wibblenut

You're right, but had it not been so restrictive would people have used it for its core purpose? There are a bunch of other reasons it hasn't caught on. But at this stage I think their best move would be to ask ICANN whether they can liberalise the extension.. I imagine the community would back it.

The .tel TLD was established for the purpose of publishing contact/location and other meta info at the DNS level, but it hasn't yet caught on unfortunately.

Yep, but the point I was trying to make is that DNS over UDP works well today.

It's also worth remembering that most of the world has 2G connectivity. Heck, even I'm 2G most of the time (rural UK).

This is partly why I'm so interested in publishing information at the DNS level (i.e. .tel) - you get to use UDP (or TCP failover), plus other awesome benefits. You can do other innovative things with DNS too.

DNS is distributed, so I think you meant to say decentralised?

But I'm baffled as to why anybody would want to use it? For it to become useful we'd need to go to the extraordinary lengths of replacing substantial infrastructure, at a very great cost - to replace proven technology that scales extremely well?

And it wouldn't surprise me if Harold Camping was mining Bitcoins on the church computer. The end is nigh!

It doesn't surprise me that this is the first occasion you've heard about it :)

But all of the complexity is hidden. The API is standardised, so management apps and other services will always work, irrespective of who your domain registrar/TelHosting provider is.

I'm sure the majority of registrants have no idea they're publishing DNS records, or even what DNS is - and they don't need to know. The best technologies are the ones you don't necessarily see.

Non-technical people see a very simple and cost-effective way of establishing a simple online presence. For $10-$20 it's all-in - there's no web hosting or any technical expertise required. Small businesses love this. As such GoDaddy doesn't carry .tel, because it can't up-sell any of its other big-margin crap. But lots of YP publishers around the world are becoming .tel resellers :-)

I see it as a hugely disruptive technology with a good chance of success, but it seems more appealing to non-geeks than it does geeks at the moment. Once it gains popularity then geeks will start to catch on and realise all the cool stuff that's suddenly possible.

This is why I believe the .tel TLD is so important - DNS for people, no more carrier or service provider lock-in, stupid fast, and resilient.

I have about a dozen services defined under my name, some of which are private, which I can prioritise, or even change to a different profile depending on time/location.

Mobile operators are starting to adopt it, despite the fact it undermines their phone number lock-in, because it makes it much easier for them to roll out new data-driven services, e.g. China Mobile (600m subscribers) will use it for mobile payments.

It could be even more interesting if device manufacturers ever manage to persuade mobile operators to use virtual SIMs - imagine being able to subscribe to new networks on-the-fly!

I'm looking forward to decentralised microblogging, since then we can publish multiple feeds (RSS would seem ideal) from the same identity (domain), e.g. $ dig andy.tel naptr|grep rss - there'd also be a record to delegate a "hub" for my followers to subscribe to.

Dan Kaminsky, Spelunking the Triangle: http://dankaminsky.com/2011/01/13/spelunk-tri/

All the ludicrous claims about transforming commerce, toppling governments, etc. are starting to grate a little, and I thought this headline deliberately suggested a much more serious scenario than somebody going to speak at a tech conference in the Summer.

No, they're not.

You're right, but "dishonesty" is a dirty word, despite not necessarily always being bad or immoral. It's up to journalists to perform balanced reporting. We trust them to do that.

Lazy journalists that simply rewrite press releases, emails from their friends, or otherwise fail to do any meaningful research are the ones truly deserving of the label "dishonest" (amongst others!).

Intriguing news for the DNS crowd :)

Well it was first drafted in 2002, and Jakob Schlyter actually wrote about it recently: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20110327_death_of_the_pki_drag...

Along the same lines Google recently launched a DNS based service for certs it knows about: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/04/improving-s...

DNSSEC is now deployed at the root level for .com/.net/.org/.edu/.gov.

Yep. DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE): http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dane-protocol-06

I'm glad DNS has been getting a lot of love lately. I just wish people would realise what other cool stuff it's useful for. :)

Neat. You could drop the HTTP part and use pure DNS:

$ dig @auth-ns hashed-password.andy.tel naptr

NXDOMAIN on failure, NAPTR record (or a set of records) on success.

Your comment about DNS being an API is right on.

That's a very good point, although it's changing; specialist registrars/resellers, directory publishers, and VOIP companies are all showing interest now. But I was thinking more about early adopters - the type of people who hang out on HN and register domains in their sleep :)

I heard Michael Jackson used to change his number on a biweekly basis. Would be quite interesting to see a survey on this group. See my other comment for a neat solution ;)

I like it. A reviewer says, "shouting numbers in a crowded bar isn't a particularly fun sport". Exactly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m50xrDcj0fc).

I'm a big fan of the .tel TLD for this, and other reasons: publish contact information dynamically, it's fast, reliable, gives you fine grained privacy controls, etc. etc.

I don't understand why this hasn't really caught on yet. The implications for the telco market would be huge if more people used DNS to its full potential.

There are many p2p networks for streaming content - they seem to be popular in Asia for watching English and European football, and I think many of these existed prior to 2007.

I'm sure there's a mountain of other prior art covering the concept. It isn't novel to anybody with half a brain. I was streaming audio in the 90s and clearly remember thinking about a p2p network then, because of the expense and legal threats I was receiving. All I wanted to do was enable football fans living abroad to listen to the local radio station on match days.. I thought I was doing the BBC a favour by extending their broadcast range! Yeah, I was just a naive kid. :)

Interesting, thanks.

The scope for my contest would be more loosely based than solving a specific problem criteria, although that could be an added fun twist! I anticipate people would build apps for phones, plugins for other software, services to help users, etc. Many companies run competitions of this nature, e.g. Twilio.

I could run off some ideas for what's needed if you'd be interested in expanding Coderloop to support a contest like this?

Fastest way is to check whether it exists in the nightly zone file, and then a DNS lookup, and whois query.

Kneejerkitis.

1) ICANN has nothing to do with ICE seizing domains.

2) wikileaks.org was NOT seized by ICE, in case you didn't know (their nameserver operator, everydns, terminated service due to alleged AUP breach). They should probably just run their own nameservers if it's too much for a free provider to handle.

3) DNS is hierarchical in structure, but very decentralised from a technical point of view. In fact, you might call it "P2P", since anybody can join the network and run their own resolver.

4) #dnsissexy - the average user doesn't even know it exists.

5) Not happy with something? ICANN is a community. (I'm not saying it's perfect - nothing is!).

6) Really really pissed about something? Free speech, courts, democracy.

7) Really pissed AND lazy? Use a ccTLD. I hear .ly is cool.

What are people like Sunde proposing? The PR is sensationalist and contradictory, with talk of an alternative root (where would it be located? who would control it?), and a new bittorrent-like protocol (no idea how this could even work).

Anyway, I'm standing up for the status quo. It works phenomenally well.

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.

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.

Just like everything else, hence DNSSEC.

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

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.

Quick correction - .by is the ccTLD for Belarus and is not regulated by ICANN.

>A fraction of a second delay probably wouldn't be noticeable to the end user

It is (try it), and retries/outages would be very noticeable. One of the applications I'm particularly interested in is directory services, and as you can imagine browsing through trees is extremely sensitive to responsiveness. Dialing a name should also be near instantaneous.

>DNS may be distributed but that's part of the problem - you can't just set your address to redirect to another number when you're out on lunch

You can (.tel allows you to switch between "profiles").

>it'd take too long for the changes to propagate through the system.

You can set TTLs to whatever you like (60 by default).