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Comment by smilliken | Hacker News Reader

A public DNS with unique canonical names would be nice, but we don't have one of those. The DNS we actually have is inconsistent for several reasons: replication lag, ownership disputes, legal and political disputes (governments disagree what content is ok), VPNs with custom entries, firewalls, host files, etc, etc.

URIs are incredibly important and deserve a more solid foundation to build upon. To make them truly unique, we should use some form of GUIDs. Pet names are a usability layer on top of GUIDs for us humans , but we should communicate the GUID instead of or alongside the pet name.

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Universal unique canonical names are not a good thing because the problem of name squatting exists.

It's why relative names and forkable registry is a good solution.

But in some cultural context where a registry is mainstream, names are almost unique.

Here are some explanations :

- http://seenthis.net/messages/358071

- https://gnunet.org/sites/default/files/paper_cans2014_camera...

> 3.3 Relative Names for Transitivity of Delegations

> Users can delegate control over a subdomain to another user’s zone by indicating this in a new record

> Universal unique canonical names are not a good thing because the problem of name squatting exists.

They're not a good idea when they are user-friendly, because of domain squatting.

But `ebbfed3a54f82da274b51df5c5f1fcd8644edc0b5beb86643a0e177f1cb4ad60` is a perfectly good universal, unique, canonical name, and `(ebbfed3a54f82da274b51df5c5f1fcd8644edc0b5beb86643a0e177f1cb4ad60 foo)` is a good relative name, rooted in a universally-unique name.

I agree.

Take this idea one step further, and you have IPFS, which is a very promising approach:

https://ipfs.io/

I tried to setup ipfs on El Capitan yesterday. I stalked the OS X Homebrew FUSE package, mounted ipfs and it immediately fails complaining too many file descriptors are being used.

ipfs is awesome, but I want to first be able to mount it as the file system :-)

I haven't tried using IPFS, but the default ulimit setting on OS X is tragically low. You might want to try bumping it up.

I tried - increased it to unlimited and it still had the same error :-(

I have zero knowledge of Go, so not even sure how to start troubleshooting.

IPFS is certainly not this idea taken one step further. It is a totally different thing.

If we're talking about linking names to resources, ipfs/ipns is not a different thing https://github.com/ipfs/examples/tree/master/examples/ipns

A public DNS with unique canonical names would be nice, but we don't have one of those.

Even IP addresses aren't strictly "unique". Very recently HN users were complaining about the same Sci-hub donation page showing different Bitcoin addresses in different regions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11636331

That's why I said "should" and not "does".

If everything goes right in DNS, you and I can both type "https://news.ycombinator.com/" into our browsers and end up reading Hacker News.

The workflow to get to the same end result (viewing HN) doesn't seem immediately clear to me with GNS/GNUnet. I'm assuming I'd either have to track down YC's public key (where?) to add them as a petname, or transitively reach them via some other user that I trust.

> The workflow to get to the same end result (viewing HN) doesn't seem immediately clear to me with GNS/GNUnet. I'm assuming I'd either have to track down YC's public key (where?) to add them as a petname, or transitively reach them via some other user that I trust.

Presumably you'd type something like `news.ycombinator.com.network-solutions.gnu`, since right now you are (ultimately) trusting Network Solutions to Do the Right Thing.

Distinct, not unique.

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