Naming via SDSI

hal@finney.org hal@finney.org
Sat, 10 Mar 2001 16:16:49 -0800


Timm Murray, <admin@madtimes.com>, writes:
> In Freenet Name Service (FNS, see eof.sourceforge.net) there
> are no TLDs.  I suspect people will make psedo-TLDs, but there
> is no technical reason to do so.

I see that the specific page describing FNS is
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=2162&group_id=15579.

FNS is a mechanism for using Freenet to map between names and IP
addresses.  It is intended as a parallel mechanism to DNS.  Unlike DNS,
FNS is not hierarchical; names can be any string.

FNS mappings are stored in Freenet under Freenet search keys of the form
"fns/name/$DATE".  Presumably these names are looked up using today's
date; for example, "fns/www.microsoft.com/20010310" would be used to
look up www.microsoft.com on March 10, 2001.

Not only are such mappings first-come, first-served, they are also
apparently individually FCFS for every single day.  If someone does
not create documents for their domain name using a given date string,
someone else could step in and in effect take over the domain for that
date; is that the intention?

Hal