Statements against new.net?

Vadim Antonov avg at kotovnik.com
Wed Mar 14 20:46:20 UTC 2001



On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Mathew  Butler wrote:

> The problem is, of course, that it's NOT human-to-human communication.  It's
> machine-to-machine communication, and human-to-machine communication, and
> DNS was designed to create a mnemonic representation of a way to reach a
> machine.

If it is machines communicating there's no need to do any mnemonics.  In
fact, it is still humans communicating, with the aid of the machines.

So... we have two design constraints:

1) people need to be able to locate and revisit somethings in the network

2) any meaningful hierarchial labeling of the real world is quite
   impossible, and runs into problems of scaling, adversity, and 
   entrenched notions of ownership.

Propping up DNS as-is only guarantees that the whole thing is going to be
pushed off the cliff on the second side.  Neither it is very good on the
first count.

So, instead of trying to fix the broken concept, and raising ridiculous
protests and indignation when someone tries to rock the boat, isn't it
easier just to go for a real permanent solution?  Which is to replace
"mnemonic" DNS with something deliberately mnemonic-free (like numeric
strings :) and leave the human-interaction part to the better and wildly
successful concept of navigation in a general graph.

The exising deployed software is nearly sufficient (and in many cases
quite adequate) to make this mode of communication easy to use.

My proposal is to create a special hierarchy (similar to tpc.int) which
can _only_ be used to register numeric "names" on first-come first-served
basis.  The "current" DNS then can go down in flames, for all i care.
Actually, I think this is inevitable, since some day someone will find a
way to win a lawsuit against the whatever central naming authority is.

Anyone who thinks numeric IDs do not work when "better" alphanumeric IDs
are possible needs to take a look at the ICQ.  It is _very_ successful in
case you didn't notice.  And so is telephony.

And in case you didn't notice that most people in the world do not speak
english, and do not use latin script, let me tell you the simple (and
quite obvious to someone who is not spoiled by American isolationism)
fact: for the majority of world population ASCII strings are only
marginally better than numbers in being "mnemonic" - and it is much easier
to pronounce numbers in a native language.

--vadim





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