[Freedombox-discuss] DHTs and Names

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 19 August 2011 11:43,  <bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:34:34PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
>>
>> Hi.  I'd like to understand how these human readable names that we're
>> going to insert into a DHT are going to work from a security standpoint.
>>
>> What stops me from taking your name?  What stops me from taking names
>> similar to yours?
>>
>> I'm skeptical of the advisability of globally scoped non-hierarchically
>> registered human readable names and would like to understand the service
>> model and goals for this proposal.
>
> I'm not sure someone will have a good answer to this question, as you
> raise an issue that is for sure not that easy to solve (also called
> nowadays the Zooko triangle).
>
> You can find some resources on the page I creates yesterday:
> http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/DistributedNaming. Or maybe is because
> of this page that you are asking?
>
> I2p has an interesting way to solve this issue: it uses a pure DHT
> (kadmelia) as a backend, and on top of that people use so called
> "Adressbooks", which enable them to put "petnames" on entries of this DHT.
> There is one global addressbook, but people can override it with their
> local one. This personnal adressbooks can also be shared, so that you can
> use the addressbook of a friend that is in your WOT and then call different
> remotes the with the same name than your friend.
>
> http://www.i2p2.de/naming.html and
> http://www.i2p2.de/naming_discussion.html
>
> Seems like a lot of use believe that the DNS has too many issues that
> conflict with FBX project, so an alternative naming scheme should be
> investigated.

This is a fascinating initiative and I am intrigued by the initiate.
By the way public keys are also normally unique globally.

At this point I'm slightly confused as to whether freedombox will or
will not be using DNS.  IMHO, an alternative to DNS will take a decade
to gain traction.  That is assuming if you pick the right one and have
a whole lot of luck.

As an example metric, the very successful GPG has 3 million users in
10 years.  Cityville, one game on one platform, got 100 million users
in one month.

The stack that that Eben Moglen mentioned in his inception for
freedombox ( run your own web server, some dynamic dns, keep the logs
on your box, allow microbloging, connect to existing SNS silos, some
web parts, encrypted backups ) was what attracted me an others to this
project, I still believe it can be a winner a winner, all be it with
some tweaks.

I'm wondering how much of this original vision would have to change if
DNS is not highly leveraged?

>
> bert.
>
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