Dan Kaminsky

Wed Aug 5 23:30:23 UTC 2009

In message <59f980d60908051602y1fe364devfb5f590a8c7959dc at mail.gmail.com>, Ben S
cott writes:
> On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Chris Adams<cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> >>> ... we may not longer have the end user =93typing=94 a URL, the DNS or
> >>> something similar will still be in the background providing name to add=
> ress
> >>> mapping  ...
> >>
> >> =A0 In the the vast majority of cases I have seen, people don't type
> >> domain names, they search the web. =A0When they do type a domain name,
> >> they usually type it into the Google search box.
> >
> > Web !=3D Internet.
> 
>   (Web !=3D Internet) !=3D the_point
> 
>   Most people don't type email addresses, either.  They pick from from
> their address book.  Their address book knows the address because it
> auto-learned it from a previously received email.  If their email
> program doesn't do that, they find an old email and hit "Reply".  (You
> laugh, but even in my small experience, I've seen plenty of clusers
> who rarely originate an email.  They reply to *everything*.  You have
> to email them once for them to email you.  It's always neat to get a
> message in my inbox that's a reply to a message from three years ago.
> But I digress.)

	Which requires that people type addresses in in the first
	place.  It's like these anti spam proceedures which require
	that you respond to a message that says you sent the email
	to let it through.  I doesn't work if everyone or even if
	most do it.
 
>   User IDs on Facebook, Twitter, et. al., aren't email addresses,
> they're user IDs.  They just happen to look just like email addresses,
> because nobody's come up with a better system yet.  The main reason
> those services ask for the user's email address for an ID is it makes
> the "I forgot my user ID" support cases easier.  (Note that it doesn't
> eliminate them.  Some people still don't know their Facebook user ID
> until you tell them it's their email address.  Then they ask what
> their email address is...)

	No they make finding a unique id easy by leveraging a
	existing globally unique system.
 
>   Web browsers already automatically fill-in one's email address if
> you let them.

	Which you have typed into the web browser in the first place.

>    One of these days Microsoft or Mozilla or whoever
> will come up with a method to make the automation more seamless, and
> people will probabbly stop knowing their own email address.  To do the
> initial exchange for a new person, they'll use Facebook.  Or whatever.
> 
>   Paper advertisements:  What's easier?  (1) Publishing a URL in a
> print ad, and expecting people to remember it and type it correctly.
> (2) Saying "type our name into $SERVICE", where $SERVICE is some
> popular website that most people trust (like Facebook or whatever),
> and has come up with a workable system for disambiguation.

	1 if you actually want people to get to you and not your
	competitor.

	There is a reason people put phone numbers in advertisments
	rather than say "look us up in the yellow/white pages".
 
>   You get the picture.  Follow the trend.  The systems aren't done
> evolving into being yet, but the avalanche has definitely started.
> It's too late for the pebbles to vote.

	There is a difference between looking for a service and looking
	for a specific vendor of a service.
 
>   As the person I was replying to said, DNS is unlikely to go away,
> but I'll lay good money that some day most people won't even know
> domain names exist, any more than they know IP addresses do.

	People may not know what a domain name is but they will use
	them all the time even if they are not aware of it.  Google
	Twitter, Facebook etc. all depend on a working DNS whether
	they make it use visible to user or not.

	Mark
 
> -- Ben <google!gmail!mailvortex>
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org