Dan Kaminsky

Thu Aug 6 00:40:09 UTC 2009

>> (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.

I can only hope that those who believe in "disambiguation" of mailing  
addresses, electronic or otherwise, will be sorely disappointed.  
Return to sender is the only safe course. [No, I am not an architect,  
regardless of what Google says.]  And, I really want whitehouse.gov,  
not whitehouse.com, even though you could only guess my reason.

The design intent of the DNS namespace and structure is to provide  
unambiguous location of domain name related data. The implementation  
of that structure and lookup mechanisms may be flawed, but we should  
fix the flaws, not discard the namespace.

This discussion has wandered widely. Perhaps we should revert to  
discussing how to operate our networks to provide secure connectivity,  
including secure determination of connection targets.

James R. Cutler
james.cutler at consultant.com