[freenet-chat] ideas for a freenet 'name server' framework

[Ian Clarke]

I think the fact that DNS has evolved into a primitive search engine  
(typing www.dictionary.com to find a dictionary website) was always  
rather ugly - and I'm not sure it is something we want to emulate.

Better to implement a proper search engine which can correctly  
address the issue of mapping information about what people want (a  
search query) to actual websites where they will find it.  I believe  
people are already working on this.

Ian.

On 15 Jun 2006, at 05:02, David McNab wrote:

> Hi
>
> I've been thinking about ways to get human-friendly, yet secure, URIs
> under freenet.
>
> (KSKs are nice, just a shame they're so easily subverted).
>
> My thoughts so far are:
>
> 1) Users would trust one or more 'namesites'. For instance, if I have
> confidence in Alice's 'namesite', I would stick in my ~/.freenames  
> file
> an entry:
>
> alice freenet:USK at alicepubkey/alice/0
>
> 2) If I want to browse a freesite, with the human-friendly URL of
> http://falun-gong.free, my client would look in ~/.freenames, see the
> entry for 'alice', then try alice's uri for 'falun-gong'.
>
> 3) If the 'alice' namesite has an entry for 'falun-gong', then the  
> URI:
>
> USK at alicepubkey/alice/0/falun-gong
>
> should return the physical URI of the 'falun-gong' site I'm looking  
> for,
> which might be:
>
> USK at falungpubkey/falun-gong/0
>
> 4) Alice might trust other namesites, so her namesite would have
> a file 'USK at alicepubkey/alice/0/.forward
>
> which lists URIs for other namesites which Alice considers  
> trustworthy.
> So if Alice didn't have an entry for 'falun-gong', maybe one of the
> namesites listed in her .forward file might.
>
> So, how would this get used in practice?
>
> One way I've thought of is to implement a basic name server for local
> use only. This name server would have a very simple socket interface,
> supporting commands like 'lookup' (look up a name), 'list' (list the
> trusted namesites), 'add' (add a namesite), 'remove' (remove a  
> namesite).
>
> Then the last step is to write an http proxy over the top of fproxy
> which simply follows the above method to translate human-readable URIs
> such as 'http://falun-gong.free' to
> 'http://127.0.0.1:8888/USK@falungongpubkey/falun-gong/0/index.html'
>
> As for the service side, running a namesite would be very easy. It  
> would
> just be a freesite where the mapping from (say) foo.free is  
> implemented
> as a relative path /foo, which contains just the real freenet URI
> 'USK at blahblah/foo/0'.
>
> An alternative, which would reduce the number of files on the  
> freesite,
> would be to list everything in one file, maybe '/.bulk'.
>
> But before I launch into something like this, the question to ask is
> whether others might see value in having human-readable yet secure and
> (relatively) trustworthy URIs.
>
> For me, I would see value, because I'm getting a bit tired of the
> current URIs being so long that I can't see the file extension in my
> browser address or status bars.
>
> Anyway, your thoughts?
>
> -- 
> Kind regards
> David
>
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