[governance] FW: [IP] Fwd: Unofficial P2P TLD standard?

[Lee W McKnight]

Maybe of interest.

Lee
________________________________________
From: Dave Farber [dave at farber.net]
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 5:59 PM
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Fwd: Unofficial P2P TLD standard?

Begin forwarded message:

From: Sam™ <samwaltz.groups at gmail.com<mailto:samwaltz.groups at gmail.com>>
Date: December 4, 2010 4:31:14 PM EST
To: Dave Farber IP <dave at farber.net<mailto:dave at farber.net>>
Subject: Unofficial P2P TLD standard?

Hi Dave,
This hasn't been covered by any reputable media yet, however with
support from the pro-Wikileaks community and the anti-censorship
community get behind the pro-P2P community, it seems much more likely.
It sounds like system administration will be quite time-consuming,
though, as they will require people to verify new sites.
Sam Waltz


http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-based-dns-to-counter-us-domain-seizures-101130/

BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures
Written by Ernesto on November 30, 2010

The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days
and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier
in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a
new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will
exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work
with a new .p2p domain extension.

In a direct response to the domain seizures by US authorities during
the last few days, a group of established enthusiasts have started
working on a DNS system that can’t be touched by any governmental
institution.

Ironically, considering the seizure of the Torrent-Finder meta-search
engine domain, the new DNS system will be partly powered by
BitTorrent.

In recent months, global anti-piracy efforts have increasingly focused
on seizing domains of allegedly infringing sites. In the United States
the proposed COICA bill is explicitly aimed at increasing the
government’s censorship powers, but seizing a domain name is already
quite easy, as illustrated by ICE and Department of Justice actions
last weekend and earlier this year.

For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS
entries of domains, not least because several top level domains are
managed by US-based corporations such as VeriSign, who work closely
together with the US Department of Commerce. According to some, this
setup is a threat to the open internet.

To limit the power governments have over domain names, a group of
enthusiasts has started working on a revolutionary system that can not
be influenced by a government institution, or taken down by pulling
the plug on a central server. Instead, it is distributed by the
people, with help from a BitTorrent-based application that people
install on their computer.

According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an
application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system
to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request
cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a
locally hosted DNS database.”

“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does
not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this
application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a
way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US
proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the
world including China and Iran amongst others.”

The Dot-P2P project was literally started a few days ago, but already
the developers are making great progress. It is expected that a beta
version of the client can be released relatively shortly, a team
member assured TorrentFreak.

The project has been embraced by many familiar names in the
P2P-community. Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is among them,
and the people from EZTV have been promoting it as well.

“For me it’s mostly to scare back. To show that if they try anything,
we have weapons of making it harder for them to abuse it. If they then
back down, we win,” Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment.

Although the initiators of the project are still debating on various
technical issues on how the system should function, it seems that the
administrative part has been thought out. The .p2p domain registration
will be handled by OpenNIC, an alternative community based DNS
network. OpenNIC also maintains the .geek, .free, .null and several
other top level domains.

On the other hand, there are also voices that are for distributed
domain registration, which would keep the system entirely
decentralized.

The domain registrations will be totally free, but registrants will
have to show that they own a similar domain with a different extension
first, to prevent scammers from taking over a brand.

The new P2P-based DNS system will require users to run an application
on their own computer before they can access the domains, but there
are also plans to create a separate root-server (like OpenNIC) as a
complimentary service. It’s worth noting that the DNS changes will
only affect the new .p2p domains, it will not interfere with access to
any other domains.

It will be interesting to see in what direction this project goes and
how widely it will be adopted. There are already talks of getting
Internet Service Providers to accept the .p2p extension as well, but
even if this doesn’t happen the system can always be accessed through
the BitTorrent-powered application and supporting DNS servers.

If anything, this shows that no matter what legislation or legal
actions are taken, technology stays always one step ahead. The more
aggressive law enforcement gets, the more creative and motivated
adopters of the Open Internet will respond.

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