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PaX [comrade/them, they/them] @hexbear.net

2mo ago

I fucking hateeee DNS domain name landlordism

DNS is the most neoliberal shit system that too many have just accepted as how computers work and always worked to the point where I have heard actual landlord arguments deployed to defend it

It's administered by ICANN, which is like the ideal neoliberal email factory NGO that justifies the de facto monopoly of a tiny few companies with responsible internet government-stewardship stakeholderism, etc type bureaucracy while upholding the right of domain landlords to charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars in rent for like 37 bytes on a server somewhere lol

Before this it was administered by the US military-industrial complex, you can thank Bill Clinton and the US Chamber of Commerce for this version of it along with Binky Moon for giving us cheap .shit TLDs for 3 dollars for the first year

Never forget the architects of the internet were some of the vilest US MIC and Silicon Valley ghouls who ever lived and they are still in control fundamentally no matter how much ICANN and IANA claim to be non-partison, neutral, non-political, accountable, democratic, international, stewardshipismists

"Nooooo we're running out of IPv4 addresses and we still can't get everyone to use the vastly better IPv6 cuz uhhh personal network responsibility. Whattttt?????? You want to take the US Department of Defense's multiple /8 blocks? That's uhhhh not possible for reasons :|" Internet is simultaneously a free-market hellscape where everyone with an ASN is free to administer it however they want while at the same time everyone is forced into contracts with massive (usually US-based) transit providers who actually run all the cables and stuff. Ohhh you wanna run traffic across MYYYYYYY NETWORK DOMAINNNNNNN????? That'll be...... 1 cent per packet please, money please now money now please money now money please now now nwoN OWOW

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I support the protracted PaX war against domain landlords
Anyway I'm gonna go buy gay.site as a bit cos I'm one of the good ones

Feeling more and more like the only way to attack capitalism is on the ground
Hexbear should use this as a chance to go outside. I need backing here, I’m afraid to go outside and need to find more people like y’all in the physical world
- If literal Nazis can get up the courage to meet in person, I feel like we should too.
  
  Which actual, IRL leftist org is not mercilessly ridiculed on this website? We do a very poor job around here of connecting comrades to orgs

Maoist Digital Worldism

capitalism with MONEY PWEEESE characteristics

https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html
- I have recently tried to use this and no matter what I did I could not make it work on my machine :(
  Very cool tech, absolutely overcomplicated in every way from its build system (Autotools is...... unspeakably bad lol CHECKING FOR WEIRD UNIX QUIRK LAST SEEN ON SOME GNU NERD'S MACHINE IN 1994....... not found :) ERROR LIBC NOT FOUND) to its weird modular configuration (they made their own fuckin init for their different services lol) to its API
  When it wasn't segfaulting it was dumping hundreds of thousands of lines of confusing error messages to its log :/
  I tried for dayss, I was inside it with a syscall tracer and a debugger and still couldn't make it work and no idea why :( Sometime I must get on their IRC and see if anyone can help me get it working on OpenBSD cuz I do rly like what they're trying to do
  Sooooo its the typical GNU project :3 Somehow Freenet (I refuse to acknowledge the new crypto-adjacent project under that name) is better technically lmao
  Edit: just to be clear, GNU and the FSF are cool, no hate for them they have some of the coolest free software nerds working for them. I do have hate for that sex pest who formerly headed the FSF though lol
  
  The Domain Name System today enables traffic amplification attacks, censorship (i.e. China)
  
  Autotools is pretty dense, but all build-systems are like that. Believe me, the only good build system is the cp -rf $src $dest build system
  .
  At least autotools was one of the first (and transparent too). I don't know what the excuse for CMakeLists.txt is
- Is it possible to actually use this? I’d imagine it makes the internet absolutely tiny
- Yeah too bad gns implements rate limiting and bad actor protection by essentially mimicking butt coin and requiring proof of work.
  Trust is not a technologically solvable problem. This includes current DNS systems because ownership is effectively a proof of stake.

Truly disgusting, always has been.

Just update your hosts file, or better yet, setup an alternative system - no one can stop you.
- OpenNIC is around, I may get on there
  The issue is very very few ppl use it
  
  I might just join opennic too
  
  time for hexbear.fur

Why do Ford and Mercedes-Benz need to own chunks of IP addresses

Digital leeches are the worst.

What the fuck did I just read
a network engineer
- TLDR: The internet will be democratic when fox furries can get a .fox for free instead of ICANN delegating that to Fox Broadcasting Company for their exclusive use
  Orr that would be a start at least hehe
- Hey buddy some of us jork it to the mDNS RFC every single day

What is stopping someone from just starting up an alternative DNS system? Like, if you control some DNS servers, and convince people to use them, you can make any domain name point to any IP address, right? I understand the "network effect" barrier, but can we just make our own DNS (with blackjack and hookers)?
- Yes, and people have tried before (just running an alternate root). In this case, it's just the network effects that get you.
  There have also been decentralized attempts, but either they're not global (petnames) or they're shitcoins.
- hey I like making alternative DNS services and helping people who need them, take this
- Yess, ppl have done that it's just hard to convince anyone to use it :/
  The most famous project is OpenNIC: https://opennic.org/
  I've never used it but as far as I know... there are no costs to you at all for registering a domain. I am unsure how they allocate them exactly, ideally it would be based on need
  
  Aw that's super cool. Never encountered that before, but I will look into it.

I made a post about the exact same subject. Just a little less... unhinged lmao.
But I completely agree. If you're interested, there's a concept called petnames in the Spritely institute (made by Christrine Lemmer-Webber, lead author of ActivityPub, and others). In this concept, the name of your site would depend on how you name it / how other people nammed it. Here's the link: https://files.spritely.institute/papers/petnames.html#org1be8a0a
- I was first introduced to petnames by secure scuttlebutt, which seems mostly dead these days, but there were a lot of leftists on there for a few years at least. I love the concept, but it seems hard to transition from DNS since any alternative name system would involve extra software. not to say we shouldn't, but the app (or set of apps) that drives that change would have to be pretty compelling.

How are we still seeing this and posting?

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