A Name Resolver for the Distributed Web | Hacker News Reader

A Name Resolver for the Distributed Web

blog.cloudflare.com

33 pointswarenhor7 comments

Maybe I'm being cynical, but it feels weird to read a post about all this "decentralized web" technology from a company built entirely on centralizing the web.

Then near the end they introduce their central gateway to this decentralized web, and tell us that another similar gateway is merging into theirs.

I'm not against introducing more options for decentralization into browsers, but I don't think you're going to do that by making it unnecessary through central gateways.

They want to be the Gmail of dWeb.

While I understand the cynicism, I think that this point is critical:

"It means that while Cloudflare provides resolution-as-a-service, none of the components has to be trusted."

Of course it would be better if there were multiple interchangeable "resolution-as-a-service" providers, and even better if no one needed to use those services because their OS provided the functionality locally, but we're unfortunately a long way from that, and we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good while pursuing that goal.

> A Centralized Name Resolver for the Distributed Web

ftfy

Be that as it may, it seems mostly fine for cloudflare to cache distributed content and to help with lookup. If IPFS etc. end up depending on them too much then cloudflare can be a point of failure if they pull the plug.

Any reason why IPFS addresses cant be handled by "regular" DNS. There doesn't seem to be any technical limitation. Why aren't cloudflare doing that instead of jumping on the blockchain/ENS hype train.

The article covers all that.

Not really. They say "dweb resolvers ideally provide.." but that is opinion. DNSSec covers #1 (with more security than trusting a 3rd party ENS resolver, actually), and #3 is also a problem for non dot-eth domains. I don't see much value in #2 personally.

That said, I found elsewhere in the cloudflare site (https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/distributed-web-gateway/) that they do indeed support IPFS DNSLink on their IPFS proxy, so ill shut up about it :)

I guess its more a way of them tacking on additional 3rd-party resolvers, instead of proposing to resolve IPFS via blockchain.

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