cross-posted from: https://hilariouschaos.com/post/1077711
Edit: https://chapo.chat/ for the live action drama, sort by new posts.
Edit edit: https://chapo.chat/post/4468531
Welp
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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quite vocal about how the world should be organized, but forgot to pay the domain dues
DNS is neoliberalism incarnate π
What is with the weirdly shaped emojis.
Over on the linked page? They've got custom "emojis", which are just pictures uploaded by an admin. Lemmy has that feature in general, but it's not used much on other instances. If it's enabled on your instance, you can type
:to select from all regular emojis plus custom ones.I know, but why are they so big.
I like how a whole community of academics and researchers worked out how to run a system which, even into the modern day which is kind of amazing, is largely disconnected from being abused by government and industry, and just runs according to what the people who need to use the system need it to do. You can get extorted for a fancy domain name if you really want to, but you can also go to Hostinger and get one for $5/year or something, because a lot of the core of the system is still pretty well-protected from being a cash-grab, through application of good governance and cooperation.
And then, somehow Hexbear managed to find their way around that system and fucked things up for themselves, and now it's all DNS's fault that they stepped in a pile of doo doo.
Yes, John Postel and David Mills were some of the vilest ghouls and so on. There was nothing about them that could provide a good model for how to do effective cooperation and succeed outside the systems of ownership that defined computing and telecommunications at the time, no particular reason they succeeded so dramatically and gave you, ultimately, this space to post pig balls today, and nothing about their work and traditions that needs to be defended against any silicon valley ghouls in the modern day. You fucking dingbat. I started out sticking up for you guys because no one deserves to get victimized by DNS scammers, but I take it back, go fuck yourselves.
Well, Postel has been dead since 1998 and Mills since 2010, so I don't think they're included in people still in control. So they've got that going for them, which is nice, I guess.
Architects of the internet, they said.
If they said the people currently in charge of the internet are an uneasy alliance of shadowy goons and idiots, afraid to openly break anything too irrevocably but occasionally trying to yank on the wires to see if there isn't some way a little more money inside them somewhere, I would generally agree.
The elders of the Internet?
If I didn't know this was chapotraphouse I would consider it an excellent shitpost.
I mean unlike housing, you don't actually need to pay for a domain name. There are plenty of free alternatives if you ill like paying for a TLD, and in lieu of that you could just memorise the IP, or even instruct people to change their hosts file.
I mean... OK then just remember the IP addresses of the sites you use and don't use the domain names?
That will be a problem for sites that are all hosted on one IP address where the server figures out what site you want by the client's request string.
Well then you just take whatever you get, it's website roulette.
Is this not a majority of them
It is.
Of course there are alternatives if you give up using the host header, like routing by URL. But that's difficult when the URL is encrypted, meaning SSL has to be terminated at the proxy.
My home stuff is like this
Thats because of how you set it up. If you want individual IP addresses for all your resources, you can get a huge chunk of IPv6 addresses just for yourself. You can get a /48 (65,536) addresses if you set it up with your ISP.
Yeah totally, it's just wrong to say it's not the majority of them.
You do have a point there NaibofTabr@46.4.254.144
See? If you don't like DNS, you don't have to use DNS, it's not so hard.
And IPv6 won't be that much harder, it's only... uh... 32 hex digits you'll have to remember, for each website. No big deal.
I'm still salty that IPv6 is not 6 octets. Six. It's right there in the name. IPv4 is 4 octets!
Yes, only 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:2e04:fe90. Simple!
Well, then someone would just create a directory that associates each ipv6 with the name of the company using it, so you can search for the easy to remember, human readable name which automa-
Oh I see what happened here.
Did you know we have these things called computer files that can store information. There's even one in your router specifically for storing IP addresses
Ahh! The files are in the router!l
Queue jumping up and down like a monkey trying to rip apart my router in order to reach a website
Ah, you're right, I should just look up IP addresses in my NAT table. Maybe I should add comments to it so I know which IP is which.
yep literally this. don't most routers nowadays have a dns server with a hosts file you can edit?
No no no, see, DNS is bad, that's the whole point. No touchy.
Can't have any of that neoliberal stuff, gotta delete the hosts file.
30 years ago we had to remember phone numbers, now ip addresses. We are going in circles.
At least they stopped dumping the yellow pages on my porch every year...
Your perspective makes you believe we're going in circles. In actuality, we're going down the drain...
Remember kids, this is why you still need money. This is literally how the Soviet Union collapsed and why China today became a state capitalist.
I wonder if they tried to pay it with a signed note by their mother and a chuck-e-cheeze token with 'payment in full' scribbled across the note in red marker.
In a good internet, you shouldn't have to pay someone else for your own identity.
Tell me you have no idea how DNS works without saying you have no idea how DNS works.
You don't have to pay anything to have your own identity.
If you want someone else's servers to replicate a piece of information for you, and you want them to take responsibility for administrative issues like figuring out whether you still want it next year or what to do if you're doing something illegal, you may have to pay anywhere from $5 a year to $30 a year for the privilege depending on a couple of factors. Given how massively inflated the price of registering a domain could be, if the type of ghouls who like to get their hands on things like this were able to get their hands on it, I'm inclined to call that success. About 99% of internet users will never need to know or care about DNS, and they can still have their identity without having to pay $30 a year.
I'm pretty sure the price of domains has actually been going down over time, and they've introduced a bunch of new TLDs and new types of entries in the records in response to pretty much the only significant problems that the 40-year-old system has ever had during its history. Like I said, I'd call that success.
I would like none of these services. I would simply like my domain name to be mapped to my server's IP. I don't want to have to pay a registrar, I would like to submit my domains to registers directly. There is a business layer of middle-men who do not need to exist.
ICANN is in the business of running the Internet, not fielding tech support calls from Jones' BBQ and Foot Massage. I'm fine with this layer of separation. Hell, if it was one massive company controlling all the domains worldwide, wouldn't that monopoly be an order of magnitude worse?
I don't mean interacting directly with ICANN. I mean directly interacting with registries, like Verisign.
They control the .com top level domain. They do not interact with consumers, and require you to use a third-layer of registrars to interface with them.
ICANN shouldn't get into the direct-to-consumer business, that is true and not the issue I am speaking about.
You're in luck! You can do this! You can become your own registrar. Cut out the middle man! You only have to pay $4000/year to talk directly to ICANN.
I mean, it is kind of getting that way. The proliferation of some domains that are more expensive than others could potentially be a sign of the whole thing slowly collapsing into costing $10/month or maybe orders of magnitude more, if you are a big company with fat pockets that can be rummaged through, like everything else is nowadays. My point is that the price is $12 per year specifically because those forces have been kept at bay, at least partially, which means the system is an ever-more-incongruous-with-every-passing-year vestige of the decent way that the internet used to be. And also, yes, thereβs an increasing cacophony of services which are trying to charge you more than it should cost, hoping that youβll think $50/year is reasonable and just pay it not knowing any better.
If you think it is sustainable to be able to submit registrations completely for free, though, you are welcome to provide that service to the world under some subdomain, and do a vital service to remove the evil of which you speak. Just register dns.free or whatever, and set up a thing where people can register mysite.dns.free or whatever subdomain they want, and then they can all have it for free. You can be the change. I suspect that if you undertook this mission, it would quickly become apparent to you why the system as a whole still needs to charge a tiny nominal fee in exchange for doing it.
Running the central DNS servers is so cheap that it makes no sense to try to charge for it. Doing the administrative work of keeping track of hundreds of millions of people who all want to register some appellation for themselves, and keeping track of all the changes thereto, is significant, which is why that side of the operation wants to charge you a few bucks a year for it.
You don't have to! You can run a DNS server out of your house and host any and all domain names you can think of!
Of course, nobody but you will use it, but it's the principle of the thing, right?
Oh please. Principles are like asses: everyone's got one, and everyone thinks it's other peoples's that stink.
Many things are worth nil on principle. It's the execution that matters.