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A Replacement for Domain Names

2 points by talkingtab ↗ HN
One of the things that is stupid about the internet is domain name squatting. People find a potentially good domain name, buy it, have it sit there and maybe someone will buy it so you make an enormous profit.

We need a way to fix this. A lookup site to find and disambiguate entities on the internet. For example what if I could type in to Firefox the name of my old friend fred jones and find not fredjones.com but some way to first find the right fred, then creating a personal for-me-only mapping of the site and "fredjones"

Do you have any thoughts about this?

3 comments

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sigwinch
Seems to me that there are all sorts of possibilities with rogue DNS usage. For example, if your audience is the kind of person who’s comfortable adding your own DNS server, then run something like Technitium with fairly permissive access to change records.
CableNinja
I recently dove down a somewhat similar rabbithole. DNS is a mess of addons over the years to an originally minimal protocol. I wanted to see if it was possible to replace dns entirely. In short, its not. You can easily write your own resolver to do whatever you want, and easily add it to the windows or linux stack. Everything immedoately falls apart as soon as you start talking about MX, TXT, and other records dns provides. It turns out most of these lookups are handled by other libraries and you cannot replace them since they are engrained in the app needing to do the lookup.

Unfortunately, dns is so engrained in the internet, theres no way to replace it without replacing the internet

apothegm
It sounds a lot like a search engine plus custom-titled browser bookmarks.