On 2013-12-31, at 15:06, Christian Grothoff <christ...@grothoff.org> wrote:

> And again, a key question for me is, if you really want to _encourage_
> people to _first_ deploy at large scale and _then_ reserve the name.

You can reserve a name for $10/year, no IETF process required. Less if you 
reserve under an existing domain name.

The key question for me is, why do any of these uses necessarily require 
reservation of a TLD label, or something that looks like one?

If (to take an example at random) Tor users could make use of names outside of 
the DNS that look like DNS names under a .ONION TLD, why could they not just as 
easily make use of names that end in ONION.EFF.ORG?

The general answer to this question (in the DNS world) is that names will 
appear in television ads and billboard posters, and hence need to be short and 
memorable. I'm not sure how convincing that answer is (time will tell, I guess) 
but it seems less convincing for naming schemes that involve easily-typo'd, 
long hexadecimal strings as interior labels. These are presumably not intended 
for direct entry by users. Where is the need for a pithy TLD?

If the answer is "well, it wasn't done that way, and there's a huge deployed 
base" then I would take the time to consider migration strategies away from 
schemes that seem to involve top-level DNS labels towards schemes that don't. 
It's inevitable that these names will leak to the DNS, and those leaks will be 
easier to mitigate the further the names are from the DNS root.

> I expect that this MAY happen, but if the draft is accepted, one
> of our goals is to explicitly authorize DNS operators to prevent
> this.  Right now, a well-configured, 100% RFC-compliant DNS resolver
> MUST pass a request for ".onion" to the root.  With this draft, we
> want to explicitly ALLOW 100% RFC-compliant DNS resolvers to instead
> immediately return NXDOMAIN and thus avoid the security and performance
> implications of leaking such queries to the root.

The IETF is not the resolver police. Resolver operators mitigate weird problems 
with approaches like this all the time. It's a mistake to imagine that a 
blessing enshrined in a document published by the IETF will immediately trigger 
changes in deployed infrastructure, or that deployed infrastructure is being 
hamstrung by the lack of such a blessing.

Consider, however, the different degrees of chaos that might result from:

(a) instruct all the resolver operators in the world to maintain configuration 
that special-cases a growing list of DNS names. or

(b) chose your naming scheme (again, think ONION.EFF.ORG) such that the 
NXDOMAINs, negative caching, sinkholing, whatever can be controlled by someone 
who cares about Tor (the EFF.ORG administrator) without requiring any special 
handling elsewhere.

Option (b) is much more friendly to the Internet.


Joe

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