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Comment by lcswi | Hacker News Reader

That's a horrific url though, any way to 'humanise' that?

Yes. (IPFS author here)

1. Add a TXT record to DNS <domain> with:

   dnslink="/ipns/QmWGb7PZmLb1TwsMkE1b8jVK4LGceMYMsWaSmviSucWPGG"

2. should be able to use https://ipfs.io/ipns/<domain>

See it in action here: https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.io

WARNING: IPNS is still under dev. it's not robust yet, convergence may not be perfect.

Also - if I remember correctly - if you visit ipfs.io with the Host header set to foo.com, it will return /ipns/foo.com.

Yes exactly, the IPFS daemon running there looks at the Host: header and uses it to build an `/ipns/<the-header>` path which it will resolve and respond accordingly.

How is "ownership" over a domain resolved?

Just classic DNS -- you set a TXT record on that domain, and IPFS uses standard DNS resolution to get the value of it.

Is there any place I can track IPNS completeness? I've seen issues / PRs / commits related to this, but just wondering if I can find a single-page/issue tracker.

Just made an issue for this after seeing your comment: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/1716

There should be some progress on ipns pretty soon, i'm working on a 'phase one' fix that improves upon the current situation, and will be replaced later by our final implementation once the specification and requirements for it are complete.

From section 3.7.2 of the IPFS paper [1], on IPNS ("Human Friendly Names"):

While IPNS is indeed a way of assigning and reassigning names, it is not very user friendly, as it exposes long hash values as names, which are notoriously hard to remember. These work for URLs, but not for many kinds of offline transmission. Thus, IPFS increases the user-friendliness of IPNS with the following techniques.

[1] https://github.com/ipfs/papers/raw/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-...

I think so, yes. IPNS can bootstrap of DNS if you want. By adding a DNS TXT record of the form "dnslink=/ipfs/longhorriblehashhere", you can have paths like /ipns/example.com/2015/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-ipfs/.

For example, the ipfs.io site is hosted on ipfs/ipns, and available through the gateway at https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.io/

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