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Comment by wibblenut | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to get all of my friends to use .tel domains. That way they own their data and I can discover all of their URIs dynamically (through DNS) from various apps. It doubles up as a web based "business card", which makes it a slightly easier sell.

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How does the privacy features (i.e. restricting access to certain information to certain people) work if the information is embedded in DNS? (Also, how can you use "dig" or similar to extract the information from a *.tel address? Everything I try seems to return the same sort of information I'd get from any other domain.)

Privacy is achieved by encrypting records (1024-bit RSA, PKCS#1.5) and storing them using a sub-domain label known only to the counterpart (your friend). Keys are brokered by a service called TelFriends, and this is the only element of the system that's centralised. However, you only ever use it to make new friends, as your client is supposed to cache keys.

Of course, all of this complexity is hidden behind a pretty interface, so users don't have to worry :)

As for the dig command, perhaps your resolver (DSL router?) is buggy? Try Google's:

$ dig @8.8.8.8 andy.tel naptr (or 'txt' for my text records, and 'loc' for my location).

Hit me up on http://messaging.andy.tel if you want to chat about anything in more detail.

Why .tel, rather than a more common TLD?

I was curious too; from wikipedia:

"In contrast to other top-level domains .tel information is stored directly within the Domain Name System (DNS), within the actual domain name record, as opposed to the DNS simply returning details (such as IP addresses) of the machines on which information can be found."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel

Because .tel was approved specifically (and solely) for this purpose :) Here's Telnic's quick 5 minute pitch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnRwniqqiCE

This looks very handy - hadn't heard of it before. Apparently it can also be used as an OpenID.

Do you know of a list of services that actually make use of these domains?

Yup. Some apps/services are listed here: http://www.telnic.org/tools-landing.html and http://www.telnic.org/tools-other.html

I've written some stuff that I'll try and release soon.

This just seems ripe for dns injection tomfoolery.

Just like everything else, hence DNSSEC.

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