Pirate Bay Co-Founder Envisions Peer-to-Peer DNS System
Pirate Bay Co-Founder Envisions Peer-to-Peer DNS System
Posted 12/01/2010 at 7:02am
| by Paul Lilly
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Pirate Bay co-founder has other things on his mind than jail time and multi-million dollar fines. Rather than worry about such trivial matters, Sunde has taken to championing a new, uncensored Internet, one that takes the general concept of BitTorrent and applys it to Domain Name System (DNS) lookups.
"By using existing technology for de-centralization together with already having a crew with skilled programmers, communicators, and network specialists, an alternative system is not far away," Sunde wrote in a blog. "We're not going to re-invent the wheel, we're going to build an existing technology as much as possible."
The way it works now, DNS is tasked with translating a site name, like maximumpc.com, with a string of numbers that represent the domain's actual address on the Web, one that computers can read. You can think of it as a telephone number, and ICANN holds the phone book via over a dozen PCs called "Root Servers." These servers contain the IP addresses of all the Top Level Domains (TLDs).
What Sunde wants to do is set up a P2P DNS system to take the place of these centralized root servers, the upshot being it would then be impossible for government agencies to block sites from being looked up.
Image Credit: Computerworld
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Lhot
December 02, 2010 at 11:03am
....let the users decide which to use. The current system has "lack of personal privacy" problems and the P2P option has "lack of security" issues, which is pretty much the same thing. It seems that the only difference is in WHO gets to snoop on my privacy. Personally, with all the net neutrality cr*p and all the crazy insane lawsuits that have been going on, I'm not too sure which would be worse. :/
tornato7
December 01, 2010 at 7:47pm
I had this same idea a while ago, although it was just one of those things that's like "y'know it would be cool if..." and then you forget about it until somebody else makes alot of cash off of it
Talcum X
December 03, 2010 at 7:38am
They stole my idea of vibrating phone batteries (Back in the analog days when the Moto 5150 was king)
and the trayless, cattyless CD drive for you computer that mimics the one in your car (soon after intorduced by Pioneer)
Derek Fredette
December 01, 2010 at 4:08pm
This is a great idea. It's a way to keep the power in the hands of the masses instead of the governers. This is not Plato's Reublic, this world in which we live. An open source, landless internet would create a truly new frontier, one without governance. I love it!
I'm intrigued that there is no mention of how he plans on bypassing the lookup tables, though. As far as vision is regarded, it is great, but the means of doing it may not be as elegant as the idea.
df
blkpanthr
December 01, 2010 at 7:42am
and allow hackers and other less savory types to manipulate the system....no thanx
zNelson24
December 01, 2010 at 7:55am
"hackers and other less savory types" have manipulated the current DNS system before. I welcome the idea of a P2P DNS if it gets me around difficulties we've had with COICA already.
blkpanthr
December 01, 2010 at 8:43am
while this is true (by way of the hosts file) not having a central repository pretty much means that when its hacked, and it will be, make no mistake, its going to run rampant...
COICA is pretty much a non-issue outside of the US, so most of the illegal sites arent going anywhere.
If this ever comes to fruition, i see it pretty much going the way of the onion/tor networks - Little used, and never legitimized
TheZomb
December 01, 2010 at 10:07pm
Without knowing how the system is implemented how can you know if an attack would cause more damage or less.
All the current system requires is the hacking of one server, if you decentralize that you would have multiple redundant nodes of web addresses and multiple servers to hack.
It would also allow you to check with multiple servers if an address is correct, and if it isn't it could easily pole a bunch of servers and if the vast majority have one address with a few having another it would be easy to go to the correct one, and if their largely indecisive just not navigate at all. It would be extremely difficult to hack all the servers.
WAIT, you see what I did, I just made up a bunch of crap about a system that doesn't exist using the zero information I have on it just like you did, The point is you can't tell whether it will be more or less secure from well, nothing.
blkpanthr
December 01, 2010 at 10:30pm
oh, wait, im sorry, bittorrent/p2p has no viri, no snoopers, no riaa intercepting packets, no ISP throtelling, no ip ddos attacks, no fake peers/seeds spewing out bad data, ad naseum...
my bad, p2p is the perfect solution...
johnnyathm1
December 06, 2010 at 2:15am
Please...continue with the volleys. I find this most entertaining (=
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