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schlarpc | 2 years ago

Whoa, .alt is finally a proposed standard with a real RFC number. Really happy about this, it's sorely needed in some spaces.

discuss

order

xena|2 years ago

Where would this be used?

KirillPanov|2 years ago

Anywhere you need a domain name that you are sure will never, ever, ever resolve via the root DNS servers at any point in the future.

ICANN fights tooth and nail to eliminate these. As far as they are concerned, every syntactically-valid domain name except .arpa and .example.{com,net,org} is theirs to sell -- even if they choose not to do so at the current moment. RFC9476 is basically the IETF finally getting fed up with ICANN's nonsense.

One concrete example is adding more onion-like namespaces. As long as the name is cryptographically self-certifying, you don't need a central authority to manage it. But it is generally a good idea to use a section of the namespace that the central authority isn't going to simply put up for sale at some point in the future. It's actually in their interest to do this, in order to sabotage competing decentralized protocols. Or they might just talk a lot about doing it, in order to scare people.

For example, I2P has .b32 which is their version of .onion. Tor shouldn't be special; other projects should be allowed to try out new ideas.

jonesetc|2 years ago

My first thought is a java package or mobile app id that you don't want to tie to some real web resource.