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Peter Sunde Wants To Create Alternative To ICANN
An anonymous reader writes "According to Peter Sunde's Twitter feed, he has been suspicious of ICANN for a long time. The non-profit corporation is tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces as well as handling the management of top-level domain name space including the operation of root nameservers. Sunde has lost a domain in the past because of the way ICANN acted. It was taken without any consultation on their part, instead the organization relied on information from recording industry group IFPI to change the domain ownership. But it seems for some reason his frustration has come to a head recently, and he has put a call out for help to create a competing root server."
The ROOT domain system is just that, it's trusted because well, if we didn't trust somebody at #1 this whole thing wouldn't work. You can't have a competing .com, .net, .org registry... sure, you could declare your own TLD and be root of that but, well, we don't trust you as much as we trust ICANN because, well, they've been root for a while now and haven't blown it that badly.
Sounds like Peter Sunde is bitter at his lost domain. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
An alternative name registry service would do wonders to cripple the whole "internet censorship" bandwagon that has been going on recently. Blacklists? Rendered at the very least 2X as difficult to implement on a national scale, simply because the clients you are attempting to prevent from accessing content can reach that content by using the alternate name resolution service.
It would make measures like the Australian blacklist falderall all that much more difficult to actually pull off, and would render efforts like COICA similarly difficult.
Do it. Do it now.
No more of this Pansy DNS crap. Know your IP address like you know your phone number. Cut these clowns off at the legs. Free the net to the people who know how to use it and won't download viruses to their own computers thinking it's antivirus software... Take charge by taking responsibility from those who don't care and don't know!
FTA-
"His plan involves the creation of a dns root server to begin with that uses PEER-TO-PEER technology and is SECURE"
uh...I'm pretty sure those two things normally don't go together...
Not so much to defense against the recording industry but there are countries (well 2 in particular) that want to control the internet. Imagine that kill-switch the US wants so badly... Wikileaks would be gone. So I think this is a fairly good plan, albeit with some major technically issues to overcome. The best way for everyone would be a system like tor/.onion. But with much better encryption and blind routing. Having said that, I wouldn't have a clue to implement it. One thing is for certain, there should not be 1 organization or 1 government with absolute powers over the internet. The internet is in essence like the air we breath. A right, not a privilege in this day and age.
On the one hand, I absolutely want to see control over domain names taken out of anyone's hands (not just ICANN's).
However, decentralized naming is a *hard* problem. Only one entity can control a given domain name, and something, either human or automated, must decide who gets that domain name. Whether by fiat or general consensus, some process must exist to handle the case where multiple people want the same name. ("First come first served" does not suffice unless you have fees or some other measure to prevent mass registration, and decentralized control makes those measures difficult.)
(Numbers, by comparison, prove quite trivial; just use public keys. But people don't like typing in long numbers, they like typing in *names*.)
Can't he just ask the Chinese to redirect the domain to his server?
We'll call it UCANNT *rimshot*
Universal Co-op for Assigned Names, Numbers and Timeservers
Seriously though, I do think a backup system would be a good idea....It's needed in order to stop the growing attempts (that I think we're going to see a lot more of) to control, censor, filter, and police the internet....Due to the practicalities involved in how the system works, I am not certain how plausible it would be to have two competing systems while everything is working smoothly, and there are other points where the system could be messed with, but having a framework in place might not be a bad idea with the political realities we live in...
It's the same part of me that, were I holding a cigarette lighter and a stick of dynamite, would be tempted to light the stick and throw it like they do in the movies, just to see what an exploding stick of dynamite really looks like. There's been so much greed and stupidity around the DNS, and it would be so *feasible* for someone to set up an independent alternative, I'd sort of like to see what it would look like when the existing system is blown to kingdom come.
However -- were I ever to be holding an actual stick of dynamite in my hands, the part of me that tends to say things like "this is not the optimum time to make an impulsive decision" would become quite strident. It's not that I would never, under any circumstance light a stick of dynamite and throw it. It's just that it being a really cool idea wouldn't be enough to make me try it until I'd thought through the consequences very, very carefully.
And as it stands, the DNS system does me more good than it has ever harmed me, and likewise for the vast majority of people who use it. It might be that giving *serious consideration* to a competitive system would do a lot of good, but a competition between two systems in which both survived would almost certainly be a bad thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Is Peter the illegitimate son of Karl Denninger? We had the same story 15 years ago.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Hhhmmm I can see good and bad on this one
I like the idea of making it more difficult to implement censorship but I have a feeling i may end up with and Apple Web and a Google Web and governments will like this in the long term I suspect
People who talk about "the Internets" aren't clueless idiots after all, they're actually ahead of the rest of us.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
OpenNIC. While it mirrors the ICANN addresses, it also adds several new TLDs (.oss, .geek, .parody, even .gopher) which can be easily used. This is but one of the many alternative DNS roots, but it's the most popular, and it's democratically-run.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternic
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
someone has hit the headlines with the idea. it was long time coming. tho there are stuff like opennic (actually im using their dns now). these need more traction.
Read radical news here
Well, most of us with half a brain _already_ don't trust ICANN at all. With the signed root, you really just need to push broken DS records to invalidate entire portions of the DNSSEC namespace. The UCSA (United Corporate States of America) is quite clear that it wants to retain control, AND wants to have a "kill switch".
Well, DNSSEC *IS* by design a kill switch. It has to be, in order to work. So, we have the ccTLD root keys manually locked into our resolvers, not just the signed root. There are ways against a root blackout, if the trust anchors for the ccTLDs are still valid. We assume the gTLDs will be offline anyway, because even good people like the ones behind ISC don't want to be shot in the head for treason.
Adding extra (signed!) namespaces is equally easy, you don't have to override the root. In fact, you do not WANT to override the root, running a root server is not something you can do without lots of preparation, and *real* DoS-shielded setups. A _simple_ root server takes: Two BGP routers (one does the forwarding, the other keeps the BGP prefix up with the next_hop of the forwarding router, to make sure any DoS does not migrate to the next node should this one go down), two hardware linespeed load balancers (gigabit ethernet at least), and four to six root servers. Add two hardware linespeed traffic scrubbers if you cannot just lose that root node to a DDoS.
The root server runs a specific software that only does autoritative DNS/NSEC1 *very fast*, and they don't contain much data, you need TLD node farms for that. Non-joke root servers (serving more than 10GB/s) are considerably larger (the same size as a TLD server farm). And the routing and traffic scrubbing hardware is damn expensive.
So, that's about US$ 100k per small anycast root node, and >US$ 1M for really large ones. And you need around 200 of those around the world if you want to do a proper job, latency to root servers has to be *low*. And a new TLD that is to be used for real would need a lot of the really large nodes.
So, you really want some sort of P2P DNSSEC, to switch from a centralized model to a distributed model. You will NOT be able to wrestle the TLDs from USCA control otherwise.
Good luck, it is a _hard_ problem.
a p2p, encrypted, decentralized DNS system. this is what we need.
we also need to migrate all domain ownerships currently existing in icann registry to it though. else, smartasses or squatters will grab people's domains.
Read radical news here
How stupid is it that the summary about the lost domain is double the length of the page that it links to (234 vs 117 characters)? I clicked the link to get more information, not less!
Back on topic, there is a price that you pay for a fairly unregulated domain name market, and that is the occasional stuff up as described here. I have had the opposite problem in the past, attempts to get a domain transfered have been held up despite the owner agreeing to the transfer. Admittedly, losing a name is far worse than the temporary hassles of delays in transferals.
Every page on the web can now have its own Wikipedia-style disambiguation page!
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
1 - Save a history of DNS resolutions like Archive.org does for all important websites
2 - Wait for the government to censor
3 - Get loads of visitors to your site to get the last cached IP, while the site owner updates his site to redirect visitors to the new domain name
4 - Profit!
So by a non profit organization they actually mean that when their bills are paid their salary just keeps increasing? This is just as much as scam as the single family owned and operated ISBN system. It's a wonder that anyone on this planet trusts a US based business anymore.
ICAAN started out as real geeks, then became a bunch of fake geeks, now is a bunch of lawyers, and is destined to become a bunch of business exectives until it finally becomes a bunch of ex-elected officials. That's how these organizations evolve once they become responsible for handling real power.
. . . till he gets bored of it and it disappears, and all the users are SOL?
slopsbox anyone?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
ICANN isn't in the Internet Protocol business, they're in the Intellectual Property business. It's about Trademark Control Protectionism, not Transmission Control Protocol. And the people who run the real root servers don't work for ICANN, but they do cooperate with them, and any attempts at alternate roots failed years ago, for reasons that aren't going to change.
Furthermore, if you want to start an alternate naming business, you can hang it off the existing DNS structure as myroot.someTLD so real people can find it, and then try convincing customers that they should buy theirname.yourTLD.myroot.someTLD from you because 0.0001% of the population can access it as theirname.yourTLD using your root. If you've got a spare couple hundred thousand dollars, write up a proposal to ICANN about why your project is cool enough and they might sell you your own real TLD, but the catch is that "competing with ICANN" isn't a business plan they're interested in, and .sex TLD for Profit" is a plan that other people with far more money than you have already been trying to sell them on.
"selling names in a
If you don't like that, you could try buying a country code TLD from some small country. Most of the good ones already realize their commercial value, and ICANN has been trying to bully all the CCTLD administrations for years, with some success, and a lot of random small countries end up deciding that they don't like the business plan you've spent big bucks promoting because they're Islamic Republics and they're shocked to discover that there's porn on the internet, though in some cases they can become less shocked for a sufficiently large cut of the profits. But maybe you'll think up a clever naming convention that you can sell to somebody; it can't be clunkier than bit.ly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...and it's running should not be subject to the whims of any organisation like IFPI or RIAA, nor the arbitrary laws of any country, even the US of A.
Do it, now.
Instead of starting another alt-root DNS system, would it not be better to work cooperatively with an already heavily establish alt-root system, such as OpenNIC (http://opennicproject.org), they've proven previously that, unlike ICANN, they have a working democratic system to their DNS management!
It'll fail like the buy sealand bit if they manage it the same way. Why duplicate efforts?
The link on the text "lost a domain" points to Mr. Sunde's Twitter feed, providing me with one sentence in his own words stating exactly what the summary did. That's pointless. The whole reason I'd click a link is to get more information about the situation described, preferably from a neutral source (or one that acknowledges its bias). Similarly, a link on the text "suspicious of ICANN for a long time" suggests a resource indicative of that long time, not one stupid tweet.
I actually sort of like Twitter, but you're using it wrong, /. blurb writers!
Create a new domain with .unique at the end for new root. Once you have something unique to reference by allow all people to create sub domain accounts under you, and then provide small dns driver updates for linux, mac and whatever else your favor.
I think its a great idea. Its hacker/admin dns that we can keep the noobies off of for a few years. Plus with the total control of our own DNS system, there's less for those in goverment to control who lean tward authoritarian government.
The way to do this is to start inside the existing namespace: get yourself a short 2nd-level domain and start signing people up underneath it. Decide on your own policies for who gets what sub-domains and delegate them out. I'd suggest making WHOIS privacy the default policy, but be sure to keep a chain of accountability so that you aren't providing a spam haven.
The fun starts when the Man comes to confiscate your 2nd-level domain. At that point, if you're big enough and enough people depend on the services resolvable under your domain, you need to do a PR campaign appealing directly to the resolver community and ask them to configure a special exception for your 2nd-level, pointing directly at your nameservers. Gets even more interesting with DNSSEC as they will need to add a DS record as well. You will need an alternative means to publish your KSK to the world. There are some interesting enhancements being proposed for the RPKI to allow this kind of sub-domain exception policy, but we need a few additions to DNS and DNSSEC to make it work smoothly.
I'm all for a new set of policies, but you've got to give props to the current root.
Google has already started testing alternative DNS servers, which I guess would operate somewhat like OpenDNS. What they need to do is start its own top level domain and offer DNS resolution to this domain.
Sites on this domain are indexed in with everything else, no special treatment. When someone searches and a result is displayed, clicking on mytorrent.goo resolves for people using google's DNS servers or puts an IP address in URL for those that aren't.
Possibly a browser plugin that would make everything transparent. Kind of like new.net...BUT WITHOUT THE FREAKING MALWARE.
New.net had a good idea if only they hadn't managed to come off looking like the Russian mafia attempting to install spyware on your computer. That and issuing competing top level domains such as .xxx
If google did this, but only with a good top level domain, I think they could pull it off. And good luck getting them to pull web sites without the proper authority to do it...
Heck, they might even could sell domain names for a fair price and people might actually buy them.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
What if they offered a "top level domain name" and resolved only this domain with a browser plugin...and by IP address if the browser did not have the plugin?
It has gotten to the point that a lot of people do not type in URLs anymore anyway, they do a search and click on the first link. I despise this, but I have gotten so used to searching google that I sometimes do it without even thinking about it.
This would totally take the steam out of someone trying to swipe any names on this "domain," and the web site would still be available to a large percentage of the Internet.
If it were to take off, it would even give people more of a reason to visit google. They could advertise, "all of the Internet, and then some."
A cool TLD name, and people might even pay for a name on it.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
"That is the only way that we can get a truly free internet."
You're high. Apparently you're thinking this organization would be made up of member states like "Rock Candy Mountain Land", "Santa's Republic of the North Pole" and "Stallmanistan".
Look at the freakin' UN:
Complain all you want about the US, but the majority of nations in the world aren't particularly freedom-loving.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I remember reading about the PB taking over the domain name of the IFPI and putting a website in its place calling it the 'International Federation of Pirate Interests'. It was all done legit as far as I remember. If ICANN gave it back to the recording industry arbitrarily, then yeah, I can see Peter's point. ICANN should behave by the consistent rules on this rather than taking a single company's word "That was ours, but we forgot to renew the name." and take the domain from some new name owner.
Have no fath in ICANN, they are working for themselves and for their partners, more or less crooked ccTLDs like Nunames.
Nunames takes back and domain it wants, to keep for their own use or to resell on SEDO and put the profit in their own pockets.
Every heard of the Zero-One-Infinity rule (if not, JFGI)?
I'm not at all saying that this shouldn't happen... just that you should keep in mind that if you do create more roots, you will not be able to have exactly two. It will, varying over time, be somewhere between two and infinity.
Any problems that will deal with the conflict between the ICANN root and a second root must scale to an infinite number of roots.
I don't believe that it's an insoluble problem. I'm just sayin'.
It doesn't have to be a complicated system. Have a web server somewhere with a well-known static ip serving up SunDeNS hostnames and ip addresses. .hosts file. .hosts file before the regular DNS and voila SunDeNS is alive and coexisting with regular DNS.
Have some kind of script retrieving frequently requested hostnames and placing a local
Prioritze looking up the
By that I mean if the SunDeNS doesn't have the hostname requested, it will look into the regular dns for the hostname.
Feel free to send me an email at dontneednames@74.125.232.117
slashwhat?
Please mod this up. There is nothing in RFC2826 that precludes the use of an aggregate root. However, for full distributed operation, the domain system must be modified (or each client must be configured to know all roots in existence, which is unmanageable). One solution is to use NXDOMAIN referrals, i.e. "I don't know, but ask x::y:z:w for more information".
I'm gonna start my own internet, with booze and hookers...
Actually, forget the booze.
What if every site suggested its own name?
STEP 1: google what you need
STEP 2: follow the link (technically ip address, actually a site description, like "Best cooking recipes")
STEP3: bookmark it (the site suggests a name for the bookmark which you can override)
STEP4: PROFIT!
It should be:
STEP4: ?????
STEP5: PROFIT
This won't work, this is what DNS fixes. The problem is that sometime after bookmarking it the site's IP address changes and thus breaks the link.
Also, your solution moves from one central authority to another, from DNS to search engine.
I'd like to keep using the current system but supplement it with an alternate one. If you want to get to torrents, etc, use the alternate system. New TLDs, new DNS, new certificate authorities, etc. Let whoever wants to run search engines.
The big question is how do we keep the new system from being influenced like the current one has?
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
it was built as a Tor-like network that supports P2P. So I wouldn't put Tor in the P2P category... they actually try to block torrents.
I2P has peer-to-peer features like bittorrent built in. Another interesting thing is the webserver you get, and the fact that even a home ISP subscriber gets a stable/unchanging address no different from any of the big nodes... I2P makes the IP address-changing problem go away.
I don't know why you would care about relay nodes.
Tor and I2P have PK addresses (for their .onion and .i2p domains respectively). They work well with random address assignment because they are a layer on top of the regular Internet. That's no problem at least for I2P: you keep the same .i2p address even if your regular IP address keeps changing.
The current system is designed to generate rent for those in control of the system. This is the main reason the domains can be lost.
I'd like to see a system where domains are **not transferrable**. Cyber squatting? Solved. DNS cencorship? Solved. Trade mark allegations? Solved. Personal domains for life? Solved.
kill non-national TLDs, and have the root servers only list the ip-addresses for the various national-TLDs.
If USA then wants to kill some domain outside of .US, start talking to whatever nation runs that TLD.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
As long as something like ICANN its needed... the system its broken
Something like Netsukuku its needed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsukuku
Osiris forums and Retroshare IM are only partial solutions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris_(Serverless_Portal_System)
http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/index.html