[ih] Funny how things work out

[Michael Kjörling]

On 2 Feb 2021 17:29 +0100, from internet-history at elists.isoc.org (Toerless Eckert via Internet-history):
> Would really be nice to have an eternal assignment history list of at least 2..3 level
> deep. Public. Why isn't there a blockchain for domain assignments ? Done right, that
> would give that functionality for free.

Besides the fact that this supposes that blockchains are free, which
John already noted (why, say $DEITY, is it so common for people to
jump to "blockchain" as their first tool of choice these days?),
there's now another way to get something fairly close to a list of
assigned _names_.

Certificate transparency logs.

Which are already considered trustworthy in other contexts that matter
far more, so shouldn't even come with any additional trust
requirements.

At least if you're interested in hosts that speak any variant of TLS,
and can live with the fact that wildcard certificates are, well, the
wild cards, that'll get you pretty far; the infrastructure is already
there; and they are already publicly available.

Once you have a DNS name, nothing prevents you from doing a DNS
lookup.

CT logs won't get you everything, but they _will_ get you a large
fraction of the names that the average Internet user is likely to
interact with. And if you don't think they're already being used for
these kinds of purposes, set up a web server at some randomly
generated virtual host name, get a TLS certificate from someplace like
Let's Encrypt, don't do anything else with that host name, and watch
the HTTP/S requests come in.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
 “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”