Looking at DNS and the attempt to P2P it.

Peter Sunde launched a project, reported at Computer World in an article called “P2P DNS to take on ICANN after US domain seizures”. It seems to have got stuck. This article dated 18 Oct 2011 and called Continuing the Distributed DNS System on Slashdot has some pointers. See also P2P-DNS taking control of the Internet  at memeburn.com, dated 2011.

The nearest successor seems to be namecoin, see http://namecoin.info/ , https://bit.namecoin.org & its wikipedia page. I am unsure how uncoupled the name server is from the crypto-currency.

While researching this in 2013 I came across a page on alternate roots at Wikipedia. This page says, “the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has spoken out strongly against alternative roots”. I’ll bet it has.

In 2020, I had another look, and came across https://www.namecoin.org/, here’s a query on Bruce Schneier’s site. Other’s imply that the only answer is to move to broadcast protocols, why not? It’s what ethernet is/was.

In 2023, I decided to see if the state of the art had progressed. I found this paper at Stanford U, I think it has a github source repo created on 29 Apr 2020.

5 Replies

  1. Pingback: Bitcoin |
  2. In 2014, I made a post, grandiosely entitled “Securing the Internet”, containing the following notes, together with a, now gone away, youtube video. I said, “Torrentfreak previews the next TPB evolution, a correspondent in their comments, called warcaster, made the following comments”,

    Their DNS system also sounds a bit like what DJB was proposing with CurveCP and DNSCurve. They should definitely look into those, too, to make sure they are doing it right (I see they are already using DJB’s Curve25519).

    I have deleted that post and incorporated the comments here; they are old, and belong in a DNS post.

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