[Freedombox-discuss] Establishing Communicationbetween Freedomboxes

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson bre at pagekite.net
Thu Jul 7 21:34:32 UTC 2011


On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor
<dkg at fifthhorseman.net>wrote:

> On 07/07/2011 02:43 PM, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson wrote:
> > However, if 100 dissidents use 10000 different TLDs from 1000 different
> DNS
> > providers,
>
> FWIW, there are nowhere near 10000 TLDs; you're probably not actually
> interested in TLDs directly, but rather in the labels variously
> described as "effective TLDs" or the "public suffix list", which
> currently has just over 4000 members, of which only about 260 are actual
> TLDs:
>
>  http://publicsuffix.org/
>

Yes, that was a mistake, I meant to just write 'domains'.  There is an
unlimited number of those. :-)

You seem to be suggesting that powerful forces can't meddle directly in
> DNS without it being a big deal.  Unfortunately, this is already
> happening, and it turns out to be Business As Usual.  Please see the
> latest news about domain name seizures by the US government, and various
> legal actions against the DNS via registrars and registries, using tools
> like the DMCA.
>

Those seizures all took place on .com/.net/... domains, right?  I don't
think the Americans have had the audacity to go after domains under TLDs
nominally belonging to foreign countries yet.

Mostly my point is that there is often a benefit to be had from staying with
mainstream, tried and tested solutions when possible - just because the
established systems aren't perfect does not mean they should be discarded
without careful consideration.  Also, the more compatible the FreedomBox
stack is with the "legacy Internet", the easier it will be to implement, the
easier it will be for people to migrate and the more we can piggy-back off
existing experience and infrastructure.

That's all really.  I know lots of people think DNS is fundamentally broken,
but I'm not one of them.  And it's not like DNS is standing still either, it
is still evolving, albeit slower than we might like.

Many people currently look up their keyserver's IP address through DNS.
>  They don't need to do so, though; it's not difficult to come up with
> other access strategies.  There is no explicit dependency on DNS for the
> current keyserver network.
>

That's actually worth emphasizing, in the context of FreedomBox discovery as
well.  Just because DNS could be the initial or most common way to convert a
'user.domain.org' name into a FreedomBox identity (whatever that is),
doesn't mean it has to be the only one.

So to put things another way: being *able* to use DNS would be an awesome
*feature* of whatever people do end up using for discovery.  All that is
necessary for that to be satisfied is for the key to have the structure of a
domain name, and the data to fit in an A or TXT record (or two or three).

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/
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