[Freedombox-discuss] DHTs and Names

[gnu@toad.com (John Gilmore)]

> Somebody, please confirm that the project will continue to use DNS? 

First, given that FreedomBox will use already-deployed technologies in
the short to medium term, there is no real alternative to DNS.  So,
yes, the project will continue to use DNS.

Second, there are half a dozen poorly conceived projects to "replace"
or "augment" the DNS, to provide "censorship resistance" and other
desirable characteristics.  Unfortunately, few of them are being
designed by people with actual experience at running a globally
distributed, locally cached, high performance, high availability
massive database.  Few of them are designed to be any better than DNS
at resisting determined attacks.  (Know how to make a Kademlia DHT
secure against deliberate poisoning by censors?  I don't either.)  And
most of them seem to assume that DNS will still be around to handle
99.999% of the queries, leaving their odd corner to in theory handle a
tiny fraction of the queries.  So they're all likely to fail -- or to
not scale up beyond a few thousand nodes, which is the same thing.
We'll be using the DNS for the foreseeable future.

	John

PS: Don't get me wrong -- I think the DNS could possibly be replaced.
It's one of the Internet's oldest existing protocols.  It was designed
before any distributed databases existed, simply because there were no
peer to peer networks on which to distribute any databases.  And its
fundamental weakness is its hierarchical control, which has allowed
NSI, ICANN and other throbbing leeches to feed themselves at the
expense of the Internet's users.  It dances much better than we have
any right to expect this aging bear to dance.

But now it's 40 years later, and we have networks; the community has
learned a lot about building widely distributed databases.  I think a
responsible party SHOULD launch an effort to replace the hierarchical
DNS with something that would do the job better AND which would
disintermediate the leeches.  However, that's a multi-decade project
starting with serious RESEARCH, implementation, and then massive
deployment.  That's not a job suitable for the FreedomBox Foundation.