zNS

From CommerceNet Wiki

DNS without ICANN

John Klensin has a great explanation of the problem in RFC 3467.

A name, especially a human-readable name, is a contentious label to apply. Even more so if you expect a monopoly to insist on uniqueness...!

Zooko has thought about this deeply; see Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Meaningful: Choose Two.

BradNeuberg has written a rebuttal to Zooko's article above titled Zooko's Spectrum, Not Zooko's Law. In a nutshell it argues that the qualities Zooko is arguing about, namely decentralization, security, and human-friendliness, are a spectrum rather than absolute values. For example, what does Zooko mean by human-memorizable? That goes all the way from extremely human friendly, such as "Brad Neuberg" to "brad@neuberg.com" to short identifiers like Compuserve used to have such as "234323432@compuserve.com" all the way to 128-bit hashes. That sure looks like a spectrum to me. In essence, you don't have to throw out all three, you just have to slightly relax one of them.

Also, the P2P Sockets project has produced a P2P DNS system that is decentralized and human-friendly but not secure. Tutorials are available that go in depth into the design and use.

See also: Projects, Publications.