80 karma · joined June 29, 2009
DNS was born to do this; it's lightweight, super fast and wonderfully distributed. :)
Google's webfinger takes this approach, using TXT records to map your email address to an XRD document. But this adds a lot more complexity and means doing an extra HTTP request - so now it's much slower than a single DNS query and there's probably a SPoF.
Simplicity wins.
Ah I see. Yes, the Address record stays pointing at the TelProxy web server (incidentally a major overhaul will be released later this month). Anyway, I don't personally see this as a matter of "freedom" - better to keep the focus on its intended purpose.
>Ah, I can see how that would be problematic. Do you have a blog or something I can follow your progress on?
andy.tel - no blog, but I tweet, mostly rubbish. :-)
FYI the spec changed between rfc2916 and rfc3761:
The format of the service field has changed. The old format was of the form "example+E2U", while the new format is "E2U+example".
Reason for this change have to with the added subtypes in the enumservice, the ability to support more than one enumservice per NAPTR RR, and a general agreement in the IETF that the main selector between different NAPTR with the same owner (E2U in this case) should be first."
There's a service called TelFriends that brokers keys between you and your friends.
Ordinary people don't have to care about that - typically their username/password is used in whatever app they're using to transparently decrypt records on the fly.
And since we're talking about privacy, you own your domain and its data - not Telnic, Google, or Facebook.
What freedoms are you referring to?
>I'm not sure that this is as practical a benefit as it sounds. If you were to ask me what my ".tel" is and I responded, just use "andrew.tj.id.au" you'd plug it in and use it.
Fair enough, it would be great to reach that point!
>I'm not clear on what benefit this outlines?
Search. That's what I'm working on :)
>Agreed on both accounts. The later is part of the reason for my lack of enthusiasm for it.
But it works :) And from a developers perspective it's easy - there's a bunch of apps you can play with (iPhone, Blackberry, softphones, etc).
Why?
>Could they make it any more complicated than this?
It may look messy, but complicated? You can write a parser in a few minutes. It's simple and it works.
>DNS isn't exactly designed to withstand that kind of abuse (You can't block someone, you can't ratelimit someone, etc).
It's hard to take out somebody's nameservers, since there's no single point of failure (unlike with most web setups). But even then there's still (hopefully) some resolvers with cached records :)
* Most people don't own a .com (or .whatever) for personal use - and never will - so what are the advantages?
* The suffix indicates the capability. It wouldn't be obvious that andrewtj.com contained your contact records. I'm not sure how you could change public perception of .com/etc, but you at least have a shot at it with a TLD exclusively for this purpose.
* TelHosting providers are obligated to provide standard public APIs, and there are also specs for consuming structured data from DNS. Would you use these, or create your own?
* For people who do own a .com they most likely won't be running their own nameservers, so you'd have to persuade nameserver operators to agree on API specs and run your management software.
* .tel has a system for brokering encryption keys used to encrypt/decrypt records - if you want privacy you'd need a system like this.
* Using a common namespace offers us a publicly accessible zone - convenient!
* Marketing. Hundreds of registrars selling a common branded product gives it the best chance of adoption.
* It's actually pretty hard to do by all accounts.
I have nothing to do with Telnic - I'm just an advocate/fanboy :)