rns.recipes

Coming back to the original thought, a DNS-like system, @Zenith, could you explain your suggestion a little further? How would something like that look in practice? I was wondering about tying Destinations to given operators via their public keys,so a given operator could effectively have their ID as a TLD, such as "library.[identity-here]" or "forum.[identity-here]" and so on. This would ensure that we could preserve collision resistance and that the networks and resources which are stood up are clearly differentiable. Granted, not as easy as 'reticulum.network', but it could make things somewhat easier.

What I wrote about something like this about a year ago (on the old GH discussions) is still (more or less) my opinion about it:

With the prototyping and experimentation I've done, what has made most sense in this regard is to turn the domain directionality around, so you always have a trusted root resolver first, instead of last. In Internet DNS, TLDs are the ultimate trusted root resolvers. In RNS, you'd have something like:

my_own_home.that_guy_tom.the_server_under_his_couch.whatever_that_thinks_this_node_is

This kind of scheme works without any centralization, but it is not deterministic at all. Depending on who you ask, that can either be a fantastic or a horrible thing. Personally, I think it is fantastic - and it's the way I've been planning to implement it.

A scheme like this allows you to traverse paths of name lookup instead of having one rigid scheme imposed that requires complete centralization, while still getting a name-mapping system that makes sense to humans.

It also allows complete personal control and can be efficiently managed by individuals or communities, and everyone is free to choose the resolver paths they want.

It can also be implemented very efficiently over Reticulum in a completely permissionless manner, and would even support arbitrary registration from users that don't want to run their own resolvers.

Hopefully, one of these days, I'll actually get the time and resources to implement it. I'd say most of the architecture of that kind of system running over Reticulum is worked out, including how to tie it all into the existing ecosystem, but it's gonna be a hell of a lot of work to write, test and integrate everything.

Also, as a side note, that system would resolve identities, not addresses like in the traditional Internet. That means you can resolve the Reticulum identity for a name, and the use that to find all the relevant destinations you want, such as the LXMF address, a page-serving node address, an rncp file drop, or whatever else you'd want. That's a lot more elegant, I'd say.

A while back, I thought I'd have time to do the implementation, but unfortunately the rnir tool is still left at the scaffolding. One of these days...

The only thing that has changed in the design since then is that I'm (cautiously) exploring the ability to (optionally) allow "registering" names for a defined stamp cost (similar to LXMF stamps, operator-controlled difficulty). And of course the ability to allow whitelisting your own identities for registering permanently without having to churn cores for 15 minutes to create a name. That would make it possible to just do something like rnir --register my_world.boundary.nice_new_node 0807a4f17d1d2163637e8b8086198b5f.

Whatever people resolve what to you is my_world.boundary as (for them it might be home.my_friend_allan.niagara), they can now find your nice_new_node identity as a name on that.

And of course, a simple, local rnalias tool with direct API integration is also a very good addition to that, so it's easy to quickly define local aliases.

Personally I just have a small Python script that looks up a synced "identity address book" so I can do stuff like:

rnsh $(rd rnsh.my_server)

More or less like what @Joakim has also made and published somewhere (sorry can't remember the link to it right now).

Mark wrote:

my_own_home.that_guy_tom.the_server_under_his_couch.whatever_that_thinks_this_node_is

This kind of scheme works without any centralization, but it is not deterministic at all. Depending on who you ask, that can either be a fantastic or a horrible thing. Personally, I think it is fantastic - and it's the way I've been planning to implement it.

Ooh, I like that! Basically traversing other people's aliases files. Every identity is a TLD in DNS terms.

Ideally you'd have some sort of a caching mechanism so that to resolve A.B.C.D you don't need B and C to be online and available at that moment.

I've been exploring distributing access control grants via CRDTs signed with the Reticulum identity. Something similar could work here, so you could say sign statements like "I call abc123 bob", "now I call xyz789 bob", "friendship ended with bob" (aka alias tombstone) and distributed them over some mechanism. You'd probably want to control the depth you cache these things, for example two layers. Distribution could be LXMF, RFed, or plain Request/Response ("give me your latest aliases", or "give me alias deltas since Y").

6b3fd579 wrote:

I mean that is what the entire public network consists of.

Zenith do you honestly think there isn't even 1 NSA.node on RNS? There are at least 11 hyper aggressive scraper/archiver bots active on the network. The QUAD4 guy is also somehow associated with "some government/military entity". This is just a naive thing to say, sorry. Even if not true today, it will be true tomorrow. "Cottage industry" is not now nor has it ever been an effective theory of management of anything. Especially not global comms networks. Don't forget the power mod of r/worldnews was literally ghislaine maxwell LMFAO. Also mark already got "door knocked" a year ago. These are just general comments.

oh my fucking days