

Ethics Question - friday

Scenario: DNS researcher sells research data and consulting services to domain name speculators.  The data is otherwise public and collectible by anyone, however relatively "few" are likely to have the same level of interest in DNS and to have done the same research.<p>Ethical or not?<p>I hope DNS is not too controversial a topic.  It receives some strange media coverage and is not well understood by many people in my experience.<p>My view is this: I see DNS, remote translation of names to numbers, as "unnecessary" for most end users of internets (cf. intranets).  I believe the Hosts or /etc/hosts file or a cached DNS server are 1. enough to meet such users' needs (i.e. to list all unique sites a user will visit in a lifetime), 2. small enough to be manageable with today's technology (e.g. the entire .com namespace could be addressed in a file under 150mb) and 3. simple enough for users to understand (e.g. analogous to an address book; cf. the concept of a distributed database).  Moreover, I believe users are quite capable of remembering 10-digit numbers, as they routinely do with telephone numbers, usually by maintaining a personal address book.  But I think users are never given the chance to evaluate these options, because 1. they are unaware of them, and 2. the usual sorts of "FUD campaigns", for lack of a better term.
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wmf
You could probably get a good discussion going on CircleID about this topic. I
think it's evil, but other people (like registrars) are probably selling
similar data to the bottom-feeders already, so what's one more?

Replacing DNS with host files would introduce a lot of friction into the
Internet and you have given no reasons why host files are better.

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friday
@wmf- friction? I use hosts and things go quite smoothly. Can you elaborate?

CircleID seems geared toward networking professionals, as far as I can tell.
Their needs, as managers of large networks and network policy makers, are much
more complex than those of the end users to which I refer. DNS serves
networking professionals, enabling them to manage large dynamic networks (of
which the "internet" was once one- we all know it is way to large to be viewed
like that anymore). But what does DNS do for unsophisticated end users
connecting to the internet?

Here's what it does (that hosts file does not do)

-subjects them to parked page ads

-subjects them to phishing

-subjects them to DNS spoofing

-subjects them to cache poisoning

-subjects them to ISP redirection schemes and data collection for commercial purposes

-necessitates DNS service which is subject to slowdowns, outages and, if outsourced by the ISP, fees (then passed to customers)

-allows domain name hype

-promotes trademark disputes

-foreign entrepreneurs taking over ccTLD's of undeveloped countries or territories

-allows heaps of crime, from petty stuff to very serious offences, to be anonymised, thereby encouraging many of these users to "do evil"

-creates complexity than these users will likely never understand

And what does the hosts file offer to these users:

-simplicity

-speed (if reasonably small; supplementing with a caching DNS server if hosts gets too big)

-transparency (a flat file "address book")

-reliability

-convenience (aliases = less typing)

My bank does not change it IP address every day. Yet DNS would have me look it
up mutiple times in one hour. If we "fix" DNS who are we really protecting?
The companies that have the greatest interests in the internet, Microsoft,
Yahoo, Adobe, Google, etc. (and the most influence) do not change their IP
addresses every day. I know their number(s) and where to find them. They are
not playing hide and seek. But if we look at the entire namespace for the
gTLD's we see how so much of it is rubbish: spam domains, adult sites,
gambling sites, etc. These are the internet businesses who benefit from
internet users who use DNS.

If the internet is to resemble the "brick and mortar" world in any sense and
we are to allow consumers to do their spending on the internet on a grand
scale (and that seems to be where we're headed), then there must be some
_certainty_. My hosts file is that certainty, for me. It is my internet
address book. It defines what I consider legitimate and excludes what I
conside rubbish. Alas, others, who know nothing of the hosts file, are looking
for their certainty and quality control elsewhere, perhaps through "security",
dispute resolution, the courts, Congress, etc.

