doesn't require human-memorable names. For example, this list might be called something like [email protected], and both of us would just reply to that address without ever trying to memorise it. That's why I asked how often you actually type a domain name. In any situation (such as replying to an email) where you don't manually enter the domain, it doesn't need to be a human-memorable name. Cheers, Michael _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
