Continuing the Distributed DNS System

bs0d3 writes "Last year, piratebay co-founder Peter Sunde gathered coders to begin a decentralized 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. Today the project continues, barely. A majority of interest shifted to namecoin once the idea was realized, but coder Caleb James DeLisle continues on the first project. So far he has DHT nodes and routers worked out, and awaits help on his IRC channel whenever volunteers are willing to join."

Comments

Trademarks?

[MightyYar]

I know they are the "pirate party", but there needs to be some way to protect trademarks. As much as I like the dark underbelly of the internet, I also like being able to use online banking and such without having to remember something like the_REAL_bank_of_america.com

Re:Trademarks?

[MightyYar]

There's over a hundred years of trademark law to handle these disputes, and in general it works well. Apple.com could have gone to The Apple Growers Co-Op or some such if they got there first, but applecomputer.com is a clear trademark. This is a solved problem, with only a smattering of cases that cause real issues (Nissan being one).

ICANN? No you can't, buddy.

[elrous0]

Don't worry, I'm sure the U.S. will just declare this a terrorist movement and start actively blocking all alternative DNS servers by IP. Then we can get into the escalating you-jailbreak-it-we-find-a-way-to-stop-the-jailbreak-you-jailbreak-it-again game that seems to be the inevitable result of a conflict between those who want total freedom and those who want to stifle freedom within their own self-serving carefully defined boundaries.

I'm more worried abut the USA losing control...

[John Hasler]

...to the UN, which would hand DNS over to something like WIPO. At first glance Namecoin looks great. Let's try to make it work. We need to get it up and running before major governments start outlawing what they will call "rogue" DNS.

Re:I'm more worried abut the USA losing control...

[Xest]

Yawn, I've said it many a time, anti UN whinging about this is just stupid and demonstrates massive ignorance. The UN already objectively handles this sort of thing well with it's management of international telephony (ITU), international maritime standards (IMO), international air standards (ICAO), international post (UPU) and so forth. The fact you apparently don't realise this is a testament to the great job they do, have you never wondered why you can easily send post to different countries with no wonder about htf it's going to get there? have you never wondered why there's no problems with planes flown by people from different countries with different cultures, speaking different languages crossing tens of borders within a single flight? have you never wondered how painlessly you can make a phone call abroad despite the plethora of different national telecommunications laws, concepts, and technologies between countries?

The UN is perfect to this role, because unlike the US it means no single country can enforce anything, it means consent is required of all member nations to push through things like web blocking. That means no more arbitrary US censorship with ICE, no more arbitrary effective shut downs of other country's companies corporate sites because some Texas patent troll court wins an injunction the victim never knew was filed against them, no more ability of redneck states to shut down the likes of Antigua's online gambling industry domains simply because of their own ass backwards moral standards. That's of course before you go into the drama of the new buy your own TLD plan which destroys the hierarchial structure of DNS, is technical idiocy, but was allowed through because it means far more cash for ICANN's staff and directors to pocket.

Global consensus in a world with such vast disagreement meaning controversal stuff inevitably finds itself at least one veto, whilst mundane stuff that's pretty essential (like changes relating to DNS Security) passes easily is far more sensible than everything goes P2P, or everyone being forced to adhere to the lowest common denominator state of moral standards in the US.

As for WIPO, would now be a bad time to point out that WIPO worked well like this originally too, with poorer nations vetoing over the top IP protection for the pharmaceutical industry so that the suffering amongst their populace could afford medicine and the like too, but as a result of this, primarily the US, pushed this sort of thing into a new organisation - the WTO precisely so it could bypass the fairness that WIPO originally offered?

Yes, that's right, the UN isn't the problem, a minority of countries like the US is, which is precisely why it shouldn't retain control of ICANN. The only parts of the UN that don't work well are the parts that aren't truly representative of the global community - the likes of the security council, the WTO and so forth, though even these are still better than organisations controlled unilaterally like ICANN. This is why ICANN should be moved to a representative UN organisation like WIPO was before America gimped it, like the ITU, ICAO, UPU etc. thankfully still are

Re:I'm more worried abut the USA losing control...

[ledow]

The problems I see with namecoin appear to be:

1) You have to buy the name-IP links. This is usually by crunching a certain amount of numbers for either bitcoin or namecoin. To me, this says that he who has the most computing power (i.e. government / banks / spammers) wins all the interesting names.

2) Because they have monetary value (and are created by it), you can potentially run into problems when transferring them to someone, or receiving - unwittingly handling stolen goods, etc.

3) The above = first come, first served. Yes, DNS has this problem too but first-come, first-served on something that is starting from scratch seems stupid. Why is there no thought yet to integration with existing DNS? The value of the DNS system is NOT in the management of it, but in the data included in it. Without that data, .namecoin is just as bad as any other .obscure TLD.

4) The name links are purely one name to one IP. No load-balancing, mailservers, SPF, DNS tricks, etc. This I would consider to be a HUGE disadvantage. If you're going to replace DNS, then you need to replace DNS. Not go back in time to pre-DNS days and implement only the single, simplest job that it does and which would be insufficient for huge swathes of the Internet. Hell, even if they'd just set it so that was the nameserver it linked to (which could then answer more questions about the subdomains, other records etc.), it would have been infinitely more useful, but that's NOT what it appears to do.

5) It's all a bit convoluted. Patches to this and that, here and there.

It seems to me that a P2P DNS alternative should act as nothing more than a P2P lookup of the already-existing and conventional DNS data. If enough people think that www.example.com resolves to 1.2.3.4, that's what it should resolve to under P2P DNS. There's no reason that a trust / reputation system couldn't do this, and still be secure to those people who trust nobody.

Sure, you can have other TLD's of your own choosing for purely P2P services, but what people want is a replica of current DNS under a different backend protocol, not a half-assed replacement.

I still need to look up google.com much more often than I would anything.namecoin and there's no facility to account for that currently. And, what the hell do you do about DNSSEC? If that comes first, you lose.

Re:I'm more worried abut the USA losing control...

[Infernal Device]

Yes, the UN generally does an OK job, except for that bit where they want to censor speech that makes other parties feel bad.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/01/14/2009-01-14_unacceptable_censorship_the_united_natio.html

There is not one common standard for "defamation". An atheist might say that it is impossible to "defame" a religion, since they're all made up anyway. A hard-line Christian or Muslim might conclude that any criticism whatsoever was defamation. Additionally, the freedom of speech in member countries is not synchronized in the least. Consider that in the UK, a newspaper can be ordered to not publish certain articles about individuals, which is practically inconceivable in the US. German courts have ruled that the names of criminals cannot be published alongside their crimes, regardless of the fact that they actually committed such crimes (not "may have committed", but "actually did commit").

Where does it stop? Once we allow the UN the toehold in determining what is acceptable speech, where is the line that cannot be crossed?

Re:I'm more worried abut the USA losing control...

[Xest]

Right, but that's precisely my point. You're referring to a section of the UN that relies on simple majority vote, rather than the sections I pointed to which rely on international consensus to operate.

I quite agreed with you in my original post that the sections of the UN that don't work are those where consensus is not required and where vested interests can succesfully pursue their agenda like the US does with the WTO.

The problem with your argument is that you're then extrapolating this to imply the whole of the UN is like this which is simply wrong and as I said previously demonstrates little more than ignorance of the UN. It's populist tosh, it's completely false and simply plays to the xenophobic ultra-patriotic tea-party America mindset that's a disease on this planet.

I agree the UN has bad points, bad groupings- the fact countries like Iran and Libya were on the human rights panel was a complete fucking joke for instance, but that's not the point - the point is organisations like the ITU that rely on consensus and which would have to be far more of a blueprint for any UN organisation if not handled by the ITU itself work very very well - again, far better than unilateral US control and besides - even if you had a valid point, that the UN does follow in it's entirety the majority rule demonstrated in the link you posted, how is this better than the US' unilateral control involving censorship of gambling and so forth? Although I don't personally agree with it at least in the article you linked there's a fair argument that condemning religious hate speak has the goal of preventing unnecessary violence in the world - what does censoring foreign gambling sites, legitimate foreign businesses, or sites arbitrarily defined as piracy sites achieve for the world exactly other than decreased access to culture?

Re:I'm more worried abut the USA losing control...

[Xest]

"IMO one of the worst things that could be done would be to hand over what is essentially a technical domain problem to a group of politicians. The UN, outside of maybe the Security Council and General Assembly which recognizes governments and countries and occasionally deploys "peacekeeping" forces, is pretty worthless."

This is another fine example of the ignorant scourge that plagues these kind of political debates. What are you on about handing over a technical problem to politicians? You are aware that the likes of the ITU, UNESCO and so forth are staffed by some of the formost experts in their fields? Not people who have any political standing, no, people who have worked themselves up from being average Joes to knowing something about the field in question.

The only part of the UN you hear about are the politicians sure, but there are far more people making the cogs turn doing things that make our increasingly globalised and interconnected world work together seamlessly in a number of ways - again, the examples I cited are pretty good demonstrations of this - telecomms, post, maritime, and air.

Re:not quite the right goal

[Zironic]

Well, from a technical standpoint if they get .p2p to work, it's fairly trivial to then change it to work for all domains.

The reason that these projects use their own top level domain is so they can avoid spending time on resolving name space conflicts.

Namecoin = stupid

[GameboyRMH]

Namecoin has a first-come-first-served system of domain ownership with no oversight. That means it will only ever be popular with Internet libertarians, because nobody else would want to touch such an anarchic hellhole. It would never ever be practical for business. Ever. And .onion is technically better so it's not even useful for uber-geek tinkering.

Re:Namecoin = stupid

[Infernal Device]

That they are using the same method of "earning" a domain name makes me about as uncomfortable as I am with bitcoin. Additionally, it will become near impossible to purchase a domain name in the future, as the difficulty in mining namecoins rises.

I feel like their project is missing the point - the issue is censorship and bypassing it, rather than purchasing names.