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Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

Am I right in assuming that even if a domain name is seized, the IP address will still work? If this is true, couldn't there just be a hosted index of all IP's and their associated domain names so that people could get to these sites by referencing this information? Hell, it could even be a browser plugin, so that if you type the domain name in and it happens to have been seized, it will be redirected to the proper IP address. Is this feasible?

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Many (most?) web server configurations require a 'Host' header specifying the domain to be accessed (which allows multiple domains to be hosted on a single IP).

So in a lot of cases just typing the IP into your browser won't be enough, but thats pretty easy to work around. The greater difficulty is ascertaining where a domain should point to once it has been seized. One solution is to grab the old records from a DNS cache, but then there is no way to update them should the IP ever change.

DNS is really just a huge peer-to-peer network with a few central nodes, so this shouldn't be too difficult. You can already use an alternate primary nameserver, such as Google's 8.8.8.8. You'd just need your alternate nameserver to maintain a different cache than all of the other servers.

It's distributed, but not really peer-to-peer. It's almost completely hierarchical.

doesn't matter if nobody uses it.

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