If a site has a large set of TXT records, they can be used by clients that spoof packets to request large volumes of answers by DNS servers. This is called an amplification attack. Many tiny spoofed requests in, many large answers out.
Indeed. For what it's worth the spoofing aspect got better for a while then plateaued. [1] bcp84 / bcp38 adoption has pretty much stalled out. No idea what to do with the remaining ISP's.
Nah. That's just the lazy-ass traffic filtering policies of poorly-run end-user ISPs. [0] Every end-user ISP knows what IP address ranges it has assigned to each customer. It's fairly trivial to note when the source address of traffic coming from a customer's connection isn't in the range that has been assigned to that connection and drop it on the floor. This stops source address spoofing dead.
RFC 2827 (BCP 38) was published in May 2000. There's no good excuse for end-user ISPs to not be doing this for pretty much all of their customers.
[0] For the purposes of this discussion, I'm declaring that "cloud" providers are ISPs. They provide IP addresses and Internet connectivity to their customers, so they count.
The real challenge is not finding another channel for transmitting personal information. It is finding something else for the FINGER protocol to do. (-:
Old versions of Safari could get that. I am being an opinionated ass and practicing hostile security paternalism because the safety and bot-filtering benefits outweigh the cost of supporting old clients. I do even stranger things.
iCloud private relay was a blind spot. Working out how to let those CDN ranges in. (I blocked all the CDN's but this is more of a surgical carve-out for specific Apple designated ranges)
I too am using Firefox on Linux. Are you by chance using a VPN hosted in AWS? I normally let VPS through but AWS has some special abusers that got my attention. I moved that out of the way for now.
I don't think this is a generally safe thing to do. DNS is allowed to be unmoderated because it's supposed to be for technical information only. If too many people starts doing this, someone will start forcing DNS infra to censor it, by OP53B or stricter KYC or legally mandated DNS defederation or anything that may or may not even work.
The DNS angle is nice and I get why using a TXT record was interesting for you as a replacement.
I don't think simply having data returned was the issue. It was more about the kinds of data it exposed and doxxed from the user - to anyone with access. That and of course the vulnerability that caused the worm to propagate.
That said - we're seeing RCEs in Node, Python, and other common tools now and they're not going the way of the dodo. So maybe finger's time was simply up - and Facebook, Twitter, etc just took over.
Something ironic about pure text, status info, cgi-bin being replaced by long form video of tigers chasing men and riots. That's what our brains are being fed these days.
What pulled me to DNS as a replacement was mostly that DNS is distributed, DNS servers get patched quickly as they are expected to be on the internet and people are just connecting to their local resolver vs. connecting to a port on someones workstation or server. Even if the idea never takes off I could see using it as a niche status update for myself even if nobody ever sees it.
Nice! Very cool personal image board implementation as well,
I have a personal wiki, but I think something like this is better as it has the potential to be collaborative as well.
I've put contact info & jurisdiction for my domains in TXT records at the apex since Hover doesn't actually have whois. I publish dynamic status information in the DNS on a special server outside of the ICANN roots, but it's mostly technical information.
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[ 3348 ms ] story [ 3511 ms ] threadAnd why do we want finger to exist?
What does this mean, I see a bunch in the lookup but I don't understand the ddos part
[1] - https://spoofer.caida.org/summary.php
RFC 2827 (BCP 38) was published in May 2000. There's no good excuse for end-user ISPs to not be doing this for pretty much all of their customers.
[0] For the purposes of this discussion, I'm declaring that "cloud" providers are ISPs. They provide IP addresses and Internet connectivity to their customers, so they count.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44916853
The real challenge is not finding another channel for transmitting personal information. It is finding something else for the FINGER protocol to do. (-:
I guess I could delegate a zone to another provider who does.
That's a good idea. One could delegate to a stand alone instance for instant updates.
Something low like 60 to 90 seconds should be fine unless they are an influencer, then we could monitor their live stream.
The DNS angle is nice and I get why using a TXT record was interesting for you as a replacement.
I don't think simply having data returned was the issue. It was more about the kinds of data it exposed and doxxed from the user - to anyone with access. That and of course the vulnerability that caused the worm to propagate.
That said - we're seeing RCEs in Node, Python, and other common tools now and they're not going the way of the dodo. So maybe finger's time was simply up - and Facebook, Twitter, etc just took over.
Something ironic about pure text, status info, cgi-bin being replaced by long form video of tigers chasing men and riots. That's what our brains are being fed these days.