The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Starting P2P-DNS

An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay Co-Founder, Peter Sunde, has started a new project which will provide a decentralized p2p based DNS system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN. The project is called P2P-DNS and according to the project's wiki, this is how the project is described: 'P2P-DNS is a community project that will free internet users from imperial control of DNS by ICANN. In order to prevent unjust prosecution or denial of service, P2P-DNS will operate as a distributed and less centralized service hosted by the users of DNS. Temporary substitutes, (as Alpha and Beta developments), are being made ready for deployment. A network with no centralized points of failure, (per the original design of the internet), remains our goal. P2P-DNS is developing rapidly.'"

Comments

I love the idea,

[pecosdave]

But there is so, so much potential for spammers to kill it before it gets out of the gate good. Spammers so far have killed quite a large number of things that used to be cool on the internet and they're not going to stop until they're reigned in or nobody uses anything electronic anymore because of them.

Re:I love the idea,

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd be more concerned by advertisers/audience tracker types than spammers(though, it is true, the botnet herders probably have enough hosts that, barring clever design, all domain names will point to h3rbal v15gra...)

There was a story a while back, I think it hit slashdot, about a university research group that set up a bugged tor node in order to explore that network. Because, unlike most of the idealists and tinfoil hats running tor nodes, they had a 100Mb symmetric line or something equally punchy, they had become the exit node of choice for some alarming percentage of the system by the end of their study.

Similarly, in the classic P2P scenarios, there are usually a few super seeders on University or colo connections, who end up moving a surprising percentage of the total traffic; because their connections are markedly better(and have basically 100% uptime compared to all the casual kids. Even when the casual kids actually introduce the material to the swarm, much of it ends up moving through the big guys.

I would imagine, again barring careful design(which would be tricky; because speed is of the essence with DNS lookups, unless you want your experience to suck), that it would be fairly trivial for google, Phorm, Neilson(if they aren't still living in the 19th century), or the like to set up a few P2P DNS servers that, for a few hundred bucks a month per geographic region, are by far the most responsive and fastest in the area(basic dual-socket 1u colo box on a gigabit line, we aren't talking crazy money here) which would give them near-ISP level of insight into where users of the P2P DNS are going...

Re:I love the idea,

[Anonymous Coward]

Spammers are why we can't have nice things.

Re:I love the idea,

[silly_sysiphus]

I went through essentially the same process this year; all you need to do is sell your overpriced/overvalued Apple hardware and use that money for a (maybe slightly used) Thinkpad, preferably a T-series. Heck, I made a profit switching from a Macbook Pro to a Thinkpad, and ended up with faster, newer, more capable hardware. (high-end Thinkpads are fantastic on their own merits, but stand out for being some of the most Linux-friendly laptops around...of course, if you just need a desktop, the job's even easier).

Re:I love the idea,

[Rich0]

Cost to send a bazillion spam emails from other people's computers:? Pretty close to zero.

Benefit from doing so:? Not much, but greater than zero.

Cost:benefit ratio:? Probably better than buying blue chip stocks.

Re:I love the idea,

[Beardo the Bearded]

Spam doesn't sell products. Spam is itself the product. Spammers sell the spam service to people who think that spam works. "If only 1/10th of 1% buy, then you meet your ROI!" but that's just a lie to get the cash.

The emails themselves are the product that is being purchased. The items being hawked are irrelevant.

Re:I love the idea,

[M. Baranczak]

I'd be more concerned by advertisers/audience tracker types than spammers

There's a difference?

Good luck with that.

[Skarecrow77]

When you violate US copyright law, the feds really just kinda laugh and say "ok, sure, whatever."
When you try and prevent the US government from taking over something they've set their sights on dominating, they're a whole other kind of aggressive beast.

watch your back dude...

Re:Good luck with that.

[vlm]

Up Next - "The Pirate Bay Co-Founded killed in mysterious accident"

Accused of rape in a friendly foreign country, more likely.

Re:Good luck with that.

[Arancaytar]

As long as they haven't tried to kill Assange, Sunde is probably safe. There are people the US government hates far more than the Pirate Bay.

(Unless, of course, the RIAA decides to start hiring... private contractors.)

So let's keep trying

[Anonymous Coward]

A completely decentralized internet would be nothing less than the holy grail of communications. So let's try to support those who strive for this noble goal. A centralized network, no matter how "democratic", is ultimately founded on political power, and I certainly don't have to explain why political power can't be trusted.

Re:Lack of Adoption ... Again

[Ltap]

Exactly. If people aren't installing Adblock Plus, despite all of the enormous benefits, they are going to mess with alternate DNS -- assuming they even know what DNS is and what it does. On the other hand, it doesn't necessarily need to have perfect adoption. Like torrents, it is fine if it starts with a few technically proficient people, then spreads outwards.

Also, you've probably underestimated the use against, say, schools or workplaces that use alternate DNS servers with "questionable" domains removed. Using this with encryption will pretty much kill any attempt at monitoring.

Re:Lack of Adoption ... Again

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, a few more people are going to hop on board and put up with the speed and security issues. But could someone outline how the whole public would get on board with this?

That's like saying the general public isn't going to download a separate application just to download music files (Napster) or that they're going to learn something "complicated" like how to find BitTorrent trackers and stuff just to download movies and television shows, and yet ... What's really great about this is that end users will not have to do anything. It will be built into P2P applications.

Re:2 questions

[werfu]

2: would this be a router's worst nightmare? In tree structure that ISPs has put us in, yes. But if this structure ever fails and we get back to the original net design, which is a mesh network, than it would not be such a problem. DNS change would be propagated to next nodes, wave like. IMO the problems come from the centralization and tree structure the net has become. We've seen fiber optic cable cutting net access to a whole part of the world. What would happen in a global war? Or a megalomaniac terrorist decided to cut net links all around the world? Worst economical crash ever? We're too dependent on big telcos and governments infrastructures. The net should be open, free for anyone. Simply by airwaves, like a big shout going unstopped around the world. Alright, enough dreaming here, I'm out :)

Re:Been Tried...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flying was also tried time and a time again, but eventually humans flew.

While seemingly insightful at first blush, that comment is useless. Of course some difficult problems can eventually be solved. That's a big duh-four, good buddy.

yawn

[burris]

Before embarking in this project, shouldn't he finish his replacement for BitTorrent he announced a few years back?

I'm sure the DNS project will be as successful as that one.

Re:Been Tried...

[bluefoxlucid]

Right, a P2P decentralized DNS would need to rely on date-stamped, signed DNS entries with hierarchy control. Who owns slashdot.org? Does it DNS? No? Okay, find entries. Oh, here's several, but this one's outdated, and these three are newer than this still valid one signed by someone else. Well then that one should be valid. Okay, so the same entity should be signing *.slashdot.org entries... see?