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Comment by carl_dr | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: why “blame”? Does it really matter?

yes blame. ofcourse it matters. tld use to be good insight into the purpose of the website. IE, google.com, or wikipedia.org

Those tlds still exist. The existence of butts.adult doesn’t create confusion about oxfam.org

You misled me, butts.adult does in fact not exist.

Oh wow. That seems like an oversight. Somebody with $400 to burn could either support or refute my point on this matter

With some exceptions (.gov, .edu, for example), it has never actually meant anything. Anyone can register a .com, .net, or .org for any purpose.

I thought com/net/org had distinct use cases until the early 1990s when it became a free-for-all.

That was the idea, but from my memory, people chose their own meaning and conventions pretty much from the start. So much about the internet was envisioned with a completely different use case than what it actually was used for, it’s amazing things even kinda worked out in the end.

DNS allows search so we really should have started rejecting everything that isn't qualified with an end dot as punishment to ICANN.. Instead random common names might be treated differently on every network to make sure these people can't issue certs that will be trusted for them in your own network, etc.

Now prioratizing unambiguos naming would be somewhat acceptable if ICANN was tacobell and just a steward of naming on the side.

Hot take: TLDs should not exist but parking domains should not be allowed.

And cost if domains should increase near exponentially with the more you own. One domain? $10/year, two domains: $50, three: $250, etc.

Without rigorous ID requirements, that restriction can be circumvented easily.

With rigorous ID requirements, that restriction can be circumvented easily.

I think the problem is they domain sales are for-profit, there’s no incentive to prevent squatting as it’s presumably a huge profit centre.

With AI churning out a pretend blog or news site or web shop in a few minutes, that would be hard to enforce. I’m with you on the necessary death to TLDs, though.

I'm not sure what you mean by "DNS allows search" -- by the usual definition of "search", the DNS doesn't: it is a lookup mechanism. I'm also not sure who "we" are in your idea or what you mean by "qualified with an end dot": all domains that get looked up implicitly have a "." (a zero length label that signifies the end of the query name) if it isn't explicit.

resolv.conf-> search

If you are not a consumer on an ISP emulating dialup it is quite likely that a popular name in a naming convention I.e. 'mercury' resolves to something for you and something for someone at a different firm (mercury.intranet.[firm].not-so-stupid-tld). A cert is possibly not a fully qualified one so when ICANN gives away mercury you need to append .asshat to everything ICANN names.

(Two firms have an unambiguous situation because they don't trust each others private roots but they both trust a cert issued for the public trust as a fqdn which is why TLDs expanding is a form of theft/breakage against every intranet..)

Run your own DNS then, if you're using your own DNS? Why are your queries for internal systems leaking out to the internet?

If icann sells www as a tld domain then your use of www as a machine name you may refer to unqualified is a risk because virtually every piece of software in the world respects public issuance until you delete it all if you can.

The DNS naming confusion was largely dealt with by having a small number of TLDs and rarely referring to complex things like partially specified subdomains, but every once in a while a fool named their machine com, org, or net. (Though these as subdomains were far more toxic.)

You might want to look at the "domain" directive of resolv.conf and the concept of "split horizon DNS".

I've done plenty of interesting things but a distributed correction attempt for ICANN's incompetence is never going to be adequate. You can read their own work on gTLDs in the past to know they understand this.

Accusing ICANN of incompetence when you can't be bothered to configure your DNS to avoid leaking queries to the root is an interesting approach.

There's no leak being discussed. Everyone in the world sets resolving and it is what it is with the current TLDs when ICANN needs more coke money they possibly break every node in the world and a distributed group of thousands has to look if something bad happened.

There is the argument that ICANN should no longer be consulted ever by nodes of consequence but that is an argument that they have failed 100% in their responsibilities.

If you don't care at all about zone delegation and global resolution then you obviously don't have an opinion on how to evaluate ICANNs stewardship of global domain delegation.

We have run out if IPv4 addresses but there is NAT is not a satisfying answer to start. But we have let ICANN polute naming so let's implement shadow naming everywhere is an even less satisfactory answer.

I think that the scenario here is where the queries are explicitly not leaking, and you've raised a red herring.

If I understand correctly, the scenario is an internal machine named "george", which is being properly search-pathed and looked up as "george.example.org." with nothing leaking anywhere, becoming vulnerable to Walmart being able to issue certificates in the name "george", because the DNS client library's search pathing is not read out by the layers that simply know the machine as "george".

I'm not totally convinced by the premise here that certificate checkers never read out the final fully-qualified domain name from getaddrinfo().

This isn't a red herring at all. This is DNS resolution and client PKIX implementation. You could fix your whole network to not import anything from outside, ban all BYOD, etc, or you could fire ICANN clowns who think they need to make changes to the reserved list because, why? Money, corruption, self importance?

HN is full of people from SaaS startups who in essence want to buy the perfect 900 number. But DNS and delegation goes far deeper than selling one name for $20 and going to other $20 names to store your code and email at other SaaS providers.

Ah, resolver (not DNS) search paths. They were a really bad idea that can and do lead to leaked queries that can result in all sorts of unpleasantness and risks.

As for certs, AFAIK, you can't get a certificate for a non-fqdn from a public CA since 2015.

all the ISPs I've used just resolve any possible DNS query to an IP anyways, so I'm not really sure what it matters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Spamming up namespaces for "commercial" purposes is never a good thing.

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